More BC Stops :
(Vie point at the Cottonwood River Bridge, 10 miles north of Quesnel)
Plans to complete the Pacific Great Eastern Railroad to Prince George in 1921 failed because unstable ground prevented use of the proposed bridge site on the Cottonwood River. Thus, construction stopped at Quesnel. As northern expansion continued, the need for this rail link increased and a successful upstream crossing was completed in 1952.
»More
More BC Stops :
(At vie point at the Chasm, 10 miles north of Clinton on the old highway. Leave Highway 97, 7 miles north of Clinton)
At the close of the Ice Age about 10,000 years ago, a stream fed by melting ice cascaded over a falls forming this chasm by cutting into some of the lava flows that helped to build the Fraser Plateau. Individual lava flows are shown here by the horizontal layering. When the glacial ice...
»More
More BC Stops :
(View point at Kootenay River Bridge, 40 miles north of Fort Steele)
In September 1845 Father Jean De Smet, the first missionary to reach the Kootenay Indians, placed a large ‘Cross of Peace’ in a pass north of here as he struggled on foot through the Rockies seeking the Blackfeet tribe. Born in Belgium in 1801, this Jesuit priest laboured for 35 years among Indians from the Missouri River to the Pacific.
»More
More BC Stops :
(36 miles south of Radium Junction, Highway 93/93)
In 1808 David Thompson named this flat ‘McGillivray’s Portage’ as he crossed from Columbia Lake to the Kootenay River. In 1889 WA Baillie-Grohman joined the two waterways by a canal with a single lock. Regulations aimed at preventing Columbia River flooding so restricted the operation of the canal that only two steamboats passed through – the Gwendoline in 1894 and the North Star in 1902.
»More
More BC Stops :
(View point over the Creston Flats area several miles north of Creston)
It was the dream, in the 1880s, of WA Baillie-Grohman, British sportsman and financier, to reclaim these fertile flats from the annual river floods. His canal at Canal Flats diverted part of the Kootenary into the Columbia but was abandoned. The first successful reclamation was in 1893. Now 25,110 acres lie secure beyond 53 miles of dykes.
»More
