2007/06 BC trip - Ladner Creek |
|||
Friday July 20th
Friday was still wet. I was fixing up the camper; mainly the usual tasks of tightening loose screws and substituting larger screws, the penalty for bouncing over all those logging roads. This time it was the luggage pod and the shelf/cubbyhole over our bed that were coming loose.
Some of these paragraphs and photographs are only available via the family's userids and passwords |
We met up again with Darwin and he took us to meet Rusty, the architect. His son, Cameron, will probably be our architect but he was away on vacation. He seemed a nice guy: he listened to what we wanted in the house, and all the problems we were having with setbacks, gave us some advice, and made some changes to our drawings. Things were starting to take shape, and he had some good ideas on how to get around the limitations. Once we have the survey done, he and Cameron would do some preliminary drawings, enough for us to take to the District for a variance. We were with him for a couple of hours and came away feeling a lot happier.
Saturday July 21st
Sandie's brother is interested in the history of the Kettle Valley railroad, and he took us up the Coquihalla Highway to Ladner Creek, to go investigate the old railroad’s trestle bridge there. When the railroad was built it was an engineering marvel, but it was always susceptible to slides and washouts, and it consistently lost money until a very bad winter in the 1960s closed it for ever. This is same railroad that built the Othello Tunnel complex near Hope, five tunnels and a bridge.
We had a short climb up to the old track bed and then we followed it to a tunnel. This had 
caved in, so we had to climb up and over that piece of the mountain, and then down to the other tunnel entrance and the trestle bridge. Someone had strung wire to make it easier to make the climb, but in a few places it had broken and in another, the tree holding it was now hanging over the cliff.
The bridge was impressive, a steel trestle with a wooden deck of ties. Bob had hoped to be able to walk across the bridge, but the steel holding the ties up was very narrow and I pointed out that if one of the ties slid off the steel then he’d go with it. We contented ourselves with taking pictures, and then climbed back over the tunnel.
We drove to another section of the track bed, now used as a logging track, and we hiked along that for a while, feeding a squadron of small deer flies. We found another bridge, this one much smaller and built from the remains of a railroad car. Further along at the site of the Jessica station, we found some old cabins, still in use as summer homes, and a historic outhouse. The owner of the railroad was a Shakespeare fan, hence the names of tunnels and stations: Othello, Lear, Portia, Shylock, Jessica.
We had a very late lunch at Rollies restaurant in Hope. Heavy rain set in as we returned to Chilliwack, but we went out for a final meal together anyway at Homer’s, a Greek restaurant. It was still raining when we left.