2013/01 Family - Hope news |
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Hope News |
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Dear All,
Well, after weeks of dark snowy days we had a rainfall warning for tonight, inches of rain that would wash away all the heaps of snow, but the last time I looked it was snowing like crazy out there.
When we returned from England and Minnesota Hope was already into its usual November monsoon, so we didn’t see the sun very much. It’s a pretty time of the year with the fall colours and the clouds around the mountains, but very wet and best viewed through the windows. We took a few walks though, including one to see the salmon making their way up Sucker Creek. This wasn’t one of the peak years; plenty of the green and purple chum, but none of the humpbacked pinks or the scarlet cohos. No sockeye either; their run is back in August and they go further upriver.
The last piece of the old Rambo bridge over the Coquihalla had been hauled out while we were gone. The new bridge came in under budget, so we had some spare bridge money and now have two other bridges being replaced. It’s scary when they rip up that solid-looking blacktop off the bridge deck and you see the ancient wood that’s supporting it!
On the subject of bridges, we went to a show and tell on the building of our bridge over the Fraser back in 1915. Someone in the States had found a bunch of old photographs taken during the construction and luckily had realized their historical value. The bridge was being built then primarily to connect the “new” Kettle Valley Railway with the Canadian Pacific’s main line, and the highway section on top was only there to get the government to share the cost of the bridge.
The speaker’s pictures showed the wooden piers and dams they built to get the concrete piers in place. And then showed the devastation when the whole lot was smashed by an ice dam coming down the river, an indication that winters were cooler a hundred years ago. So they built it all again, this time successfully. The speaker said that they hadn’t been able to embed the far pier properly into the riverbed and when the bridge was being upgraded in 1995 it was discovered that the river had eroded a gigantic hole behind the pier and it was close to falling in.
Back then our land was occupied by construction buildings: warehouses, offices, and bunkhouses. That probably means that the concrete walkway we found buried six inches deep in the backyard had some history behind it! It’s historic rubble now.
We took a walk out to the Othello train tunnels, a busy spot with the tourist buses in summer, but deserted when we arrived. It was nice to not have the crowds but spooky when you have no lights and all you can hear is your footsteps and the water dripping from the roof. There was a crowd at the entrance as we came back out but when they saw us emerging from the dark some of them concluded that it must be safe and came in. They were probably safer in than out as rocks fall off the cliffs quite often.