Aug 16

20C a nice morning!

Washed the motorhome yesterday, bowled in the afternoon then was at friends for a great Italian dinner and a nice evening.

A few more chickadees arriving so that is a sign of an early winter.

I have over the last few weeks been adding to the Pearce story, but don't have enough done to post as yet, so you will all have to be content with my recycling some of my earlier stuff for a while yet.

Here's what I found for today. I hope I haven't put it here before.

THE TRIP FROM HELL

M

id March 1960, McBride, BC.

   I had been stationed in the Ranger District of McBride since 1957.  McBride and Valemount situated in the Robson Valley were virtually isolated from the rest of British Columbia.

   In those days there was no highway west to Prince George, there was no road south to Kamloops except in the summer months, there was a gravel road from McBride to Jasper Park boundary and to Valemount.  The road from the park boundary to Jasper and on to Edmonton was paved.  The CN Railroad was the only direct access to Prince George and Kamloops year round. 

   I lived on the Ranger Station with my wife and two sons, the oldest wasn’t quite three and the youngest was just nine months old.  I desperately wanted to be transferred from McBride, I didn’t really care where, but had been told unofficially that there would be no chance of that until at least the fall.  Then out of the “blue” one Wednesday morning a radiogram arrived saying that I was being transferred to Vanderhoof and should plan on being there within a week!

  This worked out well for us as it was my wife’s hometown and her Mother and Step-father lived there along with a lot of other family.  We arranged for my mother-in-law to come and get the kids by train, she arrived on Friday, our furniture and other belongings we packed and loaded on a way freight Saturday morning and the kids and their Grandmother on the passenger train about ten pm that same night.

  Our car a Vauxhall station wagon was loaded with a couple of suitcases, sandwiches, coffee and our dog Skookum, we departed McBride at around eleven pm.  I had an Esso credit card and twenty five dollars in my pocket.  My idea was to drive all night, be in Prince George the next morning before noon and go on to Vanderhoof, another hour plus beyond Prince George.

  We had made this trip before but we had heard that a shortcut had been built from highway 16 at  Edson up to highway 43 coming out at the town of Whitecourt, this would save us two hours of driving.

   Mid March, spring break up was well underway but when we left it was just a bit below freezing and we made reasonable time the forty five miles to Tete Jaune Cache arriving there just  before midnight.  Then the Hell part started. 

   We came down a short hill and at the bottom there was the remnants of a large frost boil, before I could stop I was a full car length into it and bogged down to the frame.  I got out, sinking into mud over my ankles and saw that I wasn’t going anywhere soon!  We sat there until after three in the morning, intermittently running the car to stay warm.  No other vehicles came along so I started walking back the way we had come, as luck would have it a few hundred yards down the road I found a couple of broken planks sticking out of the snow bank.  I worked them out and carried them back to the car, got out the shovel I always carried and started digging and scraping the mud away from the car.  Finally I dug a depression under the rear bumper, slid the planks under and seated the car jack.  When I had the Jack fully extended I pushed the backend of the car sideways and off the jack.  I did this process at the front end then alternated back to the rear and again to the front until I had worked the car sideways on to reasonably firm ground.  It had stayed below freezing all night so the ground had “tightened up” a bit and with my wife and dog sitting in the very back for a bit of traction I was finally able to drive on past the “boil”.

The rest of the trip to Jasper was without incident, but when we arrived there at about six am the place was still totally closed up, no gas stations were open.  We still had about a quarter of a tank registering so I figured I would keep going and gas up down the road somewhere.  This was tourist country, everything closed up from September until June, a fact that hadn’t crossed my mind.

About an hour later , with the tank on “E”, I pulled into a camp ground that had gas pumps out in front of the office.  There was only a caretaker, the pumps were locked but he sold me five gallons of gas from his storage shed.

I asked him about the new shortcut over to Whitecourt and he said that they had been working on it until freeze-up but understood it to be quite passable.  He said that it started about ten or twelve miles past the town of Edson.