Valley of Dreams
May 24: I greeted the dawn, threading the neon-lit Cranbrook strip, then watched the sun creep up 2,845 metre (9336 ft.) Mount Fisher, as I ascended the Rocky Mountain Trench. I set a fast pace up Highway 95/93, powering over the only real lump in the landscape, at Skookumchuk. A half-hour before noon, under sunny skies, but with a chilly catabatic wind spilling down from the mountains, I pulled into the dusty mill town of Canal Flats, at the confluence of the Kootenay and Columbia Rivers. I used to keep a mailbox here, when I lived among these peaks.
The Kootenay Gold Rush of 1864, brought an invasion of miners who lined Findlay Creek’s canyons and benches, picks and pans in hand. Yet the Annual Report of the B.C. Minister of Mines for 1885 recorded a mere $3,600 in gold scraped from the creek, compared, for instance, to the nearby Wildhorse Creek bonanza of $30,050, or even the modest rewards from the “Moyea” (Moyie) River, which gave up $6,900.
“Owing to an excitement arising last spring a great many Chinese, hitherto engaged on Wild Horse Creek, decamped to Findlay Creek. That departure lessened the output from Wild Horse Creek, and unfavourably affected the general returns, owing to the utter failure of Findlay Creek, as regards shallow diggings ….”
“Among other unfavourable results, the Chinamen who placed their faith in Findlay Creek were reduced to beggary, in many cases being without the barest necessities of existence, or the means of paying for the supplies they had procured during the season.”
So reported Gold Commissioner & Stipendiary Magistrate A.W. Vowell, whose own privations in the field had left him “an invalid and confined to my room.” Findlay Creek can do that. Like those “Chinamen,” we retreated from “the land of beans and gravy” with not much more than the clothes on our backs and a hand-sewn canvas tipi, which we erected on the shores of Columbia Lake.
Our mining experience consisted of maintaining assessment reports on the old Blake family claims on which we were living, keeping the Ministry of Mines happy and the claims up Findlay and Doctor Creeks active. This translated into mucking about in various old excavations, chipping out a few rocks here and there, and helping claim-holder Joe Blake (in his early-eighties, at the time) maintain roads and bridges that often consisted of a few roped logs spanning a yawning chasm. Lynn remembers one summer having to drive a load of dynamite over one of these precarious spans! Blake was ecstatic that we had revived the family placer empire and “made it a home again.”
Those were some of the most formative adventures of my life, experienced less than a decade before, yet in my mind they already seemed to share the same place in history occupied by earlier fables.
Over lunch, I heard some contemporary tales from a waitress at the Capricorn Inn. Foremost among them the news that “crazy old Bill,” the last remaining prospector on the lower Findlay, had “fell asleep” in a snow bank the previous winter, short of his cardboard-lined shack, losing his feet to frostbite. Winter is a hard time in these mountains. Cabin fever takes its toll.
The final stage of my ride took me past Thunderhill Road, the turnoff for Findlay Creek and the Meadow beyond. According to Ktunaxa native legend, the Hoodoos are said to be the bones of the great water monster Yawo’nek, left stranded by the river. The striated earth indeed reminds of some weathered, yellow carcass, rising above the cottonwoods. Pumping along the bench-lands above Columbia Lake, source of the mighty Columbia River, I passed the derelict motel and beach below, where my infant daughter once swung in a willow-bough cradle, hung from the poles of our patchwork tipi.
I remembered the rustling of the aspen leaves, the lapping of the lake water on the shore, and the loud whistling and earth-shaking rumble of freight trains running up and down the Columbia Valley toward distant markets once served by the river highway itself. Indeed, the canal, from which Canal Flats derives its name, was built to facilitate the movement of steamboats. Only two vessels ever made the run: the Gwendoline in 1895, and the North Star in 1902.
I stopped just short of my destination, Invermere, and took off my jersey in the heat of the afternoon. This final day was the hottest of the trip. I realized, with a certain melancholy, that this particular cycling adventure was drawing to a close. Sitting on the warm red earth, I devoured a bag of juicy green grapes—a poor cyclist enjoying a simple extravagance.
This valley and the mountains above were once the cradle of my dreams. I returned now as a tourist, knowing I would embrace its beauty but not tarry. At Dutch Creek, I crossed over to the lesser-known West Side Road, paralleling Hwy 93/95 through arid, open ranchland and pockets of aromatic pine. There is Chisel Peak, to the east, and soon Mount Nelson and its outlier, Trafalgar, came into view. Through triumph and tribulation, they stand unchanged, speaking of endurance, constancy and strength.
Within the hour, I was greeted by my daughter, now six, and her mother, who showed me the cedar shake job she had just completed on the newly-built house. Kyah, was eager to drag me up onto the dusty benchlands, where gophers cavort.
Two days later, we were on the wesbound train—our bikes in the baggage car—heading for the beaches of Vancouver.
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.” ~Douglas Adams
Twenty-seven years after: Return to the West Kootenays
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