This past weekend, a few friends and I decided to try our hand at finding abandoned mines up in the Haliburton region. We learned two lessons in the process:

1. Snow does not melt nearly that fast in the region, even with temperatures in the 10 degrees region
2. Trudging through knee-high snow is stupidly exhausting

We got skunked at two of our attempted locations, but did strike gold on the third location. Until we discovered it was flooded out, likely due to the ice dam at the adit blocking any drainage.

Looks like we'll have to try again in the summer.

I've had some emails from concerned persons regarding the lack of updates on the site. No, I have not abandoned the site! I've just been very crunched on time the last few months.

Between working extended hours and also moving to a new place, I simply have not had the time to get out and explore new places. I'm hoping to get things settled down in the next few weeks, and then get back out into the field with my camera.

Until then, sit tight!

Last weekend, I made a trip back down to the Rochester area in New York, wanting to revisit a few old haunts and see how they were doing. Macfadden's was in worse shape than ever, while the Rochester Subway recently had new air vents installed, providing light where there was none before.

Also found a new location in Tonawanda on the way back home; Wickwire Spencer Steel. Mostly decayed, but that's a given having sat empty for nearly 50 years.

Also, finally, couple of closer to home updates... looks like Concord Floral is now a rubble pile, and Oakville Lifecare might be undergoing some sort of conversion. I'll have to monitor that one.

Apparently this place has been sitting empty since 2006... and I've driven by it many, many times without ever noticing that the main transformer outside has been disconnected from the grid.

But once it was pointed out to me, it was only a matter of time...

Apparently I missed this one for a bit... someone (no name attached) emailed me earlier today to state that Concord Floral was being demolished. I was skeptical, as I hadn't heard anything about it being knocked down, but after consulting with a few people and seeing photos of the demo work, it certainly is coming down. Not particularly fast, but it is coming down.

On a different note... for those waiting for new content, keep on waiting. I've been really busy the last month and a bit, but hope to get back out into the field sometime in the next few weeks.

On a whim, and jonesing for an UE fix, a couple of local explorers and I found our way back into the Wellington Destructor. For some, it was their inaugural trip. For myself, it was a return to a location that I hadn't visited in nearly four years.

And has it ever changed in those four years. The volume of material stored in there has doubled, if not tripled in that time period. A couple of rather curious cats have also taken residence on the upper levels; last time I briefly saw a cat or two in the lower levels only. We couldn't get near them before they scattered, but they did follow us around as we poked through everything.

While I still prefer Symes to Wellington, it was a good way to burn off an afternoon.

Sometimes, when your Plan A fails miserably, you just go with the Plan B so as to actually accomplish something. Finding the old "monorail" at the Toronto Zoo was just that. And I think I may have just found the spot to go shooting the fall colours next year...

Just a quick update - spent the weekend out in Durham region and found myself in an abandoned school and on an abandoned horse farm. Two for two on the weekend... I'll take it!

A couple of months ago (maybe more, even), it was pointed out to me that the gallery comments were broken. And sure enough, they were. People could still post comments, but when the site tried to display them, a PHP error was spat up instead.

So why wasn't it fixed then? Because it isn't quite that simple. For those who want more background info, read on... and those who don't, skip the next paragraph.

So the code base for this site is sizable. And not well organized, as basically this site has been created by hacking new features on to existing code, with the occasional rewrite. And, as such, it's completely custom code, so I can't go running off to Google to try and search for a solution. Throw in some undescriptive PHP errors, and it can be difficult to fix issues. In this case, the only error I got was that it was a regex failure in the template engine. And many, many things can cause that error. Long story short, because I had put a single "=" in a comparison instead of "==" elsewhere, things were breaking when a specific keyword was being hit in the template... and the only spot where that normally comes up is in the gallery comments (for note, it would have come up in news comments as well, but since no one has left a comment, the bug went unnoticed).

In any event, it's now been fixed and the comments are working again. And also made me realize that the comments system might have some deficiencies (lack of read states, for example... you can't see when someone has added a new comment to an image), which I plan on starting to work on it the coming weeks.

The Victorian-era Shaw St. School has rebuffed me several times in the past, always teasing with its secrets but not providing an opportunity to actual explore said secrets. That all changed recently... the school, undergoing renovations, finally provided access.

And those secrets have now been shared with the world.