When does a town or village, become an official ghost town? At what point is it generally accepted or not rude to point out a place as abandoned beyond hope? Swift River Lodge closed in 2009. The owners, a brother and sister, left it when they could not longer run it due to lack of funds.
The most recent images I found show the buildings in the process of being torn down. In a report someone had said the population was 5 and then had gone down by 5. From that source the population seems to be zero now. I looked on Google Maps and there isn’t much in the area to be called a town or village. Maybe the town never was more than a rest stop on a long, fairly remote, highway.
Photos take by jimbob_malone, posted to Flickr. Thank you for permission to post the photos.
It’s not the only lodge or rest spot along the northern highway to be closed down or abandoned. Source – Ghost Lodges of the Alaska Highway. But the story of highway motels closing up starts a couple of generations ago at least.
You can see a lot of abandoned motels along smaller highways. Places which had their best times in the 1950’s and 60’s, before the huge highways were built and many motels were cut off from the bigger source of traffic. Some of the old motels are gone, some were repurposed but you can still find others standing as they were when everyone left. (Beware of vagrants).
I was a Canadian alien, according to the immigration paperwork at the time. (I was a Canadian who married a man in the US). So, I had my time to be an alien – but not a space alien.