Over the last few days I have been blogging the descriptions of the Robson Valley as it was recorded in the Stanley Washburn’s book; Trails, Trappers, and Tender-Feet in Western Canada, published in 1912.  I have always loved forests, so the sections I found most intriguing described the forests along the Fraser River from Tete Jaune Cache to the area where McBride was built.  Here is some of what Washburn wrote:

    As we float on down the Fraser, the vegetation becomes thicker and denser until, after a few hours, the river’s edge is hemmed in by a shoreline that is so thick with underbrush and jungle that one literally requires an axe to get out of the canoe.  But the survey (done by the advance Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad crew) has gone before us down this waterway, and every six or eight miles we see their camping places, where the brush has been cleared away for a few yards from the river’s bank, and the trees stripped of their lower branches.  This created a few hundred square feet of clearing that stands out like an oasis from the dense and impenetrable background beyond.

    There is an old horse trail that extends twelve or fifteen miles below the Cache, but the pioneers that cut it lost heart when they penetrated that far, and gave up the job.  He who fares further on the way down the valley must either take to the river, or make the effort on foot, a task that tests the endurance of the most hardy, for if there is any country in the world today that stands as a sample of the primeval, it is this same valley of the Fraser.

    Giant cedars that measure six and eight feet across at the butt and soar 80 feet clear to the first branch are the largest trees, but immense spruce and fire rival them in height, while in the lesser word below, birch, cottonwood, alder and a dozen other smaller species crowd each other for space.  The whole floor is sown with rotting trunks that must have been moulding for centuries.

    I don’t know how long it takes a tree to rot, but it must require some time for a tree four or five feet through to mould to such an extent that you can dig through the brown decay with a shovel.  Hundreds upon hundreds of these moss-grown trunks lie everywhere in the nether gloom, while great bunches of dank moss, with here and there brilliant mushroom growths are sapping the nourishment from their rich vegetable mould.  Ferns and creepers as high as your head are everywhere, and the whole so dense that a person walking unimpeded, could hardly make a mile in an hour.

    Here and there are little openings and “burns” where the timber has been scorched by fire, and then died and fallen in hopeless confusion, one great tree lying prostrate over another.  In these spots one can walk for half a mile on tree trunks and never touch earth by ten feet.  Ten good men with sharp axes could not cut a mile of trail a day, that would enable horses to travel.

    

    I have always heard that the Native Americans did not establish villages or live permanently in what is now the Robson Valley, except for a village of dugouts at Tete Jaune Cache.  They did make forays down the river for hunting and food gathering purposes, but after reading the description of the forests from Washburn’s  book, it seems logical that it would have been just too much work to try to live around here permanently.  

    The photos were taken at the Ancient Forest Provincial Park.  It is one of the few remaining areas where the giant cedars can still be seen in the Robson Valley.  It does help give you a visual of what those old forests must have been like.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

    

1909: Down The Fraser River From Tete Jaune Cache

     In 1909, when Stanley Washburn’s pack-horse party had finally fought their way through the Yellowhead Pass and into BC, their destination was Tete Jaune Cache, because they had somehow arranged to make contact with the Teare brothers, prospectors who camped close to what is now McBride.  At the time, the Teares were the only people living in what is now the Robson Valley.  Once they met up, the Teare Brothers wanted to show Washburn their claim, and the only way to get back there was by floating down the Fraser River.  Here is Washburn’s account of the trip:

    “(The Teare’s) know these rivers and their menaces, large and small, as a scholar knows his books. Their boat shoots around the obstacles, dropping downstream by other channels, through which the water pours like a mill-race.

    After dragging along behind a pack-train for many days, the life on the river afford the greatest ease in the world, for without an effort, we can sit on our blankets in the bottom of the boat; and while we smoke and chat over the latest gossip of the trail, the river sweeps us along at two or three times the speed we can possible get out of the horses.

    The valley here (Robson Valley) averages five or six miles across, from the base of the Rockies on the east side, to those of the Selkirks (Cariboo Mts) on the west.   The whole is well-nigh as flat as a board, and carpeted with a dense forest of fir, spruce, and cedar, as well as hemlock, and I know not how many other varieties of a lesser growth.

    As hour after hour we drift downstream, so level is the floor of the valley that the river winds like a serpent for miles.  There is one place where it makes a complete “S” in its course that, while we are traveling north, we actually make a complete bend, so that our boat is pointing almost due south up the valley down which we are coming.  Again and again, a portage of a few hundred yards across the tongues of land, would save five miles by river.

    

    Below is a satellite photo showing the crazy meanderings of the Fraser River.

A 1909 Expedition Through the Yellowhead Pass

     I have been reading an old book; “Trails, Trappers, and Tender-Feet in Western Canada”  published in 1912.  It is a memoir written by Stanley Washburn that chronicles the pack-horse expedition he was on through the Yellowhead Pass.  Washburn knew that the Grand Trunk Railway was going to put a line through the pass into BC, and he wanted to see the country before it changed, before the mass influx of people that would follow, due to the railroad.

    Washburn’s description of the bushwhacking pack horse trip makes it sound like a totally horrible experience, but surprisingly, his narrative is light-hearted and optimistic, despite the terrible hardships they encountered.  Below is a section from the book:

    “ The second day of travel in the pass was a long and arduous one, for on that first trip I made through the great cleft, the trail was beyond the compass of all expletives.  The trail was narrow, and when the way lies along the bottom, its is feet deep in mud--not the ordinary mud of the muskeg, but the kind that has a foundation of boulders, lying a foot beneath the surface.  The poor pack-horses are constantly putting their feet down into a muck-hole, and just as they think they have a firm foothold, their hooves slide off the surface of some submerged rock, and perhaps go a foot deeper into the slime, bringing them to their knees with a grunt.

    Every mile or two, the stream cuts in close to the mountain, necessitating a long detour around some shoulder and a climb of a thousand feet.  Then when we would come back into the bottom, we had to pick our way among fallen timber and abysmal black mire, which means horses down and frantic exertions to get them back up.

    Once when we were getting one unfortunate animal up, two others wandered too near the river bank and got stuck in quicksand.  One we hauled out by the tail, but the first horse in this venture who went for a drink, was buried up to his neck.  It took us an hour’s work, and two saddle-horses, with lariat ends fastened at strategic points on the downed horse, to drag him out. 

    In one place the trail wind up among the rocks, some fifty feet above the river, and then goes down again in great steps over slippery boulders, down which, the horses half slid and half hopped.  A single mis-step here would mean a somersault and a dead horse at the bottom, but over this  bit, they went one at a time, and each was given all the leisure in the world to pick and choose his way in the hazardous descent.

    Below was more muck and then a long climb on to a side hill and another stretch of a soft place where the uttermost exertion was necessary to keep the horses from getting mired.  A stop of even a few minutes to chop a trail, meant that some fool horse would blunder on a tour of investigation, and get into trouble.”

    

    Today, we get into a comfortable car and drive down a smooth, gently-sloped highway admiring the majestic scenery, as we travel through the Yellowhead Pass.  We never give a thought about the hardships those early explorers had to suffer, to get through it.

    

You can take a look at my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Yellowhead: A Bit of Local History

     There is only one highway will get you to our Village of McBride, BC.  That is Highway 16, which is also referred to as the “Yellowhead Highway”  The term, “Yellowhead” refers to a French trapper whose name was Pierre Bosgnais, an Iroquois Indian trapper, who worked for the Hudson Bay Company.  Pierre had yellow streaks in his hair, and so was nicknamed “Tete Jaune”, which I guess is French for “Yellow Head”.  “Tete Jaune” has been anglicized and is pronounced “T-John”.

    The Canadian Rockies were a substantial barrier to explorers and anyone who wanted to travel from the east to the Pacific.  There were very few ways to get through the mountains.  In 1885, the Canadian Pacific Railway became the first to forge a way through the mountains, joining Eastern Canada with the Pacific Coast in BC.  It made its route through the Kicking Horse Pass in southern part of BC to do it.  

    Twenty years later, the Grand Trunk Railroad sought to create a more northern Trans-Canada link to the Pacific.  After a lot of exploring and surveying, they decided to establish their rail line through what was called the Yellowhead Pass.

    That was a route that had been used by Tete Jaune during his trapping days.   He had made his way through the mountains and created Tete Jaune Cache (a “cache” is a storage area for supplies) which is on the Fraser River in BC.

    When Highway 16 was built, it also came through the Yellowhead Pass from Jasper, Alberta over the mountains to BC.  The Yellowhead Highway was completed in 1970, running all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

    Tete Jaune Cache is a hamlet in the valley formed the Fraser River which flows west, and the headwaters of the McLennan River that flows south.  Below is a photo of the bridge in Tete Jaune Cache that crosses the Fraser River.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Leaving Costa Rica 1992 Flying to Dallas

      The flight to Dallas turned out to be an interesting one.  We were supposed to be at the San Jose Airport at 6:00, so we planned to force ourselves out of bed at 5:00, unfortunately, I woke up at 3:00 and with all the thoughts about leaving going through my head, was unable to fall back to sleep.

    Our taxi arrived early, thus we arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare.  We cleared Customs, paid the $6 airport tax, then just sat around killing time until being able to board our plane which left at 8.

    Our flight flew over the coast of Nicaragua, which was interesting because we saw that the coastline was covered with mud, and the surf, full of sediments flowing from the shore.  I assumed it was the results of the big tidal wave that had killed 90 people a few days earlier.   Just inland from the coast we could see two smoking, perfectly formed cone-shaped volcanoes, with several other non-active ones, all in a row.

    As we were approaching Guatemala City, our plane flew over the slums that were a mosaic of thousands of “chicken-coop” shacks, stacked side by side on the hillsides.  It was very sobering to see how the poor lived, even from above.

    Arriving in Dallas at 3:00 was just as shocking, but in the opposite way.  Suddenly we were surrounded by opulence.  We had our fingers crossed that my brother Rob would be at the airport to pick us up for our one-day stop over, because we didn’t know how to reach him, if he wasn’t.  

    Rob didn’t let us down.  He whisked us away in an air conditioned rental car, taking us first to “The Oaks” a Best Western Hotel where we were given a very large, air conditioned room for $40.  It was certainly luxurious compared to the $40 rooms where we spent the nights in Costa Rica. 

    Our culture shock continued when Rob drove us to the Galleria Shopping Center, where we were surrounded by a world of wealth of consumer products.  We then whipped-lashed into another sobering and touching experience when Rob took us to downtown Dallas to see the “Grassy Knoll” where President Kennedy was assassinated.  

    Our evening of discovering Dallas ended with a tour of “Deep Ellum” and area that was becoming the “Hip” section of Dallas because of the influx of artists and musicians.  We walking past numerous small venues that emanated music from live bands, and went in one and listened for a while to the blues, but it didn’t take long for all of the cigarette smoke to drive us back outside to the fresh air.  We strolled down the sidewalks, looking into all of the interesting store fronts.  At a tattoo parlor, we could stand outside and watch people get their tattoos.  

    After our very long and interesting day, Rob dropped us back to our hotel room at midnight.  We were ready for bed, but for Rob the night was still young, so after saying goodbye, he headed back out  to meet up with friends.

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Costa Rica 1992: Our Last Day

      On September 3rd, our last day in Costa Rica, we were awaken at some god-awful hour in the dark by church bells.  I wished they would show some consideration to those us us who really had no reason to awaken at 4:30.  

    It was our day of souvenir shopping, but the first thing we needed to do was to go to a bank to get a last supply of colones.  We cashed in $150 US worth of Traveler’s Cheques and received 20,000 colones.  The souvenirs we purchased for friends and relatives included a, a wooden salad bowl set, toucan earrings, and cutting boards, most of which we bought at the government-run art store.  I saw and was attracted to an elegantly thin, finely-turned wooden bowl, which we bought.  (photo above).  It was made from beautifully grained exotic wood, and very unusual because it was flawed.  It had an irregular hole near its bottom where a small wood knot had fallen out. 

    We had lunch at a Vishnu vegetarian restaurant.  We ate a complete meal which included drinks, and rice pudding for dessert, for only $2.50 CAD each.  It was all very tasty, and I wished we had discovered the place earlier in our trip.

    For supper, we ate at a pizza place just down the block from our hotel. Two regular-sized  pizzas, plus two large drinks, just cost us $9.50 CAD.  They were delicious.  Mine had jalapeños and cheese.

    Once back in our hotel room, we started repacking and reorganizing our bags (which then had to include the bulky souvenirs we had bought).  My wife got in a panic upon discovering that she couldn’t find her allergy shot kit, yet another thing to add to our list of things we had lost in Costa Rica.  That list included my jacket, her fanny pack (with car keys), and an umbrella.

    Our trip to Costa Rica had been really interesting.  We were quite happy with all of the exotic jungle plants and animals we had seen and the things we had experience,  but we were ready, and looked forward to, getting back home to the Robson Valley.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

More Snow

     I have just come in from clearing my driveway with the snowblower.  I am too tired to paint or do much of a blog, so I dug out this photo to show.  I took it four days ago when we first began to get this series of snowfalls.  It shows the sky just beginning to open up after a snowstorm.

     Last night’s snowfall pretty much doubled the amount of snow on the ground,  so we have about 9 inches (23 cm).  Over the last few days I have cleared my driveway several times in an attempt to deal with it while it is easy to do, before the snow gets too deep, packed, and more difficult to remove.

    At present, the weather forecast predicts that the ‘Snow” is over and we will just be getting flurries instead.   I am pleased that we did get this last dump snow.  It relieves my concern about it being so dry.      

    Online, I checked the Snow Pillow (an instrument that measures the weight of snow that has fallen on the mountains) reading, and was happy to see that the amount of snow up on our mountains, is just a tad lower than its normal range.  I had feared it would be another record-breaking low amount, like last year.

Take a look at my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca