One Saturday afternoon we decided to take a drive to Cadomin to enjoy and photograph some of the beautiful mountain scenery. When we arrived in Edson it is raining but being the weekend photograph warriors that we are, we forged ahead and ended up in Robb and Cadomin. Cadomin is a unique old coal town with some new homes and some very old homes. After leaving Cadomin we traveled north on the Alberta Trunk Road back towards Hinton and came upon the original Luscar mine which is now a coal cleaning facility.

Luscar lies in an area known as the Alberta Coal Branch, which has a long history of coal mining. The original underground mine at Luscar opened in 1921, and by 1922 the town consisted of about 25 or 30 homes, a small cottage hospital, a school, a general store and other shops. The mine worked the strongly folded Jewel Seam and produced steam coal, primarily for railroad markets. Surface mining began in 1945 and underground mining had ceased by 1954. Fire destroyed the briquette plant in 1956 and later that year all mining ceased due to lack of markets for steam coal, after which the town was abandoned.

In 1970 the old Luscar townsite became the headquarters for an open-pit coal mine owned by Luscar Ltd. and operated by Cardinal River Coals Ltd. It produced coking coal for export to Asian steel mills. That mine closed at the end of 2000. Coal from the Cheviot Mine near Mountain Park is currently trucked to the Luscar site where it is cleaned and loaded into rail cars.