2007/06 BC trip - Hope and Chilliwack |
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Time was getting on and we wanted to check out our building lot, so we took the Coquihalla Highway over the mountains to Hope, fast and scenic, but not a very interesting drive. Hope and the Fraser Valley had been under a flood warning for most of June, but luckily the weather had been cool and the unusually deep snow in the mountains had melted gradually. The river was full, bank to bank, but we had a small patch of beach showing.
We met our new neighbour on our north side, Wes, a Finnish immigrant. He invited us indoors to show us his view over the river. From his dining room, all we could see through the window was river, as the house is built right on the bank, something we cannot do, of course, with the new restrictions. He and his wife only use the house at weekends as he is still working, at an airport bank.
Caroline, our hydrologist, had left some ribbons at the lot to indicate where our riparian setback is, and we floundered around in thigh-high grass making measurements. This was the first time that we’d actually measured the lot, and we found to our horror that the end points of our lot are actually at the bottom of our river bank, rather than the top as we’d assumed. The river bank feels like a cliff when you are climbing it but it’s actually a 12 foot wide steep slope. The riparian setback is measured from the top of the bank, so we have about 12 feet less to build in than we’d thought. It looked likely that we would have to ask the district for a variance to allow us to build closer to the road.
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Monday July 2nd
With the bad weather so far, it had not been possible to mow our lot in Hope, Sandie's brother and I went out with mower and whacker and set about bringing in the harvest. We aren’t allowed to mow the riparian zone, but it still took us a couple of hours to hack it all down. We met our neighbour Jim across the road. He used to live in Agassiz and remembered Ted, Sandie’s Dad. He told us that our other neighbour on our south side, Dave, from Colorado, is also a weekend-only resident.
Back in Chilliwack, we went looking at pickup campers. We won’t be able to bring our Tiger into Canada when we move there so we’ll be looking around for some alternative. There are quite a few small motorhomes such as the Roadtrek, but none of them has the ground clearance needed for the kind of traveling we do. We’ll probably have to get a pickup truck and add a camper. The result will be unwieldy compared to the Tiger, and we wont be able to walk back into the camper without going outside, but we have the same 4-wheel-drive chassis we have now. The Northern Lite brand, made in BC, seemed a good possibility.
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