I was 17 in the summer of 1954. With survey experience the previous summer, I was hired as chain-man—a step-up—for a party that was to locate a road for the BC Mines department. The Cassiar asbestos mine had opened a few years earlier, and a road to the nearest Canadian tidewater at Stewart was an urgent need to export the product.
For a Vancouver boy, this was to be the adventure of a lifetime. But I had no foreshadowing that a rash decision in the fall would endanger my life.
Telegraph Creek, 167 miles up the Stikine River from its mouth, was to be our jumping-off point. We sailed in luxury from Vancouver to Wrangell, Alaska, on the CPR’s Princess Louise, then up the Stikine in freshet aboard Judith Ann, an outboard-driven barge with a freight and a passenger deck. At the Little Canyon, well past the US border and the cottonwood-laden lowlands, a line was wrapped around successive big trees, and we winched through.
After three days we reached Glenora, end of the road from Dease Lake and head of navigation in the freshet. A truck ride in to Telegraph and an overnight, we were then across the river to start our two-day packhorse trip, first on the 1860s Telegraph Trail, still well-used, then struck out to the east, past Buckley Lake for a swim, to where our road survey would start. Location was identified by aerial photos, BC having been covered thoroughly. With two overlapping photos and an optical device, a 3D representation arose, to be matched to the ground. We found our prescribed starting point, 30 miles or so out.
May to September was our season. We set up camps over the summer. North first, to the brink of the Grand Canyon of the Stikine—a major bridge would be needed. Then south. By early September we had produced perhaps 20 miles of survey for the proposed Cassiar-Stewart highway. Our line was roughly 20 miles to the west of the now Highway 37. We emerged from the woods to a desert, the lava flow from Mount Edziza almost as barren, if colder, as when it was deposited a millennium ago.
Lava is some of the toughest rock there is—a road could be built only by adding fill, of which there was no nearby source. This was an impossible location; as air photos would have revealed. Why we were sent there remains incomprehensible to me. Our survey was abandoned. Later years saw Highway 37 built in the right place.
I was to leave camp, for university. The 30-mile hike alone to Telegraph was daunting. I left at dawn, with only a bag of dried fruit for sustenance. No firearms; armed only with that sense of invincibility of my age. Near one old camp a packhorse had broken its leg and sadly had been dispatched. The carcass was not far off the trail; packers had reported that grizzlies were gorging. Scared, but without choice, I started to shout a mile or so before the spot, clearly visible as I went by. Shouting may have worked. Not a bear to be seen. Relief! I continued until hoarse. Had I been taken, bits of me would never have been found.
I reached the bank opposite Telegraph at dusk, and shouted to cross. The next day I hitched a ride down to Wrangell. What had been a three-day trip up took 12 hours. Then to Ketchikan by float plane, Pan Am to Seattle, Greyhound home.
I often wonder how narrow an escape I had.
