Designing the Kootenays - A Surveyor's Memoir by Ray Johnson

Designing the Kootenays A Surveyor’s Memoir

By Ray Johnson British Columbia Land Surveyor and Civil Engineer (Retired) Nelson BC

December 2021

Figure 1 - Kootenay Region of British Columbia

Figure 2 - Communities in the Kootenay Region

Designing the Kootenays: A Surveyor’s Memoir

by Ray Johnson

Nelson, British Columbia

December 2021

1

An Introduction

Dr. Ken Coates, Canada Research Chair in Regional Innovation, University of Saskatchewan

Surveyors keep a low profile in Canada. To the degree that most people understand their work, it comes when they see a crew of people, clad in reflective gear and hard hats, alongside a roadway or a property under development. The scene is familiar, with the surveyor using the transit to take measurements, the marked rods that their assistants hold across the project site.

The surveyors leave temporary markings – often brightly coloured flags on wooden sticks – to direct construction teams or, when defining property lines, the permanent markers and monuments that are fundamental to the exercise of public and private property rights in Canada.

I met Ray Johnson through his son, Ken Johnson, who is one of Canada’s most effective Arctic engineers and a fellow writer on the history of Canadian engineering. He first described his father to me when we were in Whitehorse, Yukon, at a commemoration event for the construction of the Alaska Highway. My father was a highway engineer with the Department of Public Works and a long-standing advocate for the improvement of the highway. We discovered, in the course of extended conversations while in the North, that both our fathers – Ray Johnson and R.K. (Dick) Coates – had both been surveyors in the Kootenays in the 1950s.

We are both surveyors by descent, in spirit if not in practise. While Ray’s son decided not to focus his career on civil engineering, with a specialization in Far North community infrastructure. I avoided my father’s encouragement to study engineering but could not stray far from the profession that both defined our family history and that shaped the development of

2

Canada. My historical research focused for decades on northern Canadian history, with numerous studies of the construction of the Alaska Highway and northern infrastructure generally. My other professional work with Indigenous communities, resource companies, infrastructure firms, and government agencies only re-enforced my connections to the development community. When Ken asked me to talk to his father about helping him produce a book on his professional life, I was happy to do so.

Surveyors are a remarkable group, intensely proud of their work, united by a sense of fraternity forged in long hours slogging through forests, across swamps, up hillsides, in highway ditches, deep in underground mines, and along busy city streets. They know that their work does not get the attention given to developers, architects, and construction firms -- to say nothing of the politicians who show up for the ribbon cuttings. The profession has a remarkable commitment to accuracy and transparency; they know that their work is crucial to project safety, financial viability, and the protection of the public interest. But few people understand what, where and why surveyors actually do. It is hard to appreciate the impact a profession – particularly one defined by plot lines, straight line projections, elevations, and engineering plans -- has on our lives if you do not have an appreciation for the work that is undertaken.

Ray Johnson is 90 years old as 2021 ends. This has been a challenging year for the surveyor.

Rose, his ever-patient wife of long-standing passed away in 20XX. Ray remained in the family home – one he built with his wife and where they raised their children – until Fall of this year. It was a purpose-built, on a side hill, a well-crafted and creatively designed house that served as both home and professional office. Large drafting tables dominated one corner of the office space in the basement. The office and the outside patio held several dozen filing cabinets. Ray loves his old office and enjoys looking through the files and flipping through the notebooks he

3

kept, in the precise script of the professional surveyors, that listed all of his hundreds and hundreds of jobs, tackled and completed, over more than a half a century of survey work. He was moving into an assisted care unit and had no choice but to downsize aggressively. He left the house with great sadness, for it held the personal memories and professional records from a life of professional commitment and achievement.

Ray has a prodigious memory, and many stories to tell. He is not in the best of health – who is at 90 years old? – but he has a story to tell. He has, as well, a profound love for the Kootenays and a sense of wonder about the area’s development. Ray arrived with his family, fleeing the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in southern Saskatchewan. With no real destination in mind, the Johnsons made their way overland to Nelson. A journey of that length and duration, a whole family travelling with limited means and no assurance that work awaited, is truly epic, one of thousands of such Depression era stories. His father found work and the Johnson family found a home.

Ray loves Nelson – the lake, the ski hills and the cross-country trails, the community, and the broader region – and he never left. He rejected opportunities that would have taken him away from the city, even though people in the development field warned him that surveying around Nelson had limited prospects in the 1950s. He persisted – Ray is nothing if he is not persistent – and he ended up having an exemplary professional life. He is a tough and accomplished professional, as successful a businessperson as he was a talented surveyor.

Ray Johnson arrived in Nelson before the post-World War II expansion hit the area. This was the Kootenays of mining ghost towns, small settlements, little migration, rough roads, undammed rivers, and little external investment. In the years that followed, Ray was involved in almost every major project – and thousands of minor ones – in the region. People who follow the 4

nuances of development with a sharp eye will see Ray’s professional fingerprints on highways and logging roads, lakefront developments, and television antenna sites, the redesigning of cities and the redrafting of the property lines in small towns, not-for-profit projects and local property disputes. Few people know of the role that Ray – and surveyors in general – played in designing high alpine resorts and the time-share resort at Fairmont Hot Springs and even fewer appreciate the work he and his team did .to regularize the property survey in the City of Nelson.

Working with Ray held great appeal. He and my father, who was born in Nelson and raised in the West Kootenays, overlapped with Ray in the surveying profession. I have lived in British Columbia for many years and have spent a considerable amount of time in the Kootenays. When I was an infant, I lived in Banff, Alberta, and Revelstoke, B.C. We visited the region regularly on family vacations. Castlegar, Creston, Nelson, Grandmother’s Bay, Revelstoke, the Whatshan Lakes, Fauquier, Radium Hot Springs, and many points in between are well-remembered places of my youth. Ray Johnson knows this area better than I ever will and has an intimate familiarity with the land and communities that is probably unmatched in the Kootenays. I did not know every place he mentioned or every project he described, but I was sure delighted to learn about them, through the eyes of the person who did the foundational work.

What follows is not a history of the Kootenays nor is it an autobiography of Ray Johnson. Like the surveyor-engineer-planner that he is, Ray organizes his understanding of the past in discrete projects and specific episodes. He told stories – great stories – about topics that the rest of us would never consider interesting: access roads through private properties, redrafting property lines, developing appropriate sewage systems, and establishing the legal framework for summer and winter resorts.

5

This book is Ray’s gift to the Kootenays and, even more importantly, to his children and grandchildren. It describes dozens of his projects – a tiny subset of the total – selected by Ray and recounted to me and my research assistant, Abeer Ahmad. The process we used was simple, conditioned by the pandemic and concern for Ray’s health. Telephone interviews were conducted, initially by Abeer, and were transcribed using automated transcription software. I edited the transcripts into a standard narrative format, checking details and adding information from Ray. After the transcripts were organized and copyedited, they were returned to Ray Johnson for final review and they clarification of some elements. With Ray having final say, this book was completed.

Ray’s stories – vignettes of his life as a surveyor and planner – are organized in a roughly chronological order, but they do not follow a strict timeline. When Ray assembled the list of topics he wanted to discuss, he picked projects and examples that demonstrated the breadth of his work in the Kootenays. His unerring focus was on his professional career and the work that he completed with his professional colleagues. Read collectively, they chronicle the evolution of the Kootenays. While this memoir is not a historical reconstruction of the development of his beloved home region, I can assure you that you will see the Kootenays differently after reading this book.

As I discussed this project with Ray Johnson, it was clear that he had two goals: the describe his contributions as a professional surveyor and to inform people about the real nature of a surveyor’s work. He is extraordinarily proud of his profession and remains a firm advocate in the high and fixed standards of the surveyors’ guild. He was a professional innovator; some of the practices that he developed came into common practice. He benefited from the guidance of a great mentor and task-master and clearly believes that he performed the same services to the next

6

generation. He saw surveying technologies change dramatically but, as a strong advocate of the ‘old school” of the profession, he took great pride in his basic skills and in his early work in the mountains, valleys, and lakefronts of the Kootenays.

Canada’s evolution as a country of laws and regulations, of property rights and development standards, of appropriate construction and design, and of communities built carefully and professionally over many decades. For well over half a century, Ray Johnson played a vital role in the surveying, planning and development of his beloved Kootenays. It is impossible to drive very far in the region without seeing roads, bridges, dams, recreational projects, subdivisions, commercial properties that were shaped, directly or indirectly, by the work of Ray Johnson.

Canada, British Columbia and the Kootenays owe a great debt to the surveys, engineers, planners, designers and architects – the Ray Johnsons in all of our communities – who built well, planned properly, abided by regulations, and created the built world that we simple take for granted.

The next time you pass a survey crew along the highway, in the city, or on a construction, think of Ray Johnson and the work that he did to create the Kootenays of the 21st century. Tip your hat to the latest generation of surveyors, no doubt with a Ray Johnson among them, and hope that they have as positive, comprehensive and constructive impact on their communities and region as Ray Johnson did on the Kootenays.

Ken Coates DeCourcy Island, British Columbia December 2021

7

Table of Contents

A Kootenay Life ........................................................................................................................................ 10 Early Life ................................................................................................................................................... 12 My Start in Surveying .............................................................................................................................. 15 Boyd Affleck .............................................................................................................................................. 17 Moyie Lake Provincial Park .................................................................................................................... 19 Summer Work in the Kootenays ............................................................................................................. 20 Radium Hot Springs ................................................................................................................................. 22 Building Expertise..................................................................................................................................... 23 Salmo .......................................................................................................................................................... 25 Making a Living in Nelson ....................................................................................................................... 27 Nelson Bridge ............................................................................................................................................ 30 CBC Tower Near Nelson .......................................................................................................................... 39 TV Towers and Snowmobiles................................................................................................................... 42 Work in Golden ......................................................................................................................................... 43 The Village of Nakusp .............................................................................................................................. 45 New Denver................................................................................................................................................ 48 Sandon........................................................................................................................................................ 49 Slocan City ................................................................................................................................................. 50 Fairmont .................................................................................................................................................... 52 The Timeshare Option .............................................................................................................................. 55 Land Development at Fairmont............................................................................................................... 56 Laying Out Development Plots ................................................................................................................ 60 Glacier National Park ............................................................................................................................... 62 Hans Gmoser and the Bugaboos .............................................................................................................. 63 Hunting Camp ........................................................................................................................................... 66 Nakusp Recreation Areas ......................................................................................................................... 68 Apex Ski Trails .......................................................................................................................................... 70 Projects in the Nakusp Area .................................................................................................................... 72 Sinclair Creek ............................................................................................................................................ 74

8

Creston ....................................................................................................................................................... 76 Riondel ....................................................................................................................................................... 77 Easements and Profit à Prendre .............................................................................................................. 80 Paradise Basin ........................................................................................................................................... 82 Beachfront Development .......................................................................................................................... 84 The Sutherland Property ......................................................................................................................... 86 Accretion on Kootenay Lake.................................................................................................................... 88 Lakefront and the Blaylock Property ..................................................................................................... 92 Village of Kaslo ......................................................................................................................................... 96 Boundary Problems ................................................................................................................................ 102 Trout Lake ............................................................................................................................................... 103 Kokanee Springs ..................................................................................................................................... 104 Kokanee Springs Subdivisions ............................................................................................................... 107 McGregor Lake ....................................................................................................................................... 108 Title Wars ................................................................................................................................................ 110 Replotting Nelson .................................................................................................................................... 112 Property Complexities ............................................................................................................................ 115 Dealing with Inspectors and Other Officials ........................................................................................ 118 New Westminster Office ......................................................................................................................... 121 Steep Roads.............................................................................................................................................. 123 Dark Woods Forestry ............................................................................................................................. 126 Ainsworth Hot Springs ........................................................................................................................... 130 Marysville Settlement ............................................................................................................................. 131 Surveying Challenges.............................................................................................................................. 133 Negligence and Highway Surveys .......................................................................................................... 135 Decision Maker........................................................................................................................................ 137 Subdivision Matters ................................................................................................................................ 140 Procter...................................................................................................................................................... 142 Technological Change in Surveying ...................................................................................................... 145 Professional Integrity.............................................................................................................................. 148 Thoughts on the Expertise of Surveyors ............................................................................................... 149 Reflecting on My Career ........................................................................................................................ 150

9

A Kootenay Life Ray Johnson has lived an exemplary and fascinating life. While he loves to talk about his work as a surveyor, he shies away from discussions of his private life and has no interest in sharing publicly his political views (although he expresses them freely to friends and families). He undertook the preparation of this book to share his experience in designing the Kootenays, not to raise old political and commercial questions. Ray Johnston truly loves the Kootenays, and he knows it better than all but a tiny number of people. Even more, he clearly knows how the Kootenays assumed their current form.

Ray has an interesting history. He was born in 1931, to George and Faye Johnson, on a farm near Shaunavon, Saskatchewan, an area famed for the production of professional hockey players and, in the 1930s, being the epicentre of the great dust bowl. Maintaining farm life was near impossible, with production declining and prices falling. The Johnsons were forced off the land, abandoning farming, and heading west. They did so in 1934, at the depth of the depression.

They head out in a covered wagon, moving through southern Alberta and the rough roads and steep mountain passes of Southeast British Columbia. The trip took over a month – husband, wife and two small children in a rustic wagon -- with little money in the family’s purse, and with no assurances of a work and home at the end of the journey.

A victim of the greatest economic collapse in Canadian history, George Johnson came to British Columbia with small plans and no great dreams. The Depression dampened hopes of great opportunity. George was a hard worker and a man committed to looking after his family. He tackled any and all jobs, working in the Nelson area as a blacksmith, welder and metal fabricator.

The Johnsons built a home on Cottonwood Flats south of Nelson. The family was not rich; hard work defined Ray’s father.

10

Ray Johnson graduated from Nelson High School in 1959 and, from 1951 to 1955, attended the University of British Columbia, where he completed a BASC (Civil Engineering), with a specialization in surveying. Not one to do things by half measures, Ray married his sweetheart, Rose, in 1954 and had to push hard to get into married quarters at the university. Ray and Rose had four children: Katherine (deceased) in 1956, Kenneth in 1958, Kim in 1961 and Kevin in 1963. Ken qualified and worked as an engineer, Kim is a musician and Kevin works in Nelson as a millwright. Between them, Ray’s children have given him 12 grandchildren and 6 great grandchildren. Ray has an impressive family legacy that goes well beyond his professional work.

While expanding his family, Ray opted to set out on his own professionally establishing the firm of Ray Johnson and Associates which operated from 1960 until it closed in 2012. He stopped working as a surveyor in 2012, having already worked into his 70s and remaining a formidable presence in Nelson’s development community. Anyone who knows Ray understanding that he continues to think like a surveyor, pays close attention to developments in the Kootenays, and loves to monitor the progress of his beloved home region. Ray lost Rose, his calmer and gentler half, in 2017.

What follows are stories from Ray Johnson’s life. As you will see, it is an interesting and important life. Ray Johnson had more than a front row seat to the evolution of the Kootenays; he helped redesign the region, bringing high professional standards, a commitment to innovation, and a prodigious work ethic to the challenge of redesigning the Kootenays.

11

Early Life When I was in grade six, I was a big, mature young fellow. I was promoted to be a crosswalk attendant. You had a sign on a little board, and you would make sure the kids crossed the street safely. Well, at that time, the arterial highway went in front of the school, and it was quite a large elementary school.

When classes were over at the end of the day, there was a fair number of kids crossing the street, with some as young as first graders. They were not very cautious and tended to just run across the street.

A friend of mine was promoted to crosswalk attendant. Then, for some reason, the school decided that we needed more authority, so they promoted the two of us to junior policemen. I have a vivid recollection of going to City Hall at the time: a courthouse-type configuration, a judge, a court office, and an elevated bench where the judge would sit and listen to a court case.

I can remember being sworn in as a junior policeman by Robert Harshaw, the Chief of Police.

For a kid, going through that exercise was quite solemn, quite responsible. So, I became a junior policeman. The title made my work more official and gave me more power, though not more prestige. We had kids that would not pay any attention to the attendant. They would just cross the road whenever they wanted to. I went after one kid from the neighbouring Roman Catholic school. But I would not have done the same thing to a kid from our own elementary school, which was closer to the crosswalk.

I tried to cuff the kid and take him to our principal to point out that he was ignoring the attendants. But this kid just did not want to be controlled and told when he could go across. The kid put up one heck of a good fight and managed to almost break my nose. I got a very severe

12

nosebleed out of it, and I had to let the kid go. I do not remember ever having any more trouble with the kid, although he probably crossed the street every day coming and going from his home to his school.

I can still remember another incident that happened in the school. We were making little baskets out of pine needles from what is called the Ponderosa pine or the Bull pine. The pine needles were six or seven inches long. I'd been given a used bicycle, and being a senior, I was allowed to go and get some pine needles from the branches at a local park. I had a devil of a time taking any branch off a tree or getting some pine needles, but I got a branch or two—enough to take back to the school. The teacher would send us out to get these pine needles off the tree without cutting down the tree. That's what they did at elementary school at the time, I guess.

After elementary school, I went on to junior high school. I was just an ordinary student, except that I was what they called a house president. The school was divided into four competitive groups for all types of competition. One was the athletics group, and we had a competition once a year for that.

We went down to the local quarter mile racetrack at the civic centre grounds. There was a parade that we were part of, and there was almost, well, a bit of a competition. It was fun to be in the parade, but I remember borrowing or having my dad loan me the pick-up truck that the family owned.

I had kids in the truck, and I did not even have a driver's license. I was not yet sixteen, but I drove to the racetrack with half a dozen kids or so in the back of the truck. But today I would say that would be a terrible risk, with kids horsing around.

13

In high school, I was quite diligent and responsible. I was not the smartest student, but I was very faithful. I would have received the award for being the most outstanding student in the high school, but I was tied with another chap who was quite athletic. We tied, so nobody got the award, and this award was only given out every two years. It just had to be somebody who was a little bit outstanding. But anyway, the next year I won the award for being the most outstanding student, which was kind of a feather in my cap.

14

My Start in Surveying I started working in the surveying business when I was a teenager, just after I finished grade eight, I think. Our family was squatting on an abandoned rifle range. The government and property owners were subdividing the land, as they had decided that it was no longer appropriate for use as a rifle range. There were probably thirty or more families and single men on the property; the homes were not always well-built, and no one had title to their lands, obviously.

A surveyor named Boyd Affleck was hired to survey the former rifle range. I had taken to standing around watching the surveyors at work. The key helper to Mr. Affleck was an old man, who was called “Chaim.” He approached me one day and asked me if I liked the looks of the work. I had never worked then, being so young. But, I said, yeah, it looked interesting.

What else could a guy say? Our family had little money, and I certainly had no money of my own. The old man said to me, “You can have my job.” Those words I'll never forget. Here was a kid that had never worked and didn't have any proper shoes or anything else. But I went and asked Mr. Affleck if I could have the job and told him that the other fellow didn't want it.

Mr. Affleck looked me over and appeared to like what he saw. He said, “Well, you'll have to have a proper pair of boots.” So, I borrowed my dad's boots. We were quite poor at the time. Dad had kind of a part-time job, but it wasn't very profitable. Mr. Affleck also said, “You'll have to have your own axe.”

So, I showed up the next day, wearing my dad's boots, which were okay. Dad had an older pair that he could use, so I got his good boots. I also showed up with a double-bitted axe. It was a logger's axe, with two blades on the head, used for cutting down big trees on the West Coast. Mr. Affleck was flabbergasted. Here's a kid hauling around a huge double-bitted axe. I remember

15

saying to him, “Mr. Affleck, but that's the only axe that we have. I'll have to use it.” I used that axe for four years. I became very proficient. Not only was it very sharp, but it was very good for cutting down trees and bushes and everything else.

I started almost immediately, and I proved to have talent for surveying. Mr. Affleck, who was not fast and easy with praise, even told my mother that I seemed to have an aptitude for surveying (my mother did not tell me this until after I was married). So, he let me stake out the properties according to the development plan. He followed along and surveyed them in. That marked the beginning of my surveying. Of course, it was just for the summer holidays.

16

Boyd Affleck I cannot say enough good things about Boyd Affleck. He was around sixty-five years old when I went to work for him as a teenager. Mr. Affleck—and I called him that until the day he died— was both an engineer and a surveyor. He ran for the Liberal Party in several federal elections and was an alderman for the City of Nelson. He was an honourable man. He never, never drank and he never smoked. He was a scout leader. I remember him being the leader of a camp that I attended when I was eight or ten years old. He was a great man.

Mr. Affleck’s support was crucial. I worked with him as an assistant surveyor for several summers in high school. He always treated me as an adult. I was doing adult work and making reasonably good money. I financed myself all the way through university and could even afford to get married in the last year. I financed the wedding personally, too.

Mr. Affleck was a hard worker, and he set a real model for me. On one occasion I worked thirtysix days straight over the summer. He came to me and said that I had to take a day off because he was just not able to keep up with supervising me. Of course, he was the surveyor responsible for the work I was doing. I just wanted to make money so I could go to university.

He did not preach about hard work, honesty, and accuracy. He just modelled these qualities. He was the nicest, hardest working person that I was ever associated with. He was also tough, diligent, and never gave up on anything. No matter where we went, how cold it was, how much snow was on the ground, or how wet it was, he never complained.

It was a big joke. Another friend of mine also worked for him and said that every lunchtime, Mr. Affleck would stop, and he'd invariably make a fire in a stump or something, even in a

17

wilderness area. And he would lay down and have a fifteen-minute snooze at lunchtime and then get up and get back to work.

Working with Mr. Affleck offered a good hardworking summer job that really built up my expertise and interest in surveying. By the time I finished grade twelve, I had put in three good years working for Mr. Affleck. By then, I got promoted to an instrument man.

Lives and careers are shaped by the people around us. One individual, even if they come into your life by accident, can set you on a completely different path than what you might have planned. For me, this key person was Boyd Affleck. He had as much impact on me and my career as my parents.

18

Moyie Lake Provincial Park One summer we had the job of surveying mining claims at Moyie Lake, near Cranbrook. I remember chopping my way through the bushes and helping Mr. Affleck get around. He had only one arm and had to pack his own instrument. On one occasion, he had me pack it—he told me he only trusted me with this task—because he couldn't hang on to the cliffs and needed the instrument to get around a certain tough area. I had what he needed: two arms. And I was a strong young lad.

We also worked on the Indian reserve nearby. I fondly remember helping him mark out the parcels for the Indian band. He decided to drive his pickup truck across a bridge used for getting hay from one of the islands created because of the wash out of the Kootenay River that went through the area.

After he had driven over, we learned it was not a vehicle bridge. It was just made for hay wagons. So, when we were coming back, we had to be really careful. The truck spun out on the logs. There was hay covering the logs, and the logs would roll. The truck stalled. We both got out to push, with nobody driving.

We got it going and the truck went across the bridge and started to go across a field. It was going straight into another channel. I remember running after it, catching up to it, hanging onto the door handle, and trying to get into the cab. I had steel cleats on my boots called corks or hub nails, but I slipped on the running board. I finally managed to get into the truck and stopped it just before it went into the river. If I had not stopped it, the truck would have been lost, as the river channels were running at least six or eight feet deep.

19

Summer Work in the Kootenays A couple of years later—I had the best summer job of any kids in high school—we were surveying the highway from Kootenay Bay into Crawford Bay, a small rural community. We spent the whole summer surveying this winding road. It was dangerous work at times. In those days we used to place the instrument in the middle of the road. People would be rushing to catch the ferry, so they'd speed around the corners. On occasion, we had to grab the equipment and get out of the way lest we get run down.

Mr. Affleck was also hired by the Department of Mines of British Columbia to survey out and get the road constructed from Shutty Bench, adjacent to Kaslo, to the Lardeau on the west shore of Kootenay Lake, a road that was about twenty kilometres long. Mr. Affleck would do a reconnaissance, tying pieces of cloth or something to trees, and I would follow along with the original survey.

At that time in the area, we travelled on the sternwheeler Nasookin, which was a bit bigger than the Moyie sternwheeler or paddle-wheeler. So, we would go from a little bit of a town at the head of the West Arm of Kootenay Lake called Procter. We would load all our gear and supplies onto that stern wheeler there, and then we would be transported twenty or thirty kilometres up the lake to what was called Johnson's Landing, where our home base was for the summer. Every day we would go to work on the road across the lake. We were surveying the whole road.

I still have a photograph of me from that time in the Kootenays. It's kind of a good picture of me as a teenager, standing nonchalantly with my foot on a culvert. I had just finished grade twelve and was feeling pretty good about my life.

20

Anyway, Mr. Affleck was the engineer in charge of building the road. He had a big budget, several million dollars in his bank account supplied to him by the government. It was his job to get this road built, but he had trouble with one of the four crews that were building the road.

The fellow in charge of this crew would not follow Mr. Affleck’s orders and was not doing a proper job. The fellow was just a small equipment operator; he had his two sons working on the road, along with maybe one or two other guys. This fellow had backup from the provincial government.

Mr. Affleck decided that if he didn't have complete authority, he would not have anything to do with building the road. So, he quit, even though the project was worth a lot of money to him. He said he wouldn't carry out and be responsible for a job that was not being done his way.

The road eventually got built by another engineer from Kimberly, named Stan Schuler. But work for me didn’t stop. I worked for Mr. Affleck that summer on different jobs and subdivisions around the Sheep Creek area, which is south of Nelson and east of Salmo.

21

Radium Hot Springs Mr. Affleck created the small townsite of Radium—quite a big subdivision, around two or three hundred lots. In the Radium area, the ground was very dense, gravelly, so hard that we even cut the survey posts in two. They were normally thirty inches long, but it was so hard pounding that they would not go into the standard depth.

I have fond memories of the piece of land we were working on. It was called a kettle—like, a kettle on the stove—and it was created in the area when the glacier passed, when the whole area was covered in ice. This kettle was quite large.

I suggested that we make a park in the subdivision. Mr. Affleck liked the idea, so we made a park out of this kettle. It might have been twenty or thirty feet deep and a couple hundred feet around. You would not want to put houses down in this hollow. All the rest of the land was dead flat, with not even a hill.

I guess this was the start of the village of Radium Junction. There are an awful lot of tourist facilities there now, including gas stations and motels and everything else associated with tourism. But the park in the little kettle was created when I worked for Mr. Affleck.

22

Building Expertise When I was in university, Mr. Affleck hired another university student to be my assistant for the summer, and we worked for two summers surveying mineral claims. My God, we worked hard. I looked after one survey crew, and I was the surveyor. I became quite proficient in surveying mining property.

That work with Mr. Affleck was very meaningful. I was getting top wages, you know, adult wages as a youngster, which allowed me to pay for four years of civil engineering. My wife was with me at the university, which was quite unique at that time. Her family had broken up, so she came with me to university.

When I was in university and when I got my surveyor’s license, I was already known to have expertise in mining claims. After I graduated, a professor with a PhD approached me one day, saying that he knew I had a lot of knowledge about surveying mining claims. I was asked to teach a course on surveying to first year engineering students. It was a good subject to work with. For students to learn and solve problems, I gathered examples on mining claim properties.

Most of the kids were not interested in it, but it was a project-based course, and it was very good pay, double the pay that I would get later on. That teaching job was a good start.

I have fond memories of the graduation windup party we had. I was not much of a party person. I never drank beer. I don't like beer. I don't like smoking. Mr. Affleck was the same. God, he laid out a good plan. But anyway, at the windup party, I remember talking about our plans with my fellow graduates. Everybody was looking forward to some great employment somewhere. I still remember saying, “Well, I'm just going back to the same job I've been working on for the last eight years.” And I said, “I kinda like it and got a good job and guaranteed work.”

23

The other graduates didn’t know where they were going, but they didn't think carefully about their future. When you got a university education in those days—in 1955—having a good job to go to was quite important. One guy in my year graduated and then went back and took a medical degree. So, people didn't really know where they were going at the time. But I certainly knew what I was going to do. I went right back to work for Mr. Affleck on the survey of the Burlington Northern Railway. A technical problem had arisen because the project wasn’t properly registered. It had already been surveyed as far as the upper reaches of Nelson, but it was not registered. The surveying had to be done all over again, and the job fell to me.

24

Salmo One December, a few years after I had graduated, Mr. Affleck and I were out looking into creating a new water system for the village of Salmo, which is just south of Nelson. We were walking with snowshoes on in probably four feet of snow and looking at this creek to see where we could build the new system. We came to a weir. They needed to measure how much water was flowing in the creek to see if it was enough to supply the Village of Salmo. I was walking ahead, with Mr. Affleck behind me. Here I am, twenty-six years old or so. I was ahead, what we call breaking trail and packing it out. And Mr. Affleck, at seventy-three years old, was naturally behind me as he couldn’t walk as fast. It took me a few moments to register when he had disappeared. He was nowhere to be seen.

I retraced my steps and found him in the creek. He was upside down, trying to turn himself over with his one arm. It was twenty below zero. I managed to shovel a rough stairway to get down and haul him out of the water. He was soaking and starting to freeze, but he stayed there long enough to make sure that I measured the flow. He had fallen into the creek because he had seen the perfect place to take the measurements. We then hiked out a mile and a half down to the highway. Of course, he froze. He ended up in the hospital with pneumonia—really bad.

Shortly before Christmas, Mr. Affleck got word to me to come up to the hospital. He was very sad. He said that he would have to lay me off. He did not know if he would ever be able to work anymore on anything else. That was the end of my employment with him. The next day I applied for a job and for unemployment insurance. I was married and we had bought a house and everything else, and I really needed a job.

25

They were hard times. But I was soon hired to be the surveyor for building the Nelson Bridge.

That was the last of my business dealings with Mr. Affleck, who had been a superb employer and a real role model for me.

26

Making a Living in Nelson My wife and I moved to Nelson in the early 1950s. I was determined to make a living in Nelson—no sure thing at that time. I did not have my professional registration yet. I was just picking up little chores here and there. For example, the City of Nelson’s electrical superintendent asked me to draw what turned out to be the first composite map of the city. I drew up a map that we used for thirty years or more, a big map—two and a half feet wide and about eight feet long—showing all the properties in Nelson. That map was very useful for everybody— for the engineering department, for my work, and for everyone else in the industry.

I did odd jobs with another surveyor in Trail, Nelson, and the area. If it had to be a professional surveying job, then he would come and check my work. But we worked as partners, which would not be allowed today. We had a chap try and set up a partnership with his brother. He lived in Alberta, and his brother was in Nelson, and they tried to have a loose association. Our surveyors’ association frowned upon it, but at the time they did not challenge me for working in a partnership without my papers.

I think the association looked the other way because I was the only one in the area. My old boss was too old to work. There was nobody to take over. So, they felt that it was better that we have this kind of informal association than get nothing done. That year, I studied hard during the winter. I passed my BC Land Surveyor’s Registration.

Even that was not easy. I wrote the exams, and when I was finished writing, I told the examiners that I knew I had passed. I asked them to give me my registration. I convinced the chap that I could not afford to wait for the results and then travel back to Victoria to be sworn in. Getting official results would take the better part of a month for the examiners who were all members of

27

the profession. It worked. I had to raise my right hand and swear that I was going to adhere to all the rules and regulations and laws in effect.

That is how I convinced the secretary of our professional BC Land Surveyors Association that I knew I had passed all the exams. I was a confident person. I have been confident in my work all my life. Even though I was sworn in, I could not practice until they had marked my exams. But nevertheless, I was now sitting up in Nelson with my licensed professional designation.

There was a recession, not quite a depression, but things were still slow. I happened to talk to a mining man who said a surveyor was needed at Golden or Spillimacheen, another little settlement along the highway from Invermere to Radium Junction. A mining company needed a survey done on its mining operation. At least it was a few days’ work.

I thought I could leverage the mine work into something more substantial and stable. Surveyors also had to be businessmen. I went to the community of Brisco in the East Kootenays and found that nobody had been surveying up there for years. People were building houses on other people's property!

The workload exploded. I started with the mining company and then did a couple of other little things for people. I put the word out that I was available. My God, it expanded to the point that for the next twenty years, I had a very well-organized operation looking after the expanding population in the area. The Trans-Canada was being built at the time, and the whole area was booming.

They were working on Rogers Pass (the portion of the Trans-Canada Highway between Golden and Revelstoke). Golden was expanding. I was doing subdivisions and a lot of other work. I made good money. I was able to pay my men for a full day of travel time when we moved to new

28

worksites—which was rare at the time. We would always go up to the sites for about ten days at a time. This worked very efficiently over a good twenty years or more of travelling up there.

I was away from home a lot. My wife looked after our growing family (we had four children).

There was not a lot of work close to home in Nelson. Another surveyor moved into the Nelson area. He took some of the work that I might have been able to do. He worked full-time in the Nelson area and then took on a surveyor who got his ticket a year after I did. The second fellow worked primarily in the Castlegar area. We were all making a living, but it meant taking almost any job that came along. That was what life was like in the early 1960s. The economy was picking up, and the East Kootenays were expanding. I was busy doing subdivisions, fairly large ones. I worked for the Highways Department. I also did a survey of the Trans-Canada Highway.

One of the best things was the diversity of the work. For example, I was asked to figure out how a sawmill could expand and become more efficient as it got busier. My assignment was to make a map of the whole sawmill enterprise to help the managers figure out how to make it work better. It was jam packed so tight that it was not functioning very well. I had a pilot take me up in a small airplane. I took pictures of the sawmill yard with all the logs laying around and big piles all over the place. I immediately got sicker than a dog. I was even throwing up. You are in an airplane and trying to take pictures. The guy's wheeling over, and as I look down, I’m getting dizzy. It was just like being on a circus ride or wheel.

29

Nelson Bridge The bridge at Nelson is important to Nelson and the West Kootenays. Before it was built in the late 1950s, there was a ferry right beside the place where the bridge was built. It was part of the southern Trans-Provincial Highway at that time. So, you would come in from the Okanagan through Grand Forks and then come through Castlegar to Nelson and continue east to Alberta.

Before the bridge, you would have to use the ferry at Nelson, which got overloaded.

The bridge was needed to access what is called in Nelson the north shore (the most prestigious place to live in Nelson), where there are many million-dollar properties. For a stretch of twenty miles, it’s nothing but houses. Every couple of hundred feet, almost like city lots along the lakeshore, there is a cottage or a substantial house, until you get to the village of Kaslo.

So, the bridge is really an important connection for the national and local highway system. It is used a lot today, with traffic almost bumper to bumper in the morning rush hour. We had a traffic study done for building the mall, and there were ten thousand cars a day coming into Nelson and leaving at night.

One of my most memorable jobs was the year and a half that I spent on the Nelson Bridge shortly after moving to the area. I was hired to be the surveyor, in large part because I was an engineer, too. I did the layout and was the technician, checking concrete and so on. The bridge work had already started when I was hired. But they had not put in what they call bents, smaller piers, while the bridge is elevated. The main piers were out in the water where the channel was eighty feet deep. Placing the piers in the right place was a challenge. I spent six months working on them.

30

I think there were to be five smaller piers. They would be on dry land, so it was just a matter of measuring an already predetermined site where the bridge would go and the length of the bridge and everything. It was my job to make sure that everything was put in the right position, and to determine where the steel would later be placed. Lo and behold, my work was good. It's kind of, I hate to say it, and don't put it in print, but it is bragging rights. They believed in me, and I was very confident.

Anyway, I trusted my surveying. Today I have to use the word “trust” almost foolishly. I was working for the consultant who was responsible for making sure the bridge was built adequately, properly, according to his design. The contractor was Peter Kiewit, and the superintendent was Bill Hit; he had two engineers on his crew.

Kiewit should have laid out these piers, and I, working for the consultant, should have checked them. But something went wrong with this normal procedure. I did all the layout work, and nobody else checked it. I had to check my own work.

Later in my career, I was a consultant and responsible for other bridges, so looking back on the Nelson Bridge experience, I can't believe that a structure that serious, big, and expensive was built without someone else checking those piers. You need to have zero tolerance for mistakes and always factor in safety. You've got a little bit of leeway, but on a bridge, you must be right and precise, at least within millimetres.

Although I was busy laying out the bridge, doing inspections, and checking concrete, admittedly, there was a senior person to me making sure everybody was doing their job. He made sure I did everything that was required. I can remember checking concrete, and if it was delayed too long,

31

we'd reject it, and they'd have to take it away. They probably took ten truckloads of concrete away and threw it out.

We ran into some real challenges on the Nelson Bridge. The first challenge was installing big concrete pilings twelve feet in diameter to what they called the grillage down at the bottom in the right place. The pilings were very heavy, perhaps thirty or forty tonnes. To support them, air tanks had to be used. To lower the concrete, they let the air out of the tanks or let the water compress the volume, so the floatation would diminish as it went down. But this system failed.

Then they used two cranes—big cranes, one on each barge, on each side of this structure. They would also control letting the concrete go down. There were probably a half a dozen compressors supplying air. The volume of air would diminish as it went down into the water, and the cranes were supposed to make up the loss of buoyancy of the air tanks. The whole thing failed because the compressors could not keep up with the air. But we eventually got that done.

Another problem was with a pier that required what they called cofferdams, watertight enclosures. Sheet piling had to be hammered in around the position where the pier would be placed. The piling created an enclosure and extended from the mud on the bottom of the lake by twenty feet to the top of where the pier would be. Then water had to be removed from inside the enclosure. When that was done, the pier could be placed in there and concrete poured into the forms.

Then we had to move out into eighty feet of water. Two piers had to be installed on the lake bottom. That was quite a chore; even today that would be quite a chore. The consultant who designed the bridge was working for the Highways Department. His job was to make sure the bridge got built according to the design. But he was not sure how to place piers in the water

32

eighty feet below the lakebed, within an inch or so of the prescribed position. To do that, they had what they called the base form. They used twelve-inch-diameter steel pipes hammered into the clay at the bottom of the lake. They hammered eighty feet into the clay until they could not hammer anymore.

The crew used to get very annoyed because quite often when they were hammering, they would run out of pipe. So, they would have to weld another twenty-foot-long piece onto the existing piece.

I do not remember that they ever got the enormous pipes to move again after they welded the new piece on, but you had to be strict with yourself and try to make them move. You could not assume that the pipe would not move. And here I was as an inspector, out there in the cold, miserable, in the middle of winter, hammering on those pilings, and then saying “No, you’ve got to weld it on and then you've got to hammer it. See, if you can, if it'll move anymore.”

Eventually, the pipe would not move anymore. And then we'd have to say it was okay.

It was up to Harold Kerslake and I—me as surveyor and him representing the company responsible for building the bridge—to solve the problem with the base forms. We put together a whole new system of positioning those base forms in the right place by hammering and piling. I had to measure where that piling was, and then we adjusted the base form to fit, moved it into the right place, and fastened it down and anchored it.

The whole project was copyrighted by Peter Kiewit, the contractor that built the bridge, and his company, because they effectively invented this newer and better way of doing things. I could not let anybody know. I went six or seven years before I ever let anybody read about the process.

33

Then, the second pier went in with that system that we developed. It went in lickety-split, just no problems whatsoever, except that it needed a bunch of fill on the north shore. Because I was familiar with the area, the properties, and everything else, I personally scrounged gravel off three or four different properties in the adjacent area. I put the fill into what they call the approach to the bridge on the north shore. On one occasion, it failed and slid out into the lake. We were worried that the fill was unstable, but we carried on.

On one of the piers, a big decision was made, which I did not get really involved with. The workmen kept excavating to make the original design work. Both gears were the same length, but the pier positions in the channel were not the same depth. The workers kept trying to dig out the channel on the north side, so the pier there would be the same height and length of the other pier. As they dug and dumped the material downstream in the river, they saw that something funny was happening. The removed material was filling in the base of the second pier. They decided to make that pier shorter, which was acceptable.

To pour concrete into eighty feet of water, they designed a system that was being used at the Kitimat power plant (an aluminium plant in Northern BC). The university lab had tested the concrete that was being poured at Kitimat. I had watched the concrete being poured while I was at university because I was class president of my civil engineering group. I was interested to see how they did it. To make concrete in eighty feet of water, you cannot pour it in because it will just disintegrate. So, after the Nelson Bridge’s steel forms (piers) were fixed in place, the plan was to pour a cement mix inside, a very fine mix called a slurry. A Montreal outlet claimed that they knew how to make it.

34

So, a group came in from Montreal. I got to be very friendly with the superintendent. After they had fixed the steel form to the rock below, the group was ready to pump in the slurry. It would go to the bottom of the pier and would gradually rise, pushing the water out. The water would spill out the top because the concrete mix would be heavier than water. The cement was considered adequate for holding the pier in place on the rock.

The test from the Kitimat power plant showed that the process could make good concrete if it was done properly. But the company could not get their slurry to pump; it would jam in the pipes, which are only maybe two inches in diameter.

And boy, they tried to make the process work. They brought in sand from Spokane, Washington.

I always remember it coming in boxcars. By the time it got to Nelson, the sand was frozen solid in the box and had to be jackhammered out. So then, I personally located a sandpit south of Nelson where my folks had gotten sand for preserving vegetables through the winter.

The Montreal group tried to mix the sand into the cement, but it just would not work. So, the company had to be let go. They just had to give up on the project. And of course, it was a major job in those days. They had spent a lot of money trying to make it work. Another outlet out of Chicago came in with a similar process, but they had an additive to combine with the cement to make it very viscous.

This process worked and is still being used today in cement that has to be pumped. The additive was added to the sand mix, and the mixture was pumped in to fill up the steel forms. Above the steel forms was a section that had to be made of concrete. This exposed concrete had to be placed in wooden forms—plywood forms. They would pour eight feet of concrete at a time.

35

A set of anchor bolts had to be fixed to the steelwork. The measurements had to be precise, within a quarter of an inch or so. I was doing all the layout work and the measurements. But when they were ready to pour in the mixture, I said that I had to check my work. Here they were pouring the cement and relying on my work. I was just checking that it was done right, but I was the only guy checking. It was a very funny position to be in. I was not responsible to the contractor, but I told the crew that I was not going give them the position for the anchor bolts until I had checked my work.

The contractor got upset and decided that they had to go ahead and pour the concrete. They drilled these holes four inches in diameter where the anchor bolts would later go in. Well, as it turned out, it was difficult to drill those holes into the reinforcing steel. Getting the process right cost in the neighbourhood of four thousand dollars just because the guy decided they had to pour the concrete at that moment. He could not wait a week.

It took a few days for me to make all kinds of measurements. I was triangulating. We did not have the equipment that we have today. Today, that job would be one-tenth as difficult as it was back then.

I had stood up to the contractor. I never found any mistake or inaccuracy in my work when I did it all over again to double check it, and it turned out that it was correct. But I was not going to give the contractor the OK to proceed after the initial measurement was made.

A decision was made to strip the forms of the recently poured concrete. On one occasion working on the fourth pier, they stripped the forms off, and the concrete just fell into the river.

The concrete was still green, and it was not cured enough to be stable. The job had to be done over again.

36

A few problems surfaced when we were trying to elevate the deck (what would become the road) to make the connection to the first pier. The workmen were adding steel to the pier, and they had what they call the falsework holding it up. And we tried jacking the deck up because we knew the level was not going to match the level of the first pier, and it didn’t. When part of the deck got out to the pier, instead of connecting at the right elevation, it was four or five feet too low.

We had had a landslide, and the shoreline side was uneven and was moving a little. The shoreline started to slip, but the falsework (temporary work) was not failing. The ground underneath was failing and collapsing. They decided to quit trying to build up that side of the slope. We had to lift the deck instead of dropping it down; normally, the deck would be dropped down to match the level of the pier. But this was the reverse. We had to lift it up to match the pier. But everything fit very well after that.

One last thing about the Nelson Bridge. I was the first person, other than the iron workers, to walk across the bridge on a beam eight inches wide. I was wearing office clothes and leather shoes. Now it was not all that narrow, but I was scared, petrified actually. I had not realized how critical the rubber-soled shoes we wore during construction were for balance.

It was like being on ice. It was slippery, and I was eighty feet above the water. I should not have been there. I was not employed to do this, and if I fell in and hurt myself, I do not know if I would have received any compensation. It is always scary to be part way through something and realize that you should not be there. I was sticking my neck out needlessly just for the privilege of saying I was the first person to walk across the bridge in Nelson, other than the iron workers.

Working on the Nelson Bridge was a tremendous experience. I was only twenty-seven years old or so, and I wrote my thesis on the bridge project, and I made up a nice, big loose-leaf binder

37

about it. After the bridge work, I was laid off by AB Sanderson Company. They wanted me to look after the Alexandra bridge along the Trans-Canada Highway north of Hope, but I turned down the job. I did not want to leave Nelson to work on another bridge. I had had enough. I wanted to work in Nelson on smaller, more meaningful, personal-type contracts. The people at the consulting firm could not believe that I would not carry on being a construction engineer, but I would not go for it.

The consultant fellow even came out from Victoria up to Nelson, which is a day’s drive, to try and talk me into it. I just had to say, “No! I am not leaving Nelson.” At the time, there was talk of putting a university in Nelson. We planned to have a lot of kids, so a university was important.

It turned out we never did get a proper university here.

38

CBC Tower Near Nelson I always remember when television came to Nelson. They put what is called a repeater on the top of Elephant Mountain, near a popular hiking trail. The repeater resembles the profile of an elephant, even its tusk. Hikers walk to the top of the mountain, where there is a flag and from where the hang-gliders took off on many occasions in the past. I was hired to survey the tower sites, along with some CBC executives who came out from Montreal. They showed up in Nelson in their business suits and Oxfords ready to climb to the top of the mountain, which was covered with a foot or two of snow. I could not believe that these people failed to realize they were going out in the bush. I had to lend them my own winter clothing.

They were flown to the top of the mountain in a helicopter. I did not go with them because the helicopter would only take two people. They wandered around at the top of the mountain, covering a great amount of terrain. But anyway, they picked a pretty good spot for the repeater and designated it with a handkerchief tied to a branch of a tree. That was the only marker they had.

Here’s a multimillion-dollar tower, important to the whole television service, and that’s how it was decided where it should go. After the spot was chosen, I went up there with a CBC technician to look at the site and get ready to survey it out for tenure. The only problem was we could not find the tree they had marked. Luckily, this fellow had a small television set, and he picked up a signal in one spot and decided that was where we were going to put the tower. So, it was decided.

The next week I went up to survey the tower site. The snow was so hard, you could walk on it like pavement. To get to the ground, a power saw was needed, and the crew had to cut a cube out

39

of the snow, shovel it out, and cut it small enough that we could shovel it. We did the survey, and they built the tower. But when they finished building the tower, it did not work. It could not pick up a signal from the next repeater tower, in Rossland.

We had to survey another site for a repeater about fifteen kilometres west of Nelson in an area called Bonnington. They had to buy a prefabricated unit to put in there. And it had to be done in short order. They had a month to do something that normally took six months or a year to do.

Once they had this tower at the top, they had to get power to it. That meant they had to connect to the powerlines from down at the highway, just on the north edge of Nelson. This powerline went up a very steep mountainside. I had to locate the position for the powerline.

The survey crew—two chaps—were helicoptered to the top of the mountain. On the first day, the crew got about halfway down the mountain and ran out of daylight. They hiked out as best they could. We had to go back up the next day, and they started where they had finished.

The helicopter could not land. It would hover on a steep hillside, staying far enough away from the mountainside, so the blades would not hit the mountain. The fellows would stand out on the runner and jump. One fellow jumped and was okay, but the second fellow chickened out. But he had to be with his partner. The helicopter pilot circled back and told the fellow to jump. I still remember him saying, “You jump or I'm going to kick you in the teeth.” He bashed at the fellow somehow and threatened to hit him if he did not jump. The fellow jumped and he did not get hurt. They finished the survey, but it was quite an experience for them. Once the survey was done, tenders were called for a contract to build a powerline.

This was not my sole helicopter adventure. We had to land at a peak in the Nelson area, but it was so small and so sharp that the helicopter guy had to come in close. I did not have to jump

40

very far, but I had to jump off the runner. I asked the pilot where he was going to land the thing while I made the measurement. He just pointed out in the air. He just moved off and hovered. He waited for me to do it, giving me about ten minutes to do my work.

And then he came back and hovered over the peak. I had to jump onto the helicopter, and he took off again. And I'll tell you when you're up there, thousands of feet in the air, you get a little bit jittery on occasion. It is not the safest thing to be doing. People are known to get into trouble. A helicopter pilot at Nelson got himself killed by trying to do something like what the other pilot had done. He got in too close to the mountainside, and the rotor clipped the mountain and crashed. The government or the Workers Compensation Board would never have allowed us to do the type of things we used to do. Nobody does these things anymore. Or at least I hope that is the case.

41

TV Towers and Snowmobiles Working on Kootenay Lake, I got the job of doing the CBC television tower sites on Mount Nelson, above Nelson, and one at Crawford Bay, above McGregor Lake. I was working on the survey with a CBC representative. He took a little snowmobile-type machine and went out on the lake.

The machine fell through the ice. The fellow hauled himself out and came to get me. He was adamant that he wasn't going to lose the machine. We worked straight out for several hours— hard, like beavers, trying to salvage the machine. We had to grab some lumber from a nearby house (there was only one house on the property), and we planked across the snow so we would not fall through the weak ice, underneath almost two feet of snow. We had a devil of a time getting the machine out, fishing it up out of the ice and then getting it off the snowbound lake. I couldn't believe that we pulled it out of the water onto the ice.

Surveyors have to deal with hazards like this since our work is always outdoors and often in challenging places. Luckily, I had not been with the fellow when he fell through the ice, so I could not be blamed for the incident. Until we rescued the machine, I thought it was lost. In today’s money, it would have been worth over twenty thousand dollars.

42

Work in Golden The Golden area became almost a second home. We spent so much time there that I opened an office in the village. I looked after surveying for the village. There was even one area where the property lines were all messed up, with four properties tangled together. I did what they call a control survey.

The main job was straightening everything out. The mining company was working on a major silica deposit on Moberly Mountain, right on the northern edge of Golden. It wanted to develop this mine to make glass. It had to move the silica down about eight or ten miles of road and then put it on the railway cars. The government did not know what to do with the property. I told them that they had to treat the silica rock as a mining project, like a mineral claim, much as they would mine gold, silver, lead, or iron.

When we had finished surveying after a month or so of work, the government decided it was not a proper mine. It was a land tenure issue. So, land had to be changed and developed under the Land Act. The company went along with the idea, but I had to pay to change the survey markings. There was not that much more surveying to be done, but I had to change all the documentation.

The project sure kept me busy. One of my articling pupils went out on his own and stayed in the area to practise. I decided that I was not going to go up that far anymore. I did not really cut back that much on my work. I was seemingly every bit as busy, but I did not need to go up to remote places anymore.

There was more than enough work for me and my survey crews in the Nelson area. But from a surveying point of view, I setup much of the Golden area. I looked after the development of

43

service stations on the road and did the surveying. I did a fair bit of work on the Trans-Canada Highway going east of Golden up to Kicking Horse.

I darn near got killed on one occasion on the highway. In the older days, we used to survey down the middle of the highway. The traffic did not seem to be that dangerous. But there were scary moments. One fellow, he was pulling a trailer. He changed direction when I was set up in the middle of the highway and jackknifed the trailer. It just about hit me. I had to grab the instrument and run for my life.

Golden now is built up, with a very nice ski hill. I did several subdivisions south of Golden. I was particularly proud of a big subdivision with fancy big curves and houses in three rows. It required complicated mathematics to lay out all these lots. Every lot was on a curve. The area was expanding so quickly that every time we would go there, half a dozen jobs had to be done.

People were building or buying property right next to the highway. It was quite an elaborate thing in those days to get approval from the Highways Department to create a lot of fronting on the highway. In one case, they would not let us create the lots until they moved the highway away from it. The work dragged on and on.

I got directly involved in some of the developments. I formed a partnership with a couple of other guys to develop a ski hill, something similar to Panorama, which is one of the bigger ski hills. It is not as big as Whistler, but it is large for that area. We were going to develop a ski hill on the opposite mountain. I went through the process of surveying where we would put the tow ropes and everything else. That is when I almost became a developer. I also surveyed on an Indian reserve for a real estate person who got a year’s lease for properties on the reserve.

44

The Village of Nakusp I started working in Nakusp within a few years of becoming a BC Land Surveyor. I was hired to do a survey for a big pulp mill being built by Celgar. Initially, it was only a sawmill company, but it purchased several small licenses and bought out some small logging companies. Nakusp appeared to be booming.

I immediately decided to do a controlled survey. For some odd reason, I was able to finance spending an extraordinary amount of time resurveying the townsite, which I did in 1962. I got my surveying ticket in 1958, so this was happening four years into my career. I then resurveyed the entire townsite. Later, in a debate about a similar resurvey in Nelson, some legal folks argued that I should not be defining somebody's property unless I had been hired to tackle this assignment. They said that I had no right to go in and resurvey the whole townsite, saying to the landowners that this is where your property lines are. But here I was, in 1962, resurveying all the properties in the organized village, which was quite an extensive area, say ten blocks by six blocks of lots.

And I can remember many owners being very pleased because of their measurements. That was part of the reason for resurveying because you would find that the original survey was inaccurate. But my surveys were precise and reliable. My work was at least four times more accurate than previous surveys.

I can still remember ignoring the original survey. The original surveyors had thought that, because it was flat land, there was no reason to be precise. It was not like Nelson or some of the other communities with steep hills and cliffs. They were assuming that nobody would go out and check the measurements. Initially, people would just accept the survey posts as they were. If they

45

were out, they never knew that they were incorrect. It resulted in situations where a lot was supposed to be fifty feet wide but was surveyed at forty-nine and a half feet wide.

They did not know that the lots were only forty-nine and a half feet wide because nobody had a tape measure. Surveyors were not being hired to repost lots like they are now. If people did not know where their properties were, they would hire a surveyor to stake out their property. But if the surveyor did not have an overall map of the area or a reliable definition of the overall area, he would not know where to start. You could not just drop in and do a single lot. You would have to know that it would fit into the overall picture.

So anyway, I did the Nakusp resurvey work. Within a year or two, this big Celgar logging company, now also operating a pulp mill, had me do a forty-two-lot subdivision at the west edge of the Nakusp. That was really a big project for that era. Normally, a few lots would be involved —maybe two or three, sometimes five or six—but not something of this scale.

This goes back in law, too. There was what they call a one-quarter reversion. If a developer did a subdivision, the company would not also have to build the roads. But it had to turn over every fourth lot to the government, which would sell these lots to pay for building the roads.

If you planned to develop more than four lots, you had to file a prospectus, a very elaborate legal document. You had to state where the subdivision was, if water, telephone, and sewage were available, the financing of the developer, and everything else. The document had to be certified by a lawyer. The goal was to stop fraudulent development. The prospectus had to indicate if the road was going to be paved. Initially, very few subdivisions had paved roads, but many provided sidewalks and street lighting. So, we always did only four lots at a time, even if we knew that

46

we'd be doing four lots next year and so on, but you never went over that, because of the requirement for filing a prospectus.

I tackled other assignments for this timber company, Celgar. I laid out a cemetery for a settlement called Needles. In Nakusp itself, I laid out a wharf for the federal government and, right in Nakusp, a school site for the school board. I also got hired to draw a map of the Nakusp waterworks system. They actually had quite an extensive water system in Nakusp, but they did not have a map of the whole thing.

47

New Denver I had assignments in the Village of New Denver down the Slocan Valley at the north end of Slocan Lake. Here again, I did a control plan because there was little to no evidence of any posts from the original turn-of-the-century survey. I had to convince the Registrar of Titles to accept a posting plan. I knew that it would be looked at many times more than just a subdivision plan.

Anytime anybody would do anything in the village, they would refer to this overall plan. So, I created a system where they made a special filing in the land title system. I also did another cemetery at Burton. When BC Hydro flooded the Arrow lakes, they had to excavate graves that were being flooded out, recreate a cemetery, and rebury the bodies.

Another interesting thing happened in New Denver, carried over from the days when Japanese Canadians were interned there. A dormitory had been set up with no insulation or any other facilities. These poor Japanese people were trucked into the area by the hundreds. The settlement had thirty or so parcels surveyed by my old boss, and it had this little hut made for a summer camp. These families had to live in these places, and they would fix them up after they were moved in. Their first winter was very harsh.

Many years later, I got the job of rechecking all the surveys to make sure there were no encroachments. I was working for the Department of Public Works so that they could sell all these places to whoever wanted to move in.

48

Sandon Sandon presented a real challenge. An older and abandoned town, it had never been properly incorporated as a village. It was basically a townsite, and it had a mine right there in the built-up area.

In my time, Sandon had a small store and coffee shop. One mining company was arguing with another about whose property this mine was on. They were trying to find property lines and they needed that to find a property description. They had difficulty finding the survey work that I had done because it was not adequately registered in the Land Title Office. Another surveyor had done a survey about twenty years earlier, but mine had been even earlier—some guess thirty to forty years ago. On his plan, he had shown that my plan was registered and that it corrected the land title system.

49

Slocan City By the 1960s, the Slocan area was starting to boom. Slocan City is an incorporated village with a large number of lots. But the town did not have the old, wooden survey sticks used at the turn of the twentieth century, when Slocan enjoyed its first boom.

I never did find any of the posts in the townsite itself. But it had up to fifty lots. It took us close to a month to survey the town. We only put in new pins at the block corners and at the lanes, roads, and major corners. We did not repost all the lots, but it was something I thought should be done because the area was starting to develop. Rather than do things piecemeal, I did them systematically and professionally. And I did it out of the goodness of my heart. I never got paid by anyone to do it. After that, I got several small jobs for the school in Slocan City and with a sawmill company that had some property there.

I'm sure that everybody that lives in the area and surveyors who came afterwards appreciate the fact that everything was set out in one uniform batch and that we had done an extraordinarily precise survey. I still remember having staff read the angles precisely. We had what is called a control survey around it. This marked the beginning of my integrated survey control thinking, I guess you could say. I used the same approach later in Nelson.

My work continued in Slocan City. The sawmill raised interesting questions involving Slocan Lake. The sawmill wanted what's called a foreshore lease or the right to stack logs in a boom along the shoreline. The booms could not front on any private property, so they decided to create a foreshore lease fronting on a cliff. It was well over a thousand feet from the road, and the cliff was almost vertical.

50

But anyway, we had to survey the foreshore. We could not get an instrument set up there to measure along the shoreline, so we put a station across the lake. At that time, the electronic distance measuring equipment was starting to be used. We had to put an angle measuring device in points on the shore against the rock. We could get the boat right up to the rock and drill into the rock with a chisel and set a survey marker there. Then, we could take measurements from the opposite side of the lake. I had never done anything like that myself but was proud we created that system.

And the excitement was not over. To get to the site, our three-member survey crew took a tenfoot boat, a car topper type. The three men would take their equipment and go about two miles up the lake. Even in a small wind, not a storm or anything, the waves frightened our workers.

When it was time to come back, one chap just walked back along the shoreline, along kind of a rough trail rather than take the boat. He thought it was too dangerous for three people to be in that little boat. I think his caution was well placed.

51

Fairmont The community now known as Fairmont Hot Springs is a short distance south of Radium. God, it's really a beautiful place to be. It is like the Okanagan. There was a lot of work along the lakeshore there.

The Fairmont Hot Springs resort property owned by a British family—apparently part of the nobility—came up for sale. Two loggers, brothers named Lloyd and Earl Wilder, had a little money set aside. They bought Fairmont Hot Springs, including some three thousand acres—a big tract of land. The area had excellent water, not as clear as at Radium Hot Springs, but still nice with a large and sustainable flow.

Anyway, these chaps bought the property and guess what? I was the only surveyor working in the area. So, naturally, I got the job of advising what to do, building right from a piece of land that had next to nothing on it, except a crummy swimming pool. There was no accommodation or anything. I had to figure out what to do.

And boy, did I ever have fun doing everything. We subdivided some lots so that some other people could get into the area. The brothers decided to build accommodation for guests. I had the job of locating the building and even making sure that the building did not destroy any of the nicer trees. This lodge had to fit into the landscape. The swimming pool had to be designed so there was a diving pool and everything.

The main highway was rebuilt through the area. A subdivision was permitted, and a couple of commercial sites were created off the old highway, which was about two hundred feet back from the new main highway. I can remember doing the subdivision on the old highway. I have a particularly fond memory of leaving a prestigious big tree in the middle of the roadway initially.

52

Eventually, we had to cut it down because it was kind of dangerous. You do not normally have a big tree in the middle of the road.

But as they created the subdivision, the owners had the idea to build a ski hill on the property.

One of them got into a small plane with a pilot and others, looking for a place to put a ski hill on the mountainside. They flew the plane in too close and crashed into the mountainside.

Fortunately, they were going slowly, and it was not a major high impact crash. They all got out, but one of the guys did not feel good and later he passed away.

After viewing the mountain, the owners decided to develop the ski hill. And I got the job of deciding where to put it. They built it according to my design. Lo and behold, it worked well enough that they decided to build a lodge there and rebuild the road. I had done a control survey, indicating the elevation of all the points. I still remember engineering a two- or three-mile piece of road from basic information or the information that I had managed to get by a long-distance laser machine off the top of the Bugaboo mountains. I even hired another survey outfit with special equipment to make the measurements so that I could do the design.

I still remember figuring out where to put the road in Lakewood. I can remember showing them where they had to build this road to make it no steeper than eight percent grade so that people would be able to get up to the ski hill site all year long.

But when they built the lodge at the ski hill, we had a few problems. We had installed a tow initially that was not appropriate for the larger facility. We had to change the position of the handlebar. We designed it and put the bar in a new place where it worked out really well. We just had to turn the tow a little bit, but we were able to leave it in the same place. I thought that was pretty smart and it was real simple to do. It took a pile of money, though, and everything

53

worked out. But that area is considered an arid zone. It does not get much snow. But they kept the hill groomed so smooth that you could ski on four or five inches of snow.

I sponsored a BC Land Surveyors convention in that building. Some of the visitors thought I was a part owner of the place. And I said, no, I had just designed virtually everything that was done there. I'm so proud of the accomplishment and how successful it was. It was a family enterprise—not a big corporation. As a matter of fact, the two brothers split up. The one brother had a good feeling for the business and did everything that I suggested. The other fellow did not agree with a lot of it, so he was bought out. He took his share and bought tractor or bulldozer equipment. He tried to be a contractor, and I think he went broke with his sons doing that.

But the project overall worked well. We even laid out an airport runway down in the area where the land was not good for development. I still remember once having one of my friends, a oneeyed pilot (with full government licensing!) fly me up there. When we flew into the airport, there were cattle grazing on the runway, and we could not land there. We had to land up in Invermere and then get somebody to come and pick us up and take us down so that I could attend the planning meeting at the Fairmont lodge.

54

The Timeshare Option Sometime later, Fairmont owner, Lloyd Wilder, had been down in the United States, where he was introduced to the timeshare concept. At that time, the timeshare did not exist at all in BC. Lloyd asked, “Can we do that here?” I couldn’t see why not. I was optimistic with planning and everything else. I will never forget trying to figure out how to do it.

There was no precedent to follow in anything. I consulted the Land Registry Office. An official there said that it sounded like a good idea. It was kind of popular in the States already. He found one partial model: a Mickey Mouse agreement type of thing for ownership of the lockers in a golf course down at New Westminster. But this agreement had nothing to do with owning a suite in a building or anything like that. Anyway, that office was not any help.

I was told by people in the government that they did not want anything to do with the normal title system and timeshare, or the ownership of a unit in a building for one week. They decided it involved too much bookkeeping, was too insecure, and presented too much of a problem.

They just said to go away and do the timeshare privately. I had to find somebody who would look after it. I found a big insurance corporation in Calgary, which was willing to look after the bookkeeping, security, and registration. The model is now used worldwide. One of my former employees owns a major company in the field. I have never owned a timeshare. A company tried to sell me one on my only trip to Hawaii, but I wasn't interested.

I did the first timeshare in BC. When you do something big, and you have to be innovative, it kind of tickles my fancy about having enough gumption—just enough energy—to say, “Okay, we can do that.”

55

Land Development at Fairmont After looking after Fairmont for twenty years, I downsized my operations. Lloyd Wilder wanted me to manage the place and help develop his property along Columbia Lake. But there was a problem. It was difficult to get to, and we did not have a road into it. You could ride horses into this great big, pristine four-hundred-acre piece of land. He thought that Fairmont properties could expand here. He was going to buy a bridge that was being dismantled down at Fort Steele near Cranbrook and put it in the river to get around this rock bluff that came right down to the edge of the Columbia River.

But I told Lloyd to forget about the bridge. That was too big a project for him to take on. Instead, I suggested that we just fill in and push the river over a little bit, just enough to get a road around the cliff for about two hundred feet or so. He decided to proceed without the niceties of official permission. Today, a person might get thrown in jail if they did what we did there. Lloyd took my advice. He filled it in and pushed the river over twenty or thirty feet and got a road around the cliff.

Lloyd threatened to start subdividing that property but ran into government opposition. The government’s Fish and Wildlife Branch decided that it was important to retain that area for wildlife. So, the government bought him out, which was fine. He willingly sold because he had other land to develop.

That parcel of land is now a wilderness preserve, even though there is road access into it. I do not think that people are allowed to go there because it is a big horn sheep grazing area, with lots of elk and deer. People could, I guess, walk into the area or go by boat across the lake. But anyway, that is a little bit of planning that I guess you could say went the right way in the end.

56

Developers are controlled by an ambition to develop something and make some money on it. But a lot of developers do not make any money. I had some pretty good arguments over the years with people that think developers are always making money and charging too much. But developers have got to make a living, or they won't do it. I know others that went broke developing property because they did not have the right ideas.

These two logger fellows—Lloyd and Earl Wilder—initially had little money. They started to make a profit, but I understand that Fairmont Hot Springs is now in financial trouble. At the time, everybody wanted the development, people authorized it, and they planned for it.

The Fairmont project was important for me. It is not often that you start with a raw piece of land, particularly one previously owned by English nobility for half a century. In the early days, the Wilders had allowed friends and family to use the facility. They were not even in the business of renting out accommodation. There were a few cabins on the site, but nothing was happening. So, you start with a large piece of land—two or three thousand acres. You look at it and you say this has got potential.

The Wilders were great people, but they were not experienced in land development. They were hardworking, cutting down trees and sawing them up, and they ran a sawing and milling business. They had enough money that they could afford to buy the property. When they brought me in and asked for my opinion, I was just waving my hands around saying this has all kinds of potential— resort, swimming pool, golf course, subdivision, and ski hill. I could see the potential the first time I stood there.

You had to think carefully. You had to make sure that the property had not only a place for a sewage field but for future development if that one ever choked up or didn't function too well.

57

But anyway, the thing was just, God, now that I think about it, I get almost excited about how we dreamt about doing all the right things and realizing that it all worked out so well.

We did the subdivision, we did a larger subdivision, and then came the golf course. Fairmont had few cottage sites, so we made some were pretty fancy ones. Then we created a golf course and lots within the golf course At one of the events at the Fairmont, they had hang-gliding. You could go up on the top of the ski hill and go tandem on a hang-glider with a fellow who knew what he was doing. You could come down and land in the golf course. It was popular. My wife and I decided that she would be the last one to go. We let everybody else go first. Sure enough, it turned out that it got dark, and the fellow would not fly my wife. She was annoyed with me about backing off in terms of priority.

With the Fairmont project well launched, I was getting tired of being away from home for such long periods of time. I decided not to travel up to the East Kootenays so regularly. The project was in considerable turmoil because of issues in the Wilder family. I decided that it was not my cup of tea anymore. During the years I worked there, I found out a lot about myself. I really liked dealing with people and appeasing them or guiding them. I am very proud of the work I did on Fairmont and enjoyed the fact I was there at the beginning.

Work changes as soon as you get corporations or companies running the operations. They have too many people with too much to say. They do not listen to the consultants all the time. They have their own ideas. So, I left.

But let me end with a discussion of a fascinating side piece of the Fairmont story. Like most communities, the folks involved before the Fairmont resort project was created had developed a

58

cemetery. But they did not document it properly. I had an aptitude for documenting things and then finding a place to file the papers. An elderly brother and sister owned property in the Fairmont area. They had been sent out to Canada with a small pension because their older brother and family got ownership of the family’s big property in England. Their mother had died, and they had her buried on the property, not in a proper burial place. They were quite concerned that their mother should be buried at Fairmont in a proper cemetery. I was asked to create a cemetery for them.

They donated the nice piece of property, probably a ten-acre block of land, which is quite large for a cemetery. I had to go formally document the site to get it accepted by the government. You could not create a cemetery in an awkward place or too close to development. Luckily, it turned out to be a very good site, and I created the cemetery. The couple I know were buried there, as was Mr. Wilder. He could have chosen a larger cemetery like the Windermere one or the Invermere one, but he preferred to be buried in his own cemetery at Fairmont.

59

Laying Out Development Plots The Highways Department asked me to do the overall design of maybe a hundred lots or so. But the project failed. The people could not handle the development, and the highway relocation was cancelled. It was too bad because the development proposal was good, and it took a lot of planning to lay out the lots and roads. We did an awful lot of surveying.

There were a lot of big plans in those days. There was a good fellow in the Golden area, probably in his eighties or there about, Thomas King. He owned a lot of the vacant land around Golden. I worked on trying to figure out what to do with this land. One of the things I tackled was determining where an airport should be built. And it did get built in that area on the westerly edge of Golden.

There was quite a bit of mining development going on. I can remember one case where another firm said they were surveying ten miles away from a community in six feet of snow. I do not know how they even got themselves fed or how they ever dried out. It was a horrendous job to have. People would come to work, and then quit after a couple of days. Quite a few of the surveyors said it was not worthwhile trying to work in those conditions.

I was one of the ones that had to find out where the boundary lines were. It was a terrible job trying to find mileposts. Of every twenty we looked for, only two or three remained from the earlier survey. The people who did the survey would have said they had set out durable wooden posts, meaning they were made from cedar rather than some punky wood that would rot away in thirty or forty years. And we were now looking for them sixty or so years after they were put in.

I went to a corner that had four big trees marked. These big trees were two feet in diameter, but they were sitting in five or six feet of snow. We struggled to find other posts in areas where there

60

were no trees. There was no trace of the survey posts and nothing to indicate that anyone had ever been in that small area. There was just nothing there. These surveyors had not done what I had learned to do. I put metal posts in, which was a good thing because the area was hit by a serious fire after the survey was done. Boy, did we ever work to re-establish the surveys. In those days, we did not have the electronic distance measuring equipment. Everything had to be measured out by hand with a steel tape. It was a big job.

61

Glacier National Park One of my more interesting assignments was to help define the boundary of Glacier National Park. The boundary had initially been surveyed by surveyors from the Vancouver area. The original survey crew was chased out by bad weather, and grizzly bears tore up their survey markers. They were not able to do a thorough job. The Forest Service and the Parks Branch were arguing about the boundary line. The Parks Branch claimed that the Forestry Service had allowed trees to be cut in Glacier Park. The boundary was not marked well. A couple of years later, I was asked to go in and find out why the Forest Service was fighting with the Parks Branch about the boundary line.

I went up there to Glacier Park—even though I had an injured leg–with a couple of buddies of mine. I had to go with a federal surveyor representing the Parks Branch to define the boundary line because it had not been done properly. We had a difference of opinion about where the boundary line should have been. It was supposed to be along the height of land. But where a valley went between two mountains, it was hard to define the height of land. I did not leave thinking that we had done a good job.

62

Hans Gmoser and the Bugaboos To my delight, Hans Gmoser—the man who literally created helicopter skiing—moved to the Nelson area. And since I was the only surveyor working in the area, he contacted me. I got the first job surveying for Hans Gmoser about twenty miles back in the mountains in an area called the Bugaboos.

Hans had decided that backcountry skiing was going to develop. He and I went in to study the situation. We stayed in an abandoned and partly collapsed logging camp. It was just the bare minimum, little more than a wood frame, but better than staying in tents.

We helicoptered in and did a survey with one of my helpers. I was personally active in the case. I created a site for a lodge, which Hans subsequently built. It was a very good design, with what is called a cold roof. Hans had a base station with vehicle access down at the highway where he had supplies dropped off for the lodge. The helicopter could land at this station and pick up goods.

Within two years, the lodge was successful enough that Hans asked us to come back again when they had plowed a road into the area. I went in with a survey crew of four. We surveyed an additional parcel, and then we realized that Hans would have to have a helicopter site with fuel storage. We had a great time. The food was gourmet. The skiers were paying stacks of money for about four or five days of skiing.

One day the skiers were fogged in, but I had my doubletrack snowmobile, so I took them to another area where they could ski, where it was not foggy. But they were not skiing with a helicopter. They were just skiing, packing, tramping up the hill on their skis, and then coming down.

63

Hans did not have a good map of his property, so I made one for the skiers showing all the different ski runs that they made. I got a composite from the government of the whole region and added some twenty basic runs that skiers could do. Hans ran a really good organization and he jumped on good ideas.

The Alpine Club of Canada, the mountaineering group, wanted to build a new lodge where they could have 20 or thereabouts people stay overnight. We were hired to survey out another parcel of land that they would use for building an alpine hut and that they would have tenure of in the winter. Up to that point, the club had what was commonly called a yurt, an insulated igloo type facility that was right below Bugaboo Spire.

We had to be helicoptered in, and the helicopter could take, I think, twelve people. But there were no more than eight people with reservations to be skiing at that time, so there was room for us in the helicopter. It carried us from the launch up to the area planned for the new alpine hut.

The first day we went up there, I had three men with me. We had to take our overnight gear and food because if it got foggy, we would have to stay in the yurt overnight. Lord only knows when they would have been able to come and carry us out.

But anyway, it turned out that the weather did not close in on us. We were carried out that night and we went back the next day. A couple of us took our skis up there. We were allowed to go skiing with the high paying tourists. I could ski fairly well so skied without a guide. But I got supreme heck for it. It was a “no-no” to ski alone because you did not know where it was safe to go. There were crevasses and other dangers.

64

We made a second run. I heard a big noise and was afraid that I was caught in a crash and going to be severely injured, and maybe killed. I was petrified, and I decided that that was enough playing around.

I was up there to work. I realized we should not be out playing at the same time. We did not ski anymore. A friend of mine, a fellow worker, also went up there as a tourist. After his first run, he decided that it was too scary. He quit even though he was paying to be there, because he thought it was too risky.

It might be okay if you were a cocky fellow who figured he could handle anything. I was too responsible and refused to risk my life skiing. On that same trip, I had actually watched Hans Gmoser start a fairly substantial avalanche. We were eating our lunch at the yurt when he decided to lead the group that he was with. He was a tail end guide. He went into a dangerous area, very steep. He made a turn that kicked him off the slide, and it did not take him with it.

Luckily, he did not fall and get caught in the avalanche. He triggered it, but he was able to stay standing.

If he had fallen, he would have almost surely been killed. They didn't have the electronic sounding mechanism everybody wears now. Today, if somebody gets buried, you just reverse the polarity on your sounding equipment, and you can pick up the beep of the guy that is buried. You hope you can dig the person out in time. The rescue equipment then was like a yoyo. You had about a fifty-foot spool that you would attach to your jacket, and you had twine. The red dyed twine would be fastened to your jacket and the yoyo would be loose. Searchers would supposedly be able to find the yoyo. If you got buried, you would likely not be found until you were dead.

65

Hunting Camp I did lots of other survey work for people in the general area. Slightly to the south of the Bugaboos, a big game hunting guide hired us to survey a hunting camp on what is called Diana Lake. It is a pretty lake and a nice game hunting place. People would pay thousands of dollars to be taken in there to hunt sheep and elk.

To get there, we had to go in on horseback. I happened to have one employee that knew a little bit about horses. He did not have one himself, but his girlfriend's father had some down in the Salmo area, and so he knew about horses. Anyway, the guide left horses for us but did not stay around to saddle them up or anything.

So, there were two of us: a fellow who was a good amateur horseman and me who had never had anything to do with horses. We had to saddle up the horses, put the gear on them, and ride up to the site without the help of a guide. He was up there at Diana Lake already. The halter of the back horse was tied to the tail of my horse.

As we were entering a little gully, my poor horse got part of his tail torn off. The other horse did not want to go through the gully. He just stopped, dug in, and my horse went ahead.

But anyway, we got up there and then the situation turned out to be quite different than I expected. I thought that he should change where he planned to build his little lodge.

I decided to walk out and phone the government in Victoria. I described the plan to senior people in the Lands Branch. I got permission to make the change and then walked back the same day.

We did the survey with the approval of the guide. He agreed with my recommendations. This was a case where planning comes to the forefront. My employer in this case had not been able to

66

plan his small lodge site because of concerns about the availability of water, a corral area for horses, and other considerations.

I felt that I was doing a really good job in terms of having the confidence to just take control of the situation. I also got a chance to see some of the most beautiful countryside in the world.

67

Nakusp Recreation Areas After skiing in the Bugaboos started, some entrepreneurs wanted to build backcountry skiing opportunities near Nakusp. One of the fellows was a commercial airline pilot I met on a plane to Hawaii from Vancouver. When he left the airline, he retired in Nakusp. Being an energetic fellow, he got involved with the hot springs and had his sights on skiing. His idea was to build a motel in Nakusp. People who came to the area for helicopter skiing would stay at the motel. He also wanted to find a hot spring enterprise.

I was asked to look over the hot spring proposals. The first one was what they called St. Leon Hot Springs, and the project was very big. There was a natural spring on the hillside, off the highway. It was kind of a clamshell natural setting. At the time, the bank was hollowed out and people soaked in there. The former pilot thought something bigger could be made. He aimed to pipe the water and store it in the basement of a lodge.

The warm water would be used to heat the lodge. But we analyzed the amount of water needed and determined that there was not enough water to even think about using it that way. And there also was not enough to make a hot spring setup where the water would be circulating. The little clam was only three or four times the size of a bathtub, not big enough to do something commercial. So anyway, we looked at that one and then another site. The second one almost cost me my life.

The developers focused on another area called Halfway Creek. The fellows said they wanted to have it looked at for water volume. They hired a helicopter, and I was encouraged to go along with them to check out the volume of water. I'll never forget flying up with a helicopter and landing on a hillside with both skids sitting on a log that leveled off the chopper.

68

But the chopper blade was swinging and cutting bushes at the top end. If the bush were any bigger, the helicopter would have crashed. We hurriedly analyzed the flow of water. Then a blast came over the radio. The helicopter pilot was told that a storm was coming in, and we had to fly out of there right after landing in that ridiculous and hazardous situation.

We had to fly out into the fog bank that was coming in. We flew out with hardly any visibility. I thought, “Son of a gun. I personally volunteered my time there. It was not even a paying thing.

Was I going to die doing something so unnecessary?” It was one of the things that I did as a surveyor, trying to keep things going when I was interested in seeing things develop.

69

Apex Ski Trails One of my most interesting projects involved the Boy Scouts. I got hired to do a simple survey to split a property that was part of a field at Apex, which is south of Nelson. This plot is thousands of feet high and is in a snowbelt—a valuable skiing spot. I did the survey of the property, and the Nordic ski club started using it.

I had family living adjacent to this property, so I was quite familiar with it. The 1989 BC Winter Games, a province-wide amateur competition, came along a couple of years after that survey.

Being a skier, I knew that the cross-country skiers needed a more extensive trail area than the property they were using.

I was president of a separate society set up to manage a property for the Boy Scouts. I thought it would be prudent to see if we could expand their holdings. I suggested that the skiers be allowed a roadway that was more of a trail than a road. They could use the trail through the Boys Scout camp and convert it into a very good cross-country ski racecourse for the BC Winter Games. I arranged for my son-in-law to groom the course. I had the use of my own snowmobile. The BC Snowmobile Federation (I was the president) later donated a larger and heavy-duty machine.

We groomed the trail and the result proved to be very successful. The cross-country skiers then were allowed to use that same area every winter. It has become an exceptionally good crosscountry ski area. The club now has eight hundred to a thousand members and expensive grooming machines to look after the trail and the roads.

I am proud that I started the trails. But I am not proud that there is some conflict between Boy Scouts using the property in the wintertime and the skiers. We have had difficulty making sure that the skiers do not feel that they own the property and control the use. There have been efforts

70

to stop the Scouts from using the same trails, which the skiers worried would wreck the exceptionally well-groomed trails. To me, the ski trail network is like a superhighway compared to an ordinary highway. These are super trails, well looked after and very popular.

71

Projects in the Nakusp Area I did a subdivision for an astute person in Denver, a federal Member of Parliament, called Mr. Bert Herridge (CCF, Kootenay West). He was an MP for many years running, and he was a socialistic chap. He had a problem property up north near Nakusp, a very nice place where he lived.

Mr. Herridge was getting quite elderly, and he knew that he would have to leave the property in a few years. He felt that it was too big for anyone to buy, so he wanted it subdivided into several parcels, and he was really easy to deal with. I gave him good advice and created a subdivision, which immediately sold as parcels. Then this ski development came to the area, and its developer bought one or two of the lots right away, later buying the rest of his property, which they tried to subdivide further.

Another project I worked on was creating a landfill site for the Regional District of Central Kootenay and Nakusp. It was a devil of a thing to get access to, and it was challenging to create a suitable parcel of land. With lots of juggling, we finally managed to get approval of the site, and it was developed as a dumpsite. I think it's still a dumpsite today, so we must have got it right.

One Nakusp party was buying out a campground facility, which included mobile home parking spots and trailer sites, camper units, and parking. The mortgage plot plan was done by a surveyor from the Okanagan. Even though he hadn’t seen the land, the lawyer wanted a superficial plan because it was a five-acre block. But it still had to go through the formality of a plot plan. Well, when people bought the land, they realized that there was a problem.

The boundary lines were not well defined. On one side, people were parking their motorhomes on land owned by their neighbours. They were portable so could be moved. But on the other

72

side, the parking spaces and campsites—with a fire pit and sewer, sewage connection, water connection to everything—were actually ten feet on the neighbour’s property. So, the fellow that wanted to build the facilities did not know where the boundary lines were.

This situation was serious. The company sued for compensation and sued the surveyor who had made the errors. I got involved with it. The court eventually ruled that the surveyor was not at fault. Rather, the instructions from the lawyer were the problem.

In my opinion, the surveyor got off the hook for having done an inadequate job. But, as I said in court, he only did what he was told to do, and the company was not suing the lawyer. But in the end, I know that the Law Society compensated the person for his losses.

73

Sinclair Creek Just above Radium Hot Springs is a large canyon called Sinclair Canyon, the site of one of my most fascinating challenges. The creek there comes down and drops into the Columbia Valley.

Sinclair Creek was in a depression, close to one hundred and fifty feet deep. The Highways Department decided to fill in about five hundred feet of the depression to get to the level of land on the other side of the valley. But there was a problem with the original subdivision survey.

The familiar part of this story is that there was no surveyor in the area, although I was coming into the area from time to time. The local surveyors were mostly retired, although one older man still had his license. The Highways Department surveyors would do the surveying, and the local surveyor would draw up the map.

The local surveyor designed a substantial subdivision along the highway going up to Radium Hot Springs. At that time, the highway was surveyed to be only sixty feet wide. But in this case, the government was smart enough to say that road needed to be wider—a hundred feet wide. The surveyor simply adjusted the map.

At this man’s age, it was quite amazing that he was able to draw the map. But he was not able to get outside to survey it. He changed the measurements of the road, and the crews widened it out.

But they never actually got around to moving the survey posts, which remained set at sixty-six feet.

When the Highways Department started fixing up the road, they were tremendously confused as to what was going on. I was hired to try and straighten out the problems. I worked diligently to come up with a solution that the department could live with. The final plan varied from sixty feet up to a hundred feet and everything in between, depending on where the units were located. It

74

was not legalized or properly documented. If the plan said a hundred feet, but there was a building in the way, the Highways Department would not encroach on the land occupied by the building. The department did not want to own part of somebody's building, so they backed off.

That was the policy. The department would only take as much for a roadway as they could get without making an encroachment. I did that survey and got registered and everything. They lived with that plan until recently.

75

Creston I had some interesting projects around Creston. I was hired by the Ministry of Transportation to survey a five-mile piece of road that bypasses Creston. It goes around the orchard area and the built-up area on the mountainside. I bid on the job, coming in barely lower than the local resident surveyor.

Then a funny thing happened. There was one chap in Nelson who was politically powerful. He owned property along the old highway, going through the middle of town, which was very congested even thirty years ago. (It is even more congested today, even though there is another alternate bypass.) Anyway, this fellow stopped the bypass from being built after it had been engineered and legally surveyed. The government had acquired all the property to build the road, but it was never built. I do not know if it ever will be built. This was a political decision made to favour one, albeit powerful, party.

76

Riondel I got a commission to work on a little community on the east shore of Kootenay Lake called Riondel. I was hired to do a survey of an area where a whole barge had sunk off a little dock.

This chap wanted to reclaim the barge. He had to figure out how to siphon up the fine powder around the “treasure.” He tried inventing many different methods. The same fellow decided to buy a big property that had been a smelter. It had a brick chimney, but there was a lot of property there with lake frontage. In the end, we made probably thirty or more desirable lots.

But we had to start from scratch. The road into the property was not maintained by the government. People would drive into it and camp in the area. This fellow bought the whole property, but some of the other people in the area reacted badly to the idea of subdividing the property. I had a real run in with one chap who even put a gate up on one of the roads and said people could not go in there.

He had no business doing this. He was just acting on behalf of the other people, some of whom did not want any development in the area. But I went in one day with a chain cutter, a big thing like scissors, and I cut the lock. In my opinion, this was a public road.

The owner had already gone to Victoria and found out that if any public money is spent on a road built by the government, and if the owner consents, the road automatically becomes a public road.

Others disagreed. The fellow who had put the gate up even came to the ferry landing where we were waiting to be picked up on the lake. He chewed me out in the presence of my wife and four children, saying that the road was not proper. But I was working for a client and doing what was

77

right. In my opinion, it was a public road, and it was known as such. I had the job of subdividing that land. I laid out some very nice properties in the area.

There are more than thirty or so homesites there. Some of them are just summer homes owned by wealthy people from Alberta. But then the health officer from Creston came by to make sure that there was an adequate place for the sewage system, which was his biggest concern. Since every one of these lots got their water from the lake, powerlines had to be put in, so they could have electric pumps. I happened to be there the day the health officer was up. He was much stricter about the sites than the chaps in the Nelson area. But he was very constructive and nice. We reviewed each and every one of the lots.

The health officer had to arrange a test on another property in the area. There was a small excavator back home in Nelson. We got a hold of the owner of this machine. The health officer had to go and catch the guy and talk him into bringing the excavator over. We did a test on the property, made a minor adjustment on the lot, and then the health officer okayed it.

I still remember the health officer saying that if there was a good place for a septic field on the property, it did not always have to be below the house site. On a couple of the properties, they had to pump waste out of the septic tank back up under the upper part of the property. Not down.

Usually, the septic fields would be in the front of the property or below the house so that you had just gravity. But it started to become well known that when electricity was available, you could have a larger than normal tank and store the sewage for a couple of days without the pouring of sewage water, and then the power would be reenergized within a couple of days.

Then you could pump the sewer out and pump the sewage to the upper reaches of the property. I thought that was pretty nice of the fellow to provide this prudent and correct advice. In some

78

other places, if they could not put the sewage field where an inspector thought it should be, the lot would not be approved.

On one property, the sewage was actually pumped onto a neighbour's property. At the time, the chap owned both properties. On the homesite, which was too close to the lakeshore, there was no place for a sewage tank, so he had discharged an easement up to the other property. Eventually, he sold that other property. So, the purchaser had his neighbour’s sewage system on his property.

But although the arrangement was legal, it was not really the right thing to do, I guess. But as long as there is more than enough room for two different sewage systems on the same property, these arrangements are acceptable.

79

Easements and Profit à Prendre There was an interesting situation with a father and son who had bought two properties side by side in the Boswell area on the east shore of the lake. When they started building on their land, they did not respect the boundary between the two lots. The father had his garage on the son's property, and the son had something on his father's property. The father was getting old and decided to sell his property. They wanted to change the boundary line and re-subdivide it to reflect the actual occupation.

The government found it advantageous to take a road allowance on the front part of their lawn to widen the highway. Both parties were severely irritated. They said, “No, darn way.” They came to me about it and said, “What can we do?” I dreamed up something that had never been done here in BC. I thought we could fix the situation with an easement—the right for one party to travel across another party's property, not to occupy it. The easements are there for water lines or roadways or driveways on the neighbour's place. Easements give one the right to “trespass,” not the right to occupy.

So, I decided that I would solve the problem with easements. I happened to discuss the situation with the Registrar of Titles in Nelson, who had come from England. I described to him the situation, and I still joyously remember him saying, “Oh, they are doing that type of thing in England all the time.” He said they called it profit à prendre— the right to take something from land belonging to another.

80

I competed a survey that created the two “trespasses.” Each property owner had the right to literally live on the neighbour's property. I've created this type of survey several times to avoid the costs and delays involved with subdivision.

I faced a comparable challenge in Nelson. There were five-acre lots along the upper reaches of Nelson in the southwest area. The owners of the golf course wanted to expand. To do this, they wanted to buy half of these five-acre lots, four or five of them in a row. The medical health officer would not allow the sale because he wanted those lots to connect the area into the city’s sewer system. Even though they were in a wet area, properties from the old days had septic fields before the area became part of Nelson. The golf course needed the land, so I created a profit à prendre.

One of the owners of the lots consulted a lawyer from Trail, who said the profit à prendre could not be done. Another party had a son involved with the oil patch business in Alberta. He noted that they used profit à prendre in Alberta, but it had to be for profit. Well, the golf course was being done for profit, so the lot owner was out to lunch on that. I said to go ahead and do it, and it worked. I had to laugh at the lawyer from Trail who actually wrote a letter saying it could not be done.

An agreement was signed between the owners of the lots and the golf course. The agreement stated that if the owners of the lots sold, ownership of the properties would be transferred to profit à prendre, providing the golf course with the right to use the back two and a half acres of their property. The golf course actually got title to the property.

To this day, I say that was the right thing to do. You need to have a little extra special initiative, almost arrogance, to do some things contrary to what other official people think should be done.

81

Paradise Basin A surveyor’s work is mostly technical and professional. But a lot of it is driven or shaped by people and human relationships. On many occasions, work and life intersected in ways that made for creative and exciting opportunities. The next thing I knew, I was working with three unique and different people. One was president at the Invermere Ski Club, the second owned a D8 bulldozer, and the third rented it. Someone I knew from Golden owned part of a muskeg machine that was also kind of a snowcat but wasn't really very good for that. This fellow also had a ski tow in the Edmonton area. We formed a partnership to develop a ski hill at Paradise Basin.

I was quite an avid skier. Being the surveyor and engineer on the team, I got the job of looking after the development of Paradise Basin, which is on the opposite mountain to where the big Panorama Mountain Resort in Invermere is located today. I did quite a bit of survey work on it, and we determined that there was a need for a ski hill in the area.

Another chap decided to develop the Panorama project, and I convinced my partners that the area would never support two ski hills. Furthermore, our access road had an avalanche problem that would take a lot to address. Our hill was in a very beautiful area, but it did not have the drop that you normally would have in a ski area.

We backed out of developing our ski area. I took ownership then of the snowcat and the ski tow.

I donated the snowcat to the village of Salmo Ski Hill. The ski tow was offered to two different groups in the Nelson area. I don't know if they are still using the tow, but the ski area is popular, highly developed, and close to Nelson. Even in commercial failure, opportunities arose.

82

83

Beachfront Development The Kootenays are known for recreation and their thousands of waterfront properties. Before the 1960s, there were not many of them. I was asked to work on a parcel of land that had a very nice beach and to help the owners figure out what to do with the property.

A helicopter pilot had come down from the North with a little money. He bought the property and then figured that he did not really want to subdivide it, which would have required the construction of a public road through the middle of this very nice property. If you are subdividing a lake or river frontage, there must be a public roadway.

The owner just did not want a road, so I came up with a funny idea. I drew a map of small parcels for RVs, providing space for thirty or so of them. We drew up a policy document based on the plan that I prepared, but it was not registered.

The development had nothing to do with land titles, but RV parcels were created with a central bathhouse area, washroom, and other facilities. RV owners would pay quite a large annual fee, equivalent to the annual tax on the property. The idea proved quite popular. The owner went into partnership with another person. They bought an adjacent parcel and did the same thing on it, virtually doubling the size of the original RV park. At the front of the property, they built a small restaurant and a store.

The arrangement was not without problems. The RVs generated sewage, which could have been a health hazard. In other areas, developers had created subdivisions without proper sewage disposal, much to the medical health officer’s annoyance. But this one worked out fortunately, and I am pretty happy with what I created.

84

This project worked very well as a community. They've got a very nice wharf system there that has docking for all the boats. The project grew to around forty RV sites, with most of the people coming from Alberta because the Kootenay locals typically have their own properties.

Then an interesting thing happened. One fellow complained bitterly about the annual fee for the RV site, which was more than a thousand dollars whether he occupied the site fulltime, parked his trailer on it, or let the site sit empty. This guy only used his site for a short period once a year.

He really made a fuss about it and tried to have the policy changed, but it stood the test of time.

To this day, the policy works well.

When acting as a consultant and advising and creating things, you do not want to create something with problems, especially if it makes people fight with their neighbour. If you do a subdivision and with a poor layout, it can create animosity among neighbours. I would feel responsible for having created a poor layout, agreement, or policy; but in this instance, the policy was fair.

85

The Sutherland Property In the 1970s, I was surveying for a chap named Sutherland who owned a water system just off the lakeshore hillside, opposite Nelson on the north shore. The Health Department condemned the facility system, saying it had to be renewed. This was primarily an engineering job. I had my son, Ken, who's a civil engineer and planner, design a new intake system. We had to put in an ultraviolet treatment facility, which was a new technology at the time.

My son said that the engineering was not the complicated part of this project. It was convincing the people that they had to pay for both the maintenance and renovation of the system. They started off paying dues for the privilege of getting well water and for maintaining the well. Some of the outspoken people decided that the money that they were paying monthly for well maintenance was going into a fund for renewing the system. But that was not the case.

Under the Public Utilities Act, owners of water systems are only allowed to collect dues that are used to maintain the system, not to renew the system. When it came time to redo the system, the estimate for doing it was sixty thousand dollars.

I spoke at committee meetings, arguing that users of the system would have to pay for the renewal. One of my friends was adamantly against the idea. He was convinced that the users had already paid for the well. To him, the owner of the system was obliged to rebuild the system with money he had collected over the previous years. But in the end, we won. The users reluctantly paid for the renewal.

Sutherland was agitated and irritated with his neighbours. About sixty people were being served by his water system, including a couple of big motels, an A&W, and a marina. He called for proposals, but he did not want to pay any more than necessary. One proposal called for first-class

86

materials, including pipes, and another for second-class pipes that were not as good. I told him you could not get a first-class job for a second-class price, but he picked the proposal for the second-class pipes. Some broke after the warranty period was up. Sutherland chose the inferior pipes and saved money, but it cost him in the end, and he had to fix the problem himself.

87

Accretion on Kootenay Lake I started the process of accretion on Kootenay Lake. Accretion is a legal term meaning that when land increases by natural means (such as soil accumulation), the property owner is entitled to the new land. In the case of land bounded by water, land may emerge over time, through flooding, water-level changes, the abandonment of a channel, or other means. The level of Kootenay Lake fell after two dams were built. The typical high-water mark dropped by six feet.

I had to make a couple of very serious decisions that the water level would no longer come up as high as it used to. I was looking after building the airport runway in Nelson, quite a substantial little runway, three thousand feet long. The federal government chipped in toward building the airport.

But their engineers said that the runway and airport buildings had to be built to a certain elevation that would not flood in the future. They wanted to use the elevation established by historic flood levels. I had laid out the big mall in Nelson at six feet lower. I would have been sued if that darn thing ever flooded.

I had no qualms about saying that the lake level was not going to rise. I had a letter that the Ministry of Environment in Victoria had written to the City of Nelson, showing all the previous elevations of Kootenay Lake. The flood levels had been monitored over many years, especially after the Libby Dam was built on the Kootenay River in the United States and the Duncan Dam on the Duncan River on the north end of Kootenay Lake. This letter said that the dams had caused the lake’s level to drop by six feet.

I used that letter to advise the city on what to do with the runway. We could not afford to build a runway 120 feet wide and 3000 feet long at an elevation of five feet, as the engineers wanted. By

88

God, it would have cost a couple million dollars to truck in the gravel to make the runway five feet higher.

I got the engineers to back down. I like to tell people about how we built the runway with garbage, gravel, sawdust, and everything else we had at hand. It is still a pretty good runway.

Initially we built it with just loose gravel and some oil, so it wasn't dusty. Now the runway has a nice blacktop. It is as smooth as a baby's bottom and dead flat. There are three helicopter stations and room for a dozen airplanes. The runway works well, and its construction was one of my prouder moments.

The accretion issue matters. Thirty years ago, people could own the beach. Their property lines were then changed so that they started back from the beach. way back in the bush. Now, a person could own to the edge of vegetation. But even this change caused difficulties. We were kind of following vegetation in some places. But people would rake the beach. There would not be even a hint of any vegetation growing. Other people would not touch the vegetation, and there would be bushes and even trees growing out further because the lake level had retreated. Some of the properties would be easy to document, and they were inspected.

The government was quite cautious about changes due to accretion. The local surveyor's opinion was not always good enough; the government would send the land inspector over from Cranbrook, and he would inspect the land as well. This fellow was a little bit stingy. He felt that accretion should not be allowed. The regional district made a motion to recommend to the government that the accretions be disallowed. I still remember two senior representatives of the Government Surveys Branch—the surveyor general and a former surveyor general—came and

89

talked to the directors in the West Kootenays. These surveyors pointed out that we had to abide by the Land Act. I did something that the Land Branch did not like. I started thinking like the engineering branch.

I thought that it was silly that we had to rely on the growth of weeds and brush and then not treat fairly the people that looked after their beach and raked it. The people who looked after their beach did not qualify for accretion because there was no vegetation. So, I adopted an elevation for the whole lake. I dealt with West Kootenay Power, which had all the recorded elevations of the lake over the years. This information showed where the appropriate boundary for the properties should be, and I registered that new property line. The Land Registry Office was reluctant to file something like that.

I had a similar problem with the Fairmont cemetery. I also had to press the Land Registry Office to get them to record the land allocation. I worked on three other cemeteries for which there were no drawings remaining. I had to figure out where the graves were and try to make a drawing of the cemetery. Years ago, the plans were ripped up by the guys digging graves and managing the cemeteries. But fifty years later the people managing the cemetery needed to figure out where they were going to put a body. These plans must be recorded at the time they are made.

But, as a surveyor, I had significant challenges getting the officials to accept our plans. The fellows that were processing them at that time, twenty years ago maybe, had trouble accepting them, and they did not care to argue with me about them. They just said that the plans looked to be almost acceptable. But they did not like me using engineering technology to document the natural boundary, which is what is written in the Land Act. And one official disputed the

90

boundary quite vehemently. This person insisted on having an engineer look at it to make sure that the shoreline was appropriate.

I was not impressed. I thought engineers did not know anything about boundaries. In my covering letter, I added that I was a licensed civil engineer and said that in my opinion the plan was adequate. That shut down the push-back. I have to say not everybody was as knowledgeable about some of those things as I was.

Over the years, I did dozens of these accretions or additions to properties. One involved a lakeshore property, more than half of which was solid rock, a couple of thousand feet in total.

The rocks were almost cliffs, and it was extremely difficult to get decent measurements. They had just come out with a fancy digital camera that we were able to use. It essentially produced a moving or linear picture of the entire coastline and allowed me to make creative use of a new technology to solve an otherwise intractable problem. I did not request permission to use the equipment. I just did it. From my perspective, I had no choice, unless I wanted to bring in a mountain climber.

Today we have an instrument that you point at a specific spot to get a measurement. At the time I used the new camera, the standard technology was to use a steel tape. This would have been totally impractical. So, we improvised and it worked.

91

Lakefront and the Blaylock Property Around the same time, a group of people bought a very nice lakeshore property. I almost bought the same property because it was a nice piece of land, and it contained a house built by a surveyor engineer from the turn of the century. His was the biggest survey firm in all BC, located in Nelson at the time—the AAH Green Company. The man’s brother was the Surveyor General of BC, who oversaw all the government survey work.

The new owners of the property decided to turn it into a mobile home park. It was one of the first mobile home parks in the area, and it turned out well. It is on the beach, and the mobile homes are substantial. I worked on the project and am quite pleased with how it turned out.

I also worked on a project for Mrs. Selwyn Blaylock. Her husband Selwyn Blaylock had created the Cominco Smelter System in Trail and was behind the development of that city. Trail was considered to be a poor place to live because of the impact of the smelter on the environment. In the 1930s, Mr. Blaylock had built a magnificent house in Nelson on the lakeshore on an eightyacre piece of property. To this day, it is probably about the most impressive building in the region. The grounds included tennis courts and a marina.

After Mr. Blaylock died, Mrs. Blaylock decided to sell the property. She sold it to a speculator from California who was not very community oriented and was planning to subdivide the property. We did the first title development on the place. The project was complicated. The water system was adequate for the Blaylock estate, but not for the new housing that was planned.

The government officer allowed the first phase to go through, but the developer was told he would have to rebuild the water system for the second phase. There was also confusion about the ownership of the property. I concluded that the developer was not going to rebuild the water

92

system for the second phase. I also felt I could no longer work for him. This was one of the only places where I have ever actually quit working for people because they would not do what I figured was right—in this case, rebuild the water system. But I did not get dragged into any lawsuit. I do not think the developer ever rebuilt the water system. The residents took it upon themselves through their strata council to rebuild the water system for the new houses.

Lakefront property was sought after, even in those days. People from Nelson would camp on the lakeshore or build cabins there. On weekends, they would drive to the lake or come across by boat. A fellow in the region had some lakefront property that was in high demand. It was not, however, usable. He had about twelve or more lots but had not sold any of them, likely because they were in the middle of a road. I talked to the approving officer from Highways and indicated that we would have to shift the road up the hill. For the owner of this property, to sell these building sites for the profit he wanted, he would have to trade positions with the owners of the road.

It was not profit à prendre, but it was another provision in the law that worked. You were permitted to trade land if the government allowed it, especially in a municipality. In this case, we moved the road by about 150 feet, 200 feet further up the mountainside. To this day, it is a public road, but it is not maintained by the Highways Department, which doesn’t think it is quite up to their standards. But the people that bought the properties said that the road was acceptable. There are about eight houses there now, all worth well over a million dollars. Although they know the road to their properties is legally a public road, they’ve erected a sign that reads “private driveway.” I am proud of the way that we cooked up solutions to what seemed to be an intractable problem. It took some wheeling and dealing to pull it off.

93

I faced another challenge in the Six Mile area. The government and the regional district took the position that once you were beyond a property owner's boundary, you were on Crown land.

Anybody can occupy Crown land. I had to back up a fellow and go to court when he was fighting with his neighbour about ownership and the use of the land.

This man owned a property on Six Mile, where the regional district placed concrete picnic tables and benches. The whole neighbourhood of some hundred people used the picnic area. The man came to me because the people were bothering him. They were sitting on his lawn. Sometimes there were as many as a hundred people down there.

They were supposed to be staying on a sixty-six-foot-wide piece of land, but naturally they spread out on the properties on both sides. One side was vacant, and the interlopers got away with it. But the other side belonged to this chap who did not like the fact that youngsters would come from Calgary and other cities. They would camp out on his beach and then use the upland part of his property for an outhouse. Over the weekends, they would have a bonfire on his beach and leave a mess there. He came to me one day and asked what he could do about it.

The first thing we had to do is determine where the edge of his property was. To that point, he had not had the accretion done. I surveyed the accretion and discovered that the regional district had placed its picnic tables on the man’s land. They had to remove their picnic tables and kick the people off his beach area. They had to stay out beyond his property—what I had determined he owned.

The regional district tried to get the accretion stopped. They issued a memorandum to control the process, and they passed it on to the Organization of BC Municipalities, which pursued it further with provincial government. The best way to solve property disputes is for property owners to

94

pay a surveyor so people can see where the boundary line is, instead of governments arguing with the landowners. The people should own the land without having to fight for it. That is why you need good marker posts. If you do not have survey markers, you do not have a leg to stand on.

95

Village of Kaslo I was responsible for laying out the airport for the village of Kaslo. Either the people in Kaslo or somebody with an airplane decided that Kaslo should have a little airstrip. There was a terrace on a beach just west of Kaslo. I did the survey for the airport. It turned out to be quite a good little airport, especially for emergencies. The approach coming off the lake was good. But at the other end, you had to land and take off from one direction. The wind did not always make this easy!

I enjoyed helping create the place on government or Crown land. I put concrete controlled survey monuments on the airport land, too. After a few years when they expanded the airport, they knocked out one of my monuments. I have gone back several times to check. This is actually very important. Airports are supposed to use proper and permanent positioning, allowing pilots and others to use a GPS system and punch in the coordinates. The Kaslo airport needed these systems because it is tucked into the mountainside along Creek Valley.

I did other projects in Kaslo. The hospital board had me survey a new hospital site there. I helped define the potentially floodable land up the lakeshore. I created a parcel of land and donated the tow plug for it, so they could make a roller park for the kids. I also worked for the arena in Kaslo. I did the survey and donated the work to them. They had a plaque on the wall identifying the people that donated to the arena. My name was not on the wall—so I raised a little ruckus. I thought, “Son of a gun, you donate some work, and some people do not know what you have done.” But donating your services is part of being a good citizen, even if it is not in your home city.

The Village of Kaslo is built on land shaped like a fan that extends into the lake. The original subdivision that was planned had to be cancelled because it reached into areas that would flood.

96

After the level of the lake dropped, this became useful land. I had a chance to work on the resubdivision of the area.

There were some interesting challenges. On the opposite side of Kaslo Creek, there was uneven terrain— a nice beach but poorly laid out properties. It was laid out using an old system and did not follow the contours of the land very well. I did what was called a replot, which is quite an extensive exercise. When one owner owns all the property, it is no problem. I did one in Nelson that was really a problem because a single owner did not want to participate; we had to use the law to force them into it. But in Kaslo, we did not have any problem changing the shape of all the properties. We used one of the parcels as the site for the ice arena. The finished subdivision had a dozen nice houses overlooking the depression from the creek.

I also got involved with the water system as an engineer. Some of the old waterworks needed to be rebuilt. I concluded that the water main from the intake down to the village had to be run along the actual public road. You can do that in the municipalities, but the Highways Department said we had to go through the bush on the hillside, a much more expensive route.

To push my proposal forward, I had to argue with the senior engineer for the department, someone I knew quite well. I knew that the roadway was on the original railway route. That opened the door to me to say that the government had usurped the right to put its road on another strip of land. Actually, I did not know whether the government had done anything illegal or if it had bought out the right of way from the old railway system. Boy, I had some strong arguments.

We got permission to proceed. An iron waterline was put down the ditch line of the highway, much to the department’s concern. They would have to watch the pipeline in case it broke or got banged for some reason, or one of their men happened to dig out the ditch into the waterline and

97

break it, causing it to wash out the highway. To this day, the waterline is working. I am happy with the decision that I made to put it there. It saved the Village of Kaslo a million dollars or more. A similar thing happened more recently in Nelson. They put the waterline along an abandoned railway; they otherwise would have struggled to afford the pipeline. The railway had been abandoned, and that was an easy place to put the pipeline.

On a different occasion, I was asked to survey out where two property owners were arguing over a property line in Johnson's Landing, which is on the east shore of Kootenay Lake. You've got to go to the end of the lake and then come down the east shore to get to Johnson's Landing. One fellow argued that the other fellow's smaller house was on his property. He built a fence that came up against the house and then skipped over it and continued on the other side.

The homeowner cut down the other fellow's fence. They were close to a fist fight. One of them took a power saw and cut down all the fence posts and threw them away. I had to go in there and survey it. I found out that the fellow who had built the fence was quite right.

The other fellow should have paid me for the work. But because he lost, he never paid me, despite owing me, in today's dollars, at least two or three thousand to identify his property line. I should have had them pay up in advance. Back in those days, you could typically trust people to pay when you did work for them. I kept trying to get my money. The chap who was in the wrong eventually moved close to Nelson. I told one of my chaps that if he could get that fellow to pay his bills, he could have half of it. And I still remember my assistant thinking he could do it. He went to get paid, but he never did. He was quite disappointed because he could have used the money.

98

I did a subdivision for a chap in Kaslo who was working on rocky ground that was difficult to work with. This developer said he liked working with rock. That subdivision turned out to be quite successful, and we built a really good, stable road.

Another lot came up for sale down at Mirror Lake. They used to mine and saw out ice on a small lake and put it on the sternwheeler and have it trucked or barged to Nelson, where it would be put in what they called an icehouse. The ice would then be put on trains for air conditioning.

But anyway, there was a vacant and large piece of land. But because it was almost solid rock, nobody had developed it in the past. The fellow who had done the subdivision in Kaslo decided that he could handle that rock, too. I looked at it and backed down and told him not to do it. He was adamant that he could handle it. He hired another surveyor-engineer to do the subdivision.

The Health Department approved it on the basis that water could be pumped from the lake into the water system.

The project was approved without too much attention paid to sewage disposal. Fewer than half of the lots that were created were acceptable for sewage disposal. There may have been a difference of opinion among the health inspectors. I looked at some of the lots afterwards, just out of curiosity, and saw that my original assessment was correct. The lots could not be laid out uniformly; you had to really be careful and pick a site for each property. You had to look at sewage disposal as well.

A few years later the rules changed. You had to have not only a suitable area for sewage but also one for a backup or secondary system in case the area was flooded with debris and sewage.

Clearly, sewage management had become a central feature of rural and rural land development. I convinced my son, Ken, to go back and get a master's degree in civil engineering and sewage

99

disposal—what they now call environmental engineering. He went back to school for another two years. I sponsored him and, when he set up his business, paid for building little sewage disposal compartments. He probably had six or eight tanks—four feet deep, four feet wide, eight feet long—where he could test different soil conditions to prove how much soil was required for proper sewage disposal.

When the rules around sewage tightened, surveyors and developers had big arguments with the new breed of health inspectors who had to approve a subdivision or a creation of a lot. They would make you do what was called a percolation task. You would dig a hole or two about two feet deep in the area where you were going to put a sewage field, and you would saturate that hole with six or eight inches of water and measure the rate that water was absorbed into the ground within ten or so minutes.

I made special sticks with nails precisely one inch apart. You would put the stick in the hole with a nail on it, and you would get the water level to the uppermost nail. Then you would time how long it took for the water to recede down to the other nail. If it did not recede at a pretty good rate, that ground was unacceptable.

With the Mirror Lake subdivision, I was right to presume sewage was going to be a problem with the subdivision. We had a lot of properties with nice views. You could put a waterline anywhere because you could pump water, but you did not pump sewage. Along the West Arm of Kootenay Lake, the people started putting in sewage pumping systems. They would install a septic tank, even below the house. Then they would install a pump to pump their effluent back up the hillside and dispose of it that way.

100

We had reliable electric power that worked well when it was first put in. It works even better today because our power system is much more reliable. Previously, you had to make your tank quite large so that if the power was not available for a couple of days, you did not have to discharge too much effluent. And when the power came back on, you could pump the sewage back into the septic field.

101

Boundary Problems Boundary problems caused many challenges. On one occasion, we could not come up with a definitive position of the boundary line. Using my smart-alecky ways, I would get both owners to sign an affidavit on the plan that they accepted. At least they did not fight with each other because they had both agreed on the boundary.

Subsequent owners had to abide by the boundary decision. I did a survey in Lardeau country on that basis and have done quite a few others since. Having both parties sign an affidavit was a Ray Johnson innovation. I was talking to one of my articling pupils, who is now a professional surveyor. He told me that affidavits are now signed regularly. I was the first one to do it, but other people have done it, too.

I had an interesting project that involved working for the people who ran the Second Century Fund, a BC trust fund set up in the early 1970s to preserve nature. People would establish ownership of land and hold it in trust for the maintenance of natural habitat. Some people paid top dollar for a very large piece of land. They did not check the boundary lines as it was just a mountainside, with a total of several thousand acres. After the fact, they decided that they should know the boundary line.

The previous owner was one of these chaps who logged properties for profit. It turns out that he had logged a couple of hundred feet over onto Crown land. The new owners did not know that there was a penalty for having done that. I spent several days doing a large survey to establish the boundary line. It was all for nothing in the end.

102

Trout Lake I was hired to do a subdivision at Trout Lake, north of Kootenay Lake. The land had been set aside for a mine, but no major mine emerged, and the land had not been subdivided. But there was a small townsite called Trout Lake City. It certainly was no city. There were probably half a dozen buildings in the area. I remember we stayed in an old hotel that I worried would burn down. We did surveys and recreated a plan for the townsite that allowed people to buy lots.

I was hired to locate and review the existing plan and bring it up to date. Finding out where this old townsite was located was a real chore. We never did find any real survey posts. I had to juggle things around based on sites of occupation. We finally came up with the best solution. We set the boundary lines and showed they did not conflict with anything that was established. To this day, I have never heard anybody disagree with what I did. But we had flown by the seat of our pants to come up with a workable solution.

I came across another similar situation in Kaslo. People needed a place to build houses. They wanted to go build on the shore close to the Kaslo River. The hillside had broken loose, and this low-lying land had flooded. The subdivision was cancelled, but then it was decided to develop a rip rap pile from big rocks along the edge of Kaslo river to stop the river from breaking through and flooding the area again. I was hired to do a survey and to identify an appropriate strip of land for the rip rap to go.

103

Kokanee Springs Then came the beginning of what is called the Kokanee Springs development, another version of the Fairmont Hot Springs. The developers had millions of dollars in financing by a big oil company in Ardmore, Oklahoma.

The whole process started when one of the company’s drillers visited the area. He bought a summer home and decided that the area was so nice that a big resort should be built. He talked the local property owners into optioning up about thirty small farm holdings, letting them believe he wanted them for his logging business. In reality, he was fronting for this oil company. He talked these local property owners into financing a lot of property. The land was all optioned before anybody got wind of what was really happening. I guess the landowners were happy to sell their property. I never did hear of anybody who really complained about what was happening.

Kokanee Springs ended up with over seventy thousand acres: nice property that had been developed by small land holders, orchards, hobby farms, and ordinary residences in the Crawford Bay area. Once the developers bought the land, they started thinking about what they were going to do with it. They decided to build a golf course. I was hired to survey the golf course and put in the irrigation and other services. They had also hired a professional, semi-retired, older gentlemen who did not like to get out and trek through the bush to figure out where all the fairways would go. One of my men started doing it and just casually checking in with him.

I had to reprimand my assistant since he did not really know much about golfing. I criticized him for taking on the other fellow’s job. My employee's job was to drag this professional golf course architect out there and make sure that he decided where things were going. There is an expert out

104

there on almost everything. You've got to find this person and make sure they do their job. This chap was not doing his job. Nothing went wrong on the thing, but it was quite a chore for me. I was concerned about the quality of the golf course. It was going to be rated as a professional golf course—much higher than the amateur-designed one at Fairmont Hot Springs.

Not all the people working on this golf course were slackers. The designer was a professional.

He wanted to make sure that everything was done to his design. I remember that they were going to have the clubhouse on a little hill within the golf course. There was supposed to be an escalator, but it never got built. The estimate for building a golf course back in that time in the early 1970s was something like $360,000. The Kokanee Springs course cost over $800,000, but the oil company did not fuss about that. The work was well done and well paid for.

Still, it was not easy. We had great difficulty irrigating some of the swampy ground. I had to come up with an elaborate drainage system to get the water out of the boggy area. Most of the rest of the land just required irrigation, but that part was sub-irrigated and wet.

In the end, Kokanee Springs was a nice, large resort—and quite expensive. But more was needed to make the resort successful. The areas clearly needed a proper, more adequate highway system.

The only highway at the time came up from Creston—a twisted, paved road that was not in very good shape. At that point, there was no international airport in the area, but one has since been built in Cranbrook.

There was, though, a small airfield near the resort. So, a decision was made to build it into a little airstrip, which was used by a few daredevil small airplane pilots. It remained in operation until one of them missed his landing, went right across the highway, and hit a powerline.

105

The fellow was not killed. But the town decided not to promote the airstrip after that. There were a couple of local people who had small airplanes on it, but it just was not adequate for visitors.

The next project in Crawford Bay area was a ski hill. I advocated for the hiring of a professional planner for the ski areas. I never ever will forget how disappointed I was when, without coming out to look at the place, the ski hill developers looked at terrain maps and decided that the best place for a ski hill was in a location, where, in my opinion, it was impossible to build a proper ski hill. The highway went through the middle of the planned hill. I convinced the manager that it would be silly to develop this hill and that we should abandon it. From my work on the Bugaboos resort, I knew that they needed professionals to look at the terrain to decide if they had a suitable site for a resort area.

Anyway, the company paid for a helicopter, and brought Hans Moser and one of his guides in from the Bugaboos and from Canadian Mountain Holidays. We had kind of a party up there. We had other people with snowmobiles, but Hans Moser and the guide got the privilege of being helicoptered all over the mountains in the area. Their report said that—and they were backcountry helicopter ski professionals—even for an ordinary resort you needed road access and parking lots. They said, in effect, that they did not think it was a ski resort area.

So, the whole idea of a ski resort was dropped. I had a big part in it. Knowing what I knew and being a skier, I totally agreed with the decision that was made. It was a shame because we had the money to do it properly. We just couldn't waste other people’s money.

106

Kokanee Springs Subdivisions I devoted more time to Kokanee Springs, focusing on subdivisions. I did a subdivision on some almost wasted land of about twenty lots. They sold like hotcakes. So, the company said to proceed with a major subdivision with community water system pumps and a big well. We did this second subdivision and built a subdivision road. But the company could not sell the lots.

Back then I think the lots were in the twenty-thousand-dollar range, but the company couldn't sell any of them even for five thousand dollars. The lots sat there for a few years before anything started to move at all. Now all those lots are sold and occupied, but they certainly didn't move like the initial properties.

The developers then did another subdivision along Crawford Bay. They bought a property with a very nice beach on Kootenay Lake right beside a road. The beach was used by people from Creston. I had a devil of a time subdividing the property because it did not meet the requirements of normal subdivisions. There just was not enough space. We worked on it for probably five years trying to figure out how to make it work, so the developers could sell some very desirable lake frontage, sandy beach, and everything else. But every lot must have a good building site.

We had a nice beach but nowhere to build. So, we were never able to create any lots.

107

McGregor Lake A German investor bought a district lot on McGregor Lake. If a stream or lake was shown on a property, it was normally excluded from the purchase of a Crown grant. But here was a lot, a half-mile square, with the lake being half the property, but on a survey, there was no lake shown.

Under the Land Act, if no lake is shown on the survey, the landowner owns the lake. This situation at McGregor Lake started an argument that carried on for years until the law was changed, allowing lakes that do not appear on survey maps to revert to the Crown.

The owner of the land at McGregor Lake sold the land to this German fellow, who decided that he was going to create strata title on the property and have guests. He thought that people from Europe would buy sites out in this wilderness area. The land was probably ten miles away from the highway and was accessed by a very steep, but decent, road that required a Jeep or a fourwheel drive vehicle. Word got out that the new owner was going to subdivide the land. We went in there and surveyed it. I will never forget it. I broke my ankle very severely and ended up on crutches for four months. But the regional district, which more or less controlled rural planning, pushed for a bylaw so that the land could not be developed.

The project was not really impinging upon anybody. There was nobody within five miles of the place, and the people living there were rural. The Kokanee Springs development was already there, and there was a golf course and a resort.

The German fellow had a vision for property development that would not bother anyone, but the planners held their ground. They did not want the property to be developed with half a dozen cottage sites.

108

The manager of Kokanee Springs got involved. He supported the subdivision. He and I went to Victoria and spoke to the Minister of Municipal Affairs, Mr. Vander Zalm (later the Premier of British Columbia). The provincial government had the power to overrule the regional district.

We convinced the provincial government to rescind the power of the regional district to change the zoning. But the proposed developer decided that it was not worth trying to fight bureaucrats in this country. As far as I know, He sold the property and went back to Germany.

This is all part of the work that a development consultant takes on. You have to go with the flow or go with a client. It is your job to represent the client’s interest. You do not always win, but you do it anyway.

Another person bought a property on Crystal Lake on a peninsula, and I had the job of surveying it out. The owner decided not to even try to subdivide it or create any housing or anything on it.

But it was a very nice homesite. I enjoyed the job of marking out the property and making sure nobody trespassed, cutting trees or timber on the owner’s property or on Crown land.

109

Title Wars Surveyors often find themselves in the middle of complex property disputes. Sometimes you get to a subdivision that has several owners without easy or obvious road access to their land. This is a problem. A building property must front onto a public road. The Land Title Act makes it clear that there must be access. Developers used to create access by easement, which spelled out the conditions under which other people could use a private property, but they ran into many difficulties with this approach. So, they stopped using the easement approach.

But there would be situations with nice land that several people wanted to use, and each person would have to have a separate title. So, we developed a new system, which was called access by common lot.

You would create, for example, three lots. You would then create a fourth lot that would be owned by all three parties. This would be in effect a roadway and would connect to the public road. I did several subdivisions that way in the Slocan Valley, giving them access by common lot, and the system was expanded up the Spokane Valley. I never did anymore after that; I think the authorities probably stopped it.

In another interesting twist in the work of a surveyor, there was a taxation relief clause put out by the federal government. If work was done on the development of a mine, the owners could get a tax concession. We got the job of surveying a mine called the Tiny Tin Mine and ran a series of control surveys.

A survey crew spent over a month surveying where the mine would go. Well, this Tiny Tin Mine probably had some potential. We had to set up what is called a grid on the surface, so geologist types could do geological analysis work.

110

The job involved going underground, too. I will never forget this experience. A certified miner had to be with us all the time. It was dangerous in the mine. There were rotten planks everywhere. If a plank broke, you could fall through and drop two hundred feet to the next level.

The mine inspector representing the province happened to mention that he thought a previous surveyor might have maps of the mine. This surveyor was residing down in Montana.

So, I contacted him. He had the maps, which he willingly sent to me. But the mining company needed the new survey to get a tax write-off. They could not just take those drawings. Nope, I had to resurvey the whole mine. What a silly rule it proved to be, but that is just the way things go.

111

Replotting Nelson A great deal of the professional work in Nelson and region involved making up for the different practises of the past. In the building up of Nelson, there was an area, laid out in blocks at the turn of the century, but not fully developed. The roads were basically the extension of existing streets that connected, lower down, to the central core. The roads butted against the Burlington Northern Railroad, which was no longer in use when I started working in the area. At that time, there were still rails in place, and a local developer had acquired most of the blocks. The building sites he wanted were not desirable. For sound planning reasons, I decided the area should be replotted.

Moving forward with the proposal required us to contact all the owners within the area. There is a provision in the municipal part of the Land Title Act that if the majority of owners agree to change the shape of their properties and roads, they can request a bylaw change from the municipality. One of the owners did not want to be bothered, even though he would benefit from the changes. He went to city council to see the mayor, who came to see me and asked why I wanted to get this done.

I wanted to get it done because it fit with my own planning initiatives. The property of the owner who complained was worth hardly anything as it was. I knew that we could make some decent lots. The layout that I came up with created a street now named Fort Sheppard Drive and had about twenty good building sites, virtually all of which are now occupied by substantial houses.

At that time, there was absolutely nothing there.

We went through the whole process of drawing up a proposal and getting it through the bylaw approval process. I posted the subdivision, which was quite extensive, and got it done. As it turned out, there was not much demand for the building sites. The parcels of land were kind of

112

irregular. There were probably five or six parcels or portions of blocks and a few full blocks. But the streets just ran up the hill, probably ten to twelve city blocks until they terminated at the railway.

It took a bit of planning to get it right. But we needed the majority consent of the owners of the parcels. I said, “Well, we can have one dissenting owner. If most of the owners want to proceed, then the majority rules; this is the democratic way.” The man holding out got railroaded into participating—reluctantly, but he did so. Moving forward was a complicated process. We had to list all the properties and owners. Then we listed all the new properties that we would bring in and identify the owners of these properties. So, this reluctant property owner ended up owning these new sites.

The planning process involved drafting a new layout for the mass of the land. I created a nice subdivision that turned out quite well, with long streets running parallel to the railway and on a steep hillside gradient. Fort Sheppard Drive was something in the order of a thousand feet long.

It was virtually flat. Well, there might have been a two-percent grade; the new road was about one hundred feet away from the railway right of way.

We created some really nice lots there. But the redevelopment plan did not come up with municipal funds to build a road. We’d done this replot, but the land was not yet occupiable. The subdivision was legally created, but it was not yet constructed. The developer could not afford to build a street and put in the waterline and sewer line. So, he sold the whole project to three entrepreneurs. They were not really land developers, but they liked the idea and wanted to get involved. They bought the property; they built the road and street lighting and put in the sewer line and waterline. The mortgage company wanted to get paid, and the property was sold to

113

individuals on a lot-by-lot basis. Oddly enough, the lots did not sell very well after they went on the market. The price should have been up around twenty thousand dollars a piece. The last of the lots was disposed of for about eight thousand dollars. But then things started to boom in the area. Lo and behold! Within a few years, virtually all the lots were sold, with substantial houses built upon them.

It was not a lower cost neighbourhood, and the housing development was middle to high class.

The homes were not built by a single developer but by individual builders contracted by the owners of the lots. It was a good venture.

114

Property Complexities A chap owned two parcels of land just west of Nelson. On one parcel, he had a shop for car maintenance next door to a wheel-alignment place. He decided to expand his operations into the second parcel of land. I reposted the property so that both fellows knew where the boundary line would be, drawing on those original surveys. Everything seemed to be okay. The lawyer drew up papers, but lawyers normally do not go out in the field to check the property. The lawyer arranged it so that the autobody shop owner got title to the land with the wheel alignment shop on it. The error was discovered quite quickly.

It was basically a mistake that mixed up the two pieces of property. The lawyer did not even know which land the fellow had his autobody shop on. The transfers were prepared and filed; mortgages were filed against the transfer and against the owners.

In the middle of this mess, I had to take over and convince the owner of the wheel-alignment shop that the autobody shop owner was not trying to buy him out: that it was just a mistake made by the lawyer. It was quite the case. I had a hard time convincing the chap that this was not an attempt to put him out of business. It was one of those times when someone had to believe that you were telling the “Honest to God” truth. I finally convinced the chap, after much arguing and grave concern on his behalf, that it was a simple mistake. It cost the lawyer considerable money to arrange for cross conveyancing, missed mortgage discharges, and a new mortgage. The lawyer had to look after all the documentation.

I had another property dispute west of town. It was very interesting and had good earth, good ground, good sewage disposal, and everything else. The public health officer was of a different opinion. Generally, we got along well. On one occasion, I rode with him up to Nakusp, about a

115

hundred miles away. And he said how much he liked working with me—and that we would get along really well if I doubled the size of the lots in the subdivision.

When you are in a free enterprise system, you must respond to the market. The lots were supposed to be in the order of half an acre each. The public health officer thought that all the lots should be one acre. So, he refused to approve the subdivision that I did with half-acre lots. He stood his ground and tried to force the developer to consolidate two lots into one. The project was held up for several months because this health inspector tried to force us to make lots twice the size of what was prevalent at the time. The half-acre lots were already large, probably four times the size of a normal residential lot in the city. The developer had done everything right. He was allowing for safe sewage disposal fields. The subdivision had its own water system, so there was no problem with water supplies.

The health inspector finally agreed to let it go, but only a week before the deadline. I can remember going out and finalizing the surveys in one day—a week's work in a day, it seemed like. That solved the crisis. The developer was almost put into bankruptcy because of the holdup.

He was already building a couple of houses on the property. He was not only a land developer but also a house builder. The delays created hardship for him, and it caused quite a bit of concern. But we won in the end.

The complexities of property layout and implementation formed a central theme in my professional life. On another occasion, I did a survey of an old mine road through a private property that was used as an access for recreation, hunting, and getting Christmas trees. I talked the developer into dedicating the road for access to lands lying beyond, even though there was nobody going there at the time. It was the right thing to do.

116

It took what I called long-term planning. You never knew how that access road might be used in the future. To this day, thirty years later, nobody is really using the road that we dedicated. But it did not hurt anybody. One of the responsibilities of the surveyor is to look to the future and say, “This is the right thing to do.” Then you must do a little bit of public relations and convince somebody to give up the land for public purposes, even though it was not used by the public. It is just for the future.

117

Dealing with Inspectors and Other Officials I had created what's called a mini estate at a time when the building inspection industry was just starting up. I ended up spending a lot of time with the building inspector, who was a new man on the job. In the past, there were no building inspections.

They had planners telling us how everything should be done. I remember that if a downtown storekeeper wanted to repaint his building, he had to get permission from the city for what colours he would paint it. Some of the buildings were nice antique buildings. The building inspector and the city powers decided that the building would have to be clad in aluminum siding. These were beautiful stone buildings. That cladding—a government requirement decades ago—has now been removed. The old buildings now look more historically appropriate and attractive. The planners’ mistakes have been rectified.

This is all part of the evolution of things. Regional districts were created, and the planners got working. At times, they did not have any idea about what people could afford to do or would accept. They were telling people that they had to follow the new rules if they wanted to do a development. I fondly remember one planner from the Regional District of East Kootenay saying how this large piece of land should be developed. In my opinion, he was all wrong. Anybody would have known that he was wrong. In the end, we did it a totally different way. The planners were not helpful.

While these bureaucratic powers emerged, the province decided the highways needed to be upgraded. The Highways Department had been left these old roads. Some of them were not even paved. I can remember going to Golden in the spring. The road was just a mud hole, almost all the way from Kimberley up north through Canal Flats and up to Golden.

118

They started rebuilding and paving the roads. At the same time, the current British Columbia Premier W.A.C. Bennett decided that the province should be building power dams. In our area, they built the Waneta Power Dam and the Brilliant Power Dam, and then started building power dams up north and across the province.

As soon as construction on the power dams began, a network of powerlines was installed, which created all kinds of development, surveying, and construction work. At roughly the same time, in 1958, natural gas came to the area. The pace and extent of development work had never been greater.

The pipeline came down from the Okanagan and into the Kootenays. I worked on one of the branches that went over to Creston or went from Creston to Yahk. This development required all kinds of consulting work, both for engineering and surveying. To keep up with the work, we had to bring in a group of new professional surveyors. At that time, I had just started as a surveyor.

Within a few years of my being in Nelson, three other surveyors came to the region, joining the older people who had been doing all the work in the area from the turn of the century up to the early 1950s.

One of the older surveyors passed away in Nelson. My old mentor, Boyd Affleck, who was in his eighties, decided to retire. That left five youngsters in our group. We handled the new workload for the building sites, navigating the new rules put in place by the bureaucrats and professional highway engineers.

For example, a new position was created known as the Highways Local Approving Office. This individual was the senior engineer for the Highways Department. He had staff that would review every proposal. The complexity of the reporting and approval processes increased. If you were

119

working on a building, you would have to go through the building inspection branches. If you were doing a land development, you had to deal with several different agencies.

The Health Department was probably the worst one to deal with because its members suddenly started imposing new requirements on the sewage systems. As mentioned earlier, I sponsored my engineer son, who had graduated in civil engineering, to go back and take a master's degree in sanitation so that he could work on sewage disposal fields. I hoped that he would come back to the area and work alongside me. In the end, consultants were able to handle this new work because of the new equipment that became available.

120

New Westminster Office I had a lot of dealings with the New Westminster office, which is the largest property ownership office in BC. It handles more property ownerships than the rest of the province put together. I had a discussion with one of the New Westminster officials about a court case in Nelson. He said that a surveyor’s work was only legal if it was done of the property belonging to the person who had hired the surveyor. This fellow’s attitude was counter to my own: I always felt that to do the job properly, the surveyor must check the properties on both sides of the property in question. In other words, we should not only survey the property of the owner who had hired us. We had to be sure that the owner’s property was not impinging upon the neighbours on either side and vice versa. This process worked out quite well when I was doing accretions. I would go to the owners on either side of the property in question and tell them what I was doing and that I would be walking on their property, too. And if they wished, I would survey their entire property as well.

And I did several of them. I did one area with four properties in a row.

It was simple: I just explained to the neighbours what I was doing. They would say, “Do mine too,” and they paid me for this extra work. In one area where I did three properties in a row, I ran into one owner who was a multimillionaire. He refused to pay me because he said I got more than enough compensation from the other two owners. These other owners were not as wealthy as this fellow.

I did a survey at Johnson Road after the Highways Department hired me. I surveyed this whole stretch of about two miles of a quite valuable property opposite Nelson on the lakeshore, just so everybody would know where their property line was located. The original survey was done with wooden posts, likely in the 1930s. So, nobody knew where their property was until I went in and

121

did the survey at the expense of the Highways Department. Our work defined where all the properties were. And I think I did a good job.

I encountered one significant problem on this project though. A chap got a building permit to build a boathouse on a skimpy piece between the highway and the lakeshore. It was not really a building site, and he never built the boathouse. Instead, he built apartment units. The regional district even threatened to take him to court to stop him from occupying the new units. He never did get to occupy it. When I went by recently, it looked like the building has been torn down finally after thirty years.

There was one place where I got into one heck of an argument with another surveyor related to the boundary lines associated with these lands. The boundary line on the shoreline is not just an extension of an upland boundary. You have to determine that the boundary extension is perpendicular to the shoreline. In this instance, the extension was up on the lake. A surveyor did the extension, and he did not show consideration for the neighbours. He had the feeling that when a client hires you, you work for that client without caring too much about the neighbours.

This surveyor surveyed another place. Shortly before he got it registered, I had to do the one next door. I proved to him that he had gone in the wrong direction. Although he argued with me, he shifted the boundary by ten feet on the shoreline.

He got heat from his bosses when he followed the rule of determining the line perpendicular to the trend of the shoreline. In the end, his client decided that it was the right thing to do.

122

Steep Roads I did a nice subdivision on a very difficult hillside. A couple of young developers decided to undertake this development, but I knew it would be extremely difficult. The layout of the lots was suitable, but the road was too steep. The policy of the Highways Department was that roads should not have a gradient of more than eight percent. In the wintertime in the West Kootenay, the road would get slippery. People would not be able to drive up this road and would demand that the maintenance people from the department sand the road. When a new senior supervisor for the department came into the area, he was adamant that even eight percent should not be allowed. It was impossible to make our planned road less steep. The subdivision could not be done. I stayed away from making the road too steep and stepped away from the project.

In a different subdivision (that I, fortunately, had nothing to do with) and where the planners were not careful, their road was over eight percent and probably more like ten percent. The chap from the Highways Department should have ensured that it was never built. He was severely reprimanded and transferred out of the area. But, in this case, I did not think it was such a great problem; there were a dozen houses up that road and people put up with the incline.

Another subdivision that I did along Redfish Creek had nice frontage lots. But they were really low lying. The planning officer was convinced that the land would not be suitable for sewage disposal. But I just stuck my neck out and pointed out that within a year or so Kootenay Lake would be lowered by more than a dozen feet because of the building of the Duncan Dam, which was just under construction.

I got the subdivision approved on that basis. I guess people trusted me to know what I was doing.

I told them that lake’s highest level would be six feet lower in the future and that the property

123

would be high and dry. This was a case where having a little bit of foresight and special knowledge about what was happening made a difference. The subdivision went through, and the properties are very nice and desirable to this day.

On another project in the same area, I found myself in a catastrophic situation that surveyors really dislike. We were being asked to stake a boundary line between two owners who were in a long and acrimonious conflict. Even their dogs were fighting each other. The guy with the stronger, more vicious dog did the courteous thing. He hired us to mark out the boundary line, so that he could rebuild the fence. At that point, the fence was not high enough to stop his dogs from jumping over the fence and clobbering the neighbour's pet.

I went out there to oversee my men. I was coming back from checking up the line, which was probably three or four hundred feet long. I had not paid too much attention and came over a hill, face to face with a gentleman who was fifty feet away from me and seemed prepared to shoot me. It was scary. Most of us would not know what to say when a man points a gun at you. It turns out he was intent on shooting the neighbour's dog. His dog had barked and let him know that something was going on there.

I had done a survey for the fellow about two years prior to that. So, I treated it seriously, but I didn’t panic. I identified myself very quickly and pointed out that I was the surveyor. I told him that he better behave himself and just go back to his house. He did that but obviously mentioned the incident to his wife. She phoned the police. The police then called me right away, almost reprimanding me for not making sure that this couple knew I would be there doing the surveying.

It is now almost compulsory that you serve notice on the boundary owners if you plan to go on properties other than your client’s land. While the person you are working for knows that you are

124

there, the neighbour does not necessarily know. And as I discovered in this case, you never know the full story of the dispute.

Another fellow discovered that we had been on his property the previous day. He was adamant that he would have chased us off if he had been there at the time. I pointed out to him that under the Trespass Act, a land surveyor is allowed to go on anybody's property at any time to carry out his work. Period. If a person attempts to stop you from going there, you can have the person reprimanded and even arrested. I reprimanded a person once, to the point of having the police phone the fellow up. So, I knew the regulations and went through the whole rigmarole of making the person stop chasing me off his property.

I made a big production of letting the police officer know that I knew my rights and was behaving within the law. The officer responded to my statement that I was authorized to be there by saying simply, “Well, Mr. Johnson, you could have been dead, right?”

I know another young fellow who had a similar experience. He got shot and killed by the other property owner—the one that had not hired him. The killer was never arrested because he was supposedly protecting his property. His act was therefore considered legal and authorized. The victim was a young fellow, just a thirty-year-old. He up and died. The other fellow got away with it.

125

Dark Woods Forestry Dark Woods Forestry was a German family enterprise based in Canada. It was owned by a count who bought up big tracks of land. I talked to people from this company over the years about running the boundary lines on the property.

The company had a policy of retracing and remarking boundary lines every year, which cost a lot of money. Their people believed in doing this systematically. I was hired by them to find some of their boundary lines, one of which was sixteen miles long over the mountains.

It was quite a chore. A boundary had been marked just before the turn of the century with big “durable” wooden posts. I only saw about two of these so-called “durable” wood posts by the sixties and seventies. Most of them had deteriorated and rotted away or were knocked down. If the loggers were working close to the boundary, they often knocked out some of them.

Dark Woods Forestry decided to expand one year and bought a large tract of land near Procter, which is at the mouth of the West Arm of Kootenay Lake off the main Kootenay Lake. They thought they could subdivide the land. The fellow that bought it thought that there might be some timber on it. But when other people from the company looked at it, their timber people did not think it was worthwhile trying to log it. So, they thought the land should be subdivided.

I was asked to look at doing the subdivision. I walked through the area and on the access roads.

The railway ran across the front of the property almost ruining the lake frontage. There was a small strip of land between the railway and the lake, but it was not suitable for subdividing into lots.

126

I recommended against subdividing the property. It is not very often that you run into a property that you cannot do anything with. It was a real bummer and a poor investment. The company just sold it to a chap who then tried to develop it on his own. But he ran into the same challenges that I had identified. I was quite correct. There were some good parcels on the land, but not enough to make it viable. I am certainly relieved that I had nothing to do with the later development and was glad that my clients did not want to push ahead. There are some places that you simply cannot develop.

I also did some work with Kootenay Forest Products, starting with some road surveys. In the old days, roads were seen to benefit any property that the road went through and any properties lying beyond. Then people started to get stricter with their legal rights. They would cut off access.

Under the Forestry Act, an established timber company was allowed to expropriate land. When the Crown became a landowner, the government reserved one-twentieth of the area for road use.

The Crown did this because when land was being expropriated or sold, one could not know where a public road might be needed on the property. But it was safe to assume that a road might be needed at some point. When a decision was made to build a road, the Crown had the right to take the land back for free. This right was used by the Highways Department to get roads through properties and for the Forest Service to get a road through private land.

But the right created some difficult situations when we were surveying these roads. The owners often did not want the road. But there was nothing they could do about it. As a surveyor, you often had to go right back to what they called the Crown grant.

To trace the Crown grant, we often had to go back in ownership several years, sometimes two or three owners back. I used to go to the Land Titles Office and do a search and bring out the record

127

and show people the situation that they would have to give up as much as one-twentieth of their property for the road. Generally speaking, though, we never took that much land.

There was an interesting example involving a mining company, which had mined some property and crushed ore that they stockpiled at Ainsworth. The company went bankrupt, and the lawyers representing the claimants got involved. I got the job of measuring how much valuable ore might be in this big pile. It was something like thirty or forty truckloads of ore—high-grade lead, gold, and silver ore.

But it was not simple. We, as surveyors, could measure the size of the pile. But judging the weight was something else. This ore’s value was measured in weight, not bulk. I remember making a metal box about one-foot square. Then I took several samples and filled that box full. It was exactly one cubic foot. I did not want to make it any bigger. It weighed more than a hundred pounds as it was. So, I measured the pile, and then I weighed the material. Now I could tell the lawyers in Vancouver the weight of the milled ore in that stockpile.

The funny thing about it is I never got paid for the work. The company was bankrupt with apparently no money to pay anybody. But I foolishly undertook the work because I trusted people when they said they would pay me. Then they found out that there was no money in that account to pay me.

When you're in business, you have to learn to get the money up front. This was not common, but it was far from unheard of. When I was working for a mining company or a mineral exploration firm, I always had to make sure I was paid in advance. If I didn't, when the time came to pay me, they would just say they did not have any money and there was no personal liability. You could not get the president of the company or even a prospector working for a mining company to pay

128

the bills. There would be nobody willing to pay for it. I had to make sure that I had all my expenses, at least, paid in advance—not necessarily the overhead but the basic out-of-pocket expenses.

129

Ainsworth Hot Springs I consider the hot springs I was involved with as a major accomplishment. I was hired to work on the Ainsworth Hot Springs because the owner was a native Finlander, and I am a Finlander, too.

Both of my parents were Finnish. I was born on the Prairies, but I have always considered myself to be a Finlander. This fellow married the daughter of the original owner of Ainsworth Hot Springs Resort. His father-in-law had purchased the property from a mining company, which had mined into the mountainside and ran into hot water—a very strong stream of hot water. The mining company had created a pool for staff. The father-in-law had enlarged the pool and created a small resort.

I was hired to advise the Finnish fellow on expanding the resort. When I started the work, there was only a small townsite created at the turn of the century and no real plan that would allow everyone to soak in the hot springs.

I had the responsibility of deciding what should be done with a property. A lot of planning went into it. I took some thirty to forty parcels of land, got rid of roads, and jiggled the land around, finally putting it back into a single parcel of land, big enough to house an expanded resort.

It took quite a few years, probably ten years in total, before I was done. Shortly thereafter, the people that owned it sold it to a First Nation out of Creston.

130

Marysville Settlement I had one project that I had to finish in the middle of winter. It was ten miles up the mountain from Marysville, an unincorporated area just outside the City of Kimberley, where a mining company had discovered a mineral needed to fabricate the heat shield for the nose cone of rockets. The nose needed a material that would not belt or burst. This is going back to when they were sending rockets all over the place, including to the moon.

We got a rush job to survey out a mine where the mineral had been discovered. It was a very difficult, strenuous job. We almost got killed. My associates and I were chopping out the boundary lines of this mining property when the branch of a large tree fell within a few feet of us. Had it hit us, we would have been killed. You think of your lucky stars on such occasions.

That we didn’t get hurt was one of my lucky stars.

To get a precise bearing, I used to take what was called a star shot to see Polaris. Otherwise, we would use a compass, but relying on a compass was not considered to be professional surveying, as it only gave you approximate measurements. Although a compass was not good enough for a survey, it was for mining claims.

So, we marked out the boundary lines and finished the job as best we could in a couple of weeks.

We worked so hard. One of the workers insisted on having steak for breakfast, saying he could not work that hard on only bacon and eggs. There was probably half a dozen of us working on the survey map, but this one fellow insisted. We got him a steak for breakfast!

When we were working in the bush, we wore what they called caulk boots, which have sharp spikes on the soles. They are something like the shoes that golfers wear these days. These boots took a lot of work to lace up. We would go for breakfast with our boots on. But on occasion, we

131

would get heck because we punched holes in the linoleum in the restaurant. The owner made us take off our boots or she would not feed us. We had to unlace our boots and do them up again afterwards.

132

Surveying Challenges We faced some serious surveying challenges on the east shore of Kootenay Lake. The survey posts that were in place did not make any sense. They were almost three hundred feet short of where they should have been. I luckily happened to discuss the matter with a gentleman who's famous for his historical knowledge of the east shore. He was a tremendous man. He owned a store, a sort of outpost, and also became a notary.

I was in the store buying something and mentioned the survey. He piped up and said that he had been on the original survey team when he was a young lad. He remembered working on the survey and knew that they did not have a chance to finish.

They ran out of daylight and put in a “witness” post in an erroneous position. For some reason, the problem was overlooked. I took an affidavit from him that the post was not in the correct position. Because he was a notary, his word really meant something. I re-established the corner where it should have been.

This example demonstrates a simple truth about our business: The boundary line is wherever you put the post, even if it is not at the precise point intended. An error like this could—and did— cause great difficulty in professional survey work. Land surveyors have to make decisions about where to put the boundary line and are almost qualified to act as a judge.

I have been an expert witness on a fair number of court cases and know well the situations that surveyors face. An example is a decision I made in East Kootenay at Watson Lake. I was surveying a piece of highway right of way for the government, a nice stretch that was two or three miles long, straight as an arrow. When surveying there, I came across an erroneous measurement that did not make any sense. The post was in an inappropriate position, two to three

133

hundred feet from where it should have been. I happened to talk to the occupant of the property, who was the son of the original owner. After I told him of the surveying trouble I was having, he piped up and voluntarily told me that his dad had moved the post.

What sometimes happens is that a property owner, especially when there is nobody living next door or the neighbouring property belongs to the government, sees some nice land and moves the post to where they want it. They figure that nobody will know the difference. By moving the post over, this guy’s father had gained the use, for twenty or thirty years, of a nice meadow. The son willingly acknowledged that he knew they did not own the land.

I think I probably took an affidavit from the son saying that he knew the post had been moved.

This example shows that decisions in surveying are like judicial decisions. These matters can be serious, and as the surveyor, you have to believe that right is right. The guy probably lost ten acres or a substantial piece of government land that his family was using but did not own. If he wanted to own it, he would have to buy it from the government. I never did find out if anything was done.

134

Negligence and Highway Surveys There was a sad situation with a guy who had just got his driver's license. He drove around a corner too fast and rolled the car. He went through the window and broke his back. He was paralyzed for life. Several million dollars were needed to look after him for the rest of his life.

Somebody convinced this fellow or his parents to sue the Ministry of Transportation and Highways Department for negligence.

The speed limit on that stretch of highway was sixty miles per hour. There was supposed to be a sign at the corner telling drivers to slow down to forty miles per hour. The sign had fallen down and had not been put back up. The family argued it was the fault of the highways’ maintenance man, who was sued jointly with the supervisor and the engineer in charge of highway maintenance in the area.

I was hired by the government to do a survey of the scene and to be prepared to go to court in Vancouver. I remember coming down the elevator with a top lawyer for the government. He was probably paid ten times as much as I was paid. I told him that I had driven along that same piece of road in a similar car belonging to my wife—an old Chevrolet.

I told him that I could go around that corner at sixty miles an hour with no problem. I even had my wife with me. I had her drive the route, while I sat in the passenger seat. She had no trouble driving around the corner at sixty miles. We did not go any more than sixty because it might have been considered too fast. To me, the kid lost control. The lawyer told me I was not an expert in driving speed and safety. I was hired to do the survey, and I could not speak to anything else because he could not get me sworn in to give evidence about driving the corner.

135

It turned out that the opposing team had hired a specialist, a highways engineer from Vancouver, to give his opinion on the road. It did not work out well. This highly rated engineer’s presentation was based on other people's survey work (i.e., the government’s own survey work).

The only measurements he took were with a rolling tape, like the one real estate people use to measure length. The whole accident, he said, was caused by the curvature in the road, the sharpness of the corner, and the elevation. I could not believe what this specialist presented. His information was no good for anything in the court case.

When I gave my evidence, I told them about driving that road. After I had presented such a strong survey, they said, “Ray Johnson's kind of an expert. We'll have to listen to him.” They invited me to talk about driving the road. They let me do it and the judge listened. The judge wanted to personally thank me for that information. The poor kid, instead of getting millions of dollars, received only forty thousand. I am sure they used that just to pay the lawyer.

136

Decision Maker The main thing about being a surveyor and a planner is that you rarely start projects yourself.

Once in a while, as with Fairmont, we are brought in on the early stages of a new initiative and play a major role in conceptualizing the project. More often, we are technicians, asked to implement an idea that an owner or developer has come up with.

This simple truth means that I had the opportunity, over many years, to engage with some of the most creative, entrepreneurial, and unusual people in southeast British Columbia. Some of the projects worked exceptionally well. Others crashed and burned, often at the approval or design stage. But what a life it was, being at the starting line of literally hundreds of roads, bridges, subdivisions, resort developments, community planning processes, and recreational developments.

Every time I drove or flew around the Kootenays, I told myself how lucky I was to be involved in so much. I knew the backstory of almost every development, and I had a hand in most of them. The greatest professional joy of my life was watching my home territory evolve in front of my eyes. This is a remarkable part of the country, and I honestly believe we made it even better.

Consider a small example. I was hired to split a resort near Premier Lake. Originally, it was a ranch, but it had become a kind of resort with ranching on the side. The person who hired me had just acquired the land and had decided he did not want to ranch anymore.

The owners decided to subdivide the resort. The original owners had some funny agreements, and the property was disputed. The original owners laid claim to a large part of the property. I was hired to review it all and come up with a compromise. The new owners found out that they did not, in fact, own the whole property. They had to let the original owner have a part of it.

137

So here I was, a surveyor, acting almost like a judge. I did a pretty good job, I guess. A while later, a lawyer told me that I should have officially become an arbitrator. I would have been in a good position to intervene when there was a boundary or a property dispute.

He said I should do more of that work. But I did not want to take it on. These situations are like a divorce. They get testy at times, and it is no fun really to try to work things out. If it works out the way you think it should, then it is a feather in your cap, but these matters did not always work out the way they should have.

In my work, conflict was common—between property owners, buyers and sellers, governments and developers and, from time to time, professionals and customers. A lot of court cases never come out the way they really should have. In my experience, the lawyers twisted things around.

An interesting case came up in Kimberley. Somebody noticed that a survey was not done properly and challenged the work that was done. I was hired by our association to assess the quality of the work and redo the survey if necessary, which I did because it was necessary. The surveyor who signed off on the original work was from Alberta. He had not even come to the worksite to oversee the job. The work he supervised was not done adequately or professionally. I filed a report on it, and he was suspended. He was no longer allowed to do legal surveys in BC. The province has always been strict in their assessment of the professional quality of surveyors’ work.

It is important that people understand the rigour of professional reviews. Currently in BC, every year, one or two pieces of work by any registered surveyor is reviewed and reported on. Every second year, the people working for the professional association physically check the surveying work. The professional surveyor always gets a report from an inspector. The inspector always

138

finds something that is not quite up to standard or not quite adequate. I have fond memories of the fellow from the association complimenting me on the quality of my marker posts, which were metal ones, driven in so that you could not pull them out. He thought that our crew’s work was superlative.

Our association never officially adopted a quality standard for the posts. The metal marker posts began to be used when I was working with a federal surveyor up north. We designed a marker plate that was bolted onto angle iron posts, which would tell ordinary people the meaning of the stake. The stakes also contained the words “Do not disturb.”

I was part of the survey posts committee that designed the metal posts. To this day, these are the only galvanized iron bars used by the British Columbia Land Surveyors. The posts must be at least thirty inches or two and a half feet long, but I made lots of them five feet long and even eight feet long. This meant I could hammer them in when there was soft ground. To me, these things matter. You did your job right or not at all.

139

Subdivision Matters When planning a subdivision on a waterfront or even a river, developers and surveyors must pay attention to the Land Registry Act. The act holds that when planning small lots, every 660 feet, you have to leave a 66-foot-wide public roadway to the lake or river, so upland owners and people on the other side of the road can access the water. I am sure this rule was created in the old days when people had to get to the water to reach their canoe and paddle to town to buy groceries, or sell apples or peaches, or get to the paddle wheeler on Kootenay Lake, for instance.

These access roads would quite often end in a wharf, where the paddle wheeler would pick up the fruit. Today, there are no more paddle wheelers and not many fruit trees left, but the Land Registry Act has not been changed. In my view, these rules impose hardship on the people who own lakeshore property. In Kootenay Lake, there may be a hundred people living upland who use a small stretch of beach. To create more space for themselves, they naturally encroach on the land of waterfront landowners, often leading to quite an argument. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been involved in many arguments while marking out the boundary line.

I did something at Moyie Lake thirty or so years ago that is not allowed anymore. I took three prescribed accesses and put them together to make a mini park. This change meant that the owner of the lakefront property being developed didn’t have to make a road to the lakeshore, but he did have to leave the space for the mini park. I figured that the people from the twenty or so properties upland from the lakeshore would use the mini park instead of the beach in front of the lakefront owner’s property.

140

But subsequently, I got into an argument with the senior approving officer in Victoria. He would not go along with this unofficial modification of the subdivision rules. He told me to do things the way the act reads.

I created another mini park on Kootenay Lake, and it has since become a popular little park site.

It has a creek with a nice waterfall. My granddaughter loves to go to that park site. To create the park, I put about five or so public accesses together. These accesses, as they were, ended at a cliff, so nobody would have been able to make useful roads out of them. There was an existing road that people used to get to the park. I said that creating a park was the right thing to do, but nobody could be bothered to change the law or give the approving officer permission to do that.

But I have to say I was stubborn and determined enough to keep saying that the park needed to be built. They allowed it and it's done and it is working. It is a feather in my cap.

141

Procter There was another property dispute in the Procter area. A chap had a property right behind a thousand feet of lakefront, part of which was almost a wilderness area. The property had a cabin on it, which the man used as a summer home. Another fellow lived back from the beach on a hillside, further from the West Arm of Kootenay Lake and across the railway tracks and road.

The chap who lived on the hillside liked to go fishing. For two years, he had left his boat on this other fellow’s property. As he drove by, the boat owner used to check to see if his boat was still there, but the trees grew, and he could no longer see the boat. To solve his problem, he cut down some of the trees. Well, that annoyed the fellow who owned the property. He asked me, “What in God's name does this guy think he's doing?” When he confronted the man with the boat, they got in an argument. The boat owner had all kinds of funny excuses and suggested that the other fellow did not own the property.

So, naturally, the property owner asked me to do a survey to show that he had ownership. He wanted to be sure about it. He owned a business in town and had a little money. He was willing to spend a few hundred dollars to get the survey done. He presented my survey to the boat owner, who still argued and told him off, suggesting that he had the right to park his boat there as he was the true owner of that frontage.

The fellow I was working for decided he had enough of arguing with this guy. We went to court to see if the boat owner had any right to be there and argued that this fellow should pay damages for having cut down the trees. I knew the judge when we were kids, before he got to be a lawyer and a judge working out of Trail. I liked him. He was curt, no nonsense. He made it clear that the fellow with the boat did not have the right to go on the other fellow’s property. Then he made a

142

bigger decision. He said that boat owner did not even have the right to occupy the lakeshore in front of somebody else's property. The judge said that a person had the right to trespass, but not to occupy the land. The boat owner could go out on the water, but the judge ruled that the guy could not leave his boat there.

The boat owner was so arrogant that he continued to leave his boat there, but he no longer went through the fellow’s property to get to the beach. He went through a neighbour's property but still docked his boat in the same place. So, the owner took him to court again. Boy, I loved this judge. Waving his finger, he said, “Sir, you did not understand what I told you. I told you that you could not occupy that area. And if you come to court again, it's straight to jail.” Problem solved, or so I thought.

A while later, I went to a seminar in Nelson where a Ministry of the Environment employee was speaking to about sixty people. She told them that anyone could occupy the beach. I could not believe it. This person thought she knew what she was talking about. I went up to her afterwards and said, “You could almost be sued about what you said. If somebody does that you will be in big trouble because you have got witnesses. They will quote you.”

I did another easement involving the layout of a property that did not meet all the subdivision rules and regulations. Two property owners—neighbours—ended up in a conflict about a garden.

One of the two had put in a garden on his neighbour’s property. The dispute could not be settled with only an easement because an easement is just about control. I created a simple little subdivision, so that the garden was now located on the gardener’s property. But this raised questions about taxes.

143

The question was simple: Should the person with the new subdivision and garden pay additional taxes? I thought that the tax people would take the situation into consideration. But they paid no attention. I still figure that the taxation should have changed because the one owner got to use a good size garden that had initially been on someone else’s property. That didn't really make sense.

144

Technological Change in Surveying Over the years, there have been big changes in surveying equipment. When I started as a junior or apprentice surveyor, we were using the old style, one-hundred-year-old equipment. That shifted as soon as I started working professionally. The new equipment was essentially a transit, a piece of equipment that had been used for years, but it was designed to read differently and was much more precise.

Subsequently, a new transit was designed, which transferred information directly to the computer; we call them total stations. You would measure distance electronically, press a button, and you would get the distance down to millimetres.

Eventually, you did not have to have a reflector or need a second man to work with. You could work by yourself anywhere. Anything you pointed the new transit at, the instrument would measure the distance and tell you how far away it was down to the millimetre, and then it would record it. These innovations made surveying so easy. A surveyor no longer had to pull a steel tape across the road or anything like that. You could just look at any object from one position, and it would calculate all the required positions.

The other innovation involved computers. It wasn’t until I had finished university in 1955 that I first saw a handheld mechanical calculator. Up to that point, we had to do things longhand by logarithms or just by multiplying on paper. When the first machines came into operation, they were far too large to take into the field. Things progressed very quickly to a desktop mechanical calculator of which I had several models (up to thirty-five digits). I remember how impressed we were when they produced the first electronic handheld calculator.

145

I had the kind that was used to go to the moon, a Hewlett Packard 45. It was mind boggling what it could do in comparison to what we had only a short ten or fifteen years earlier. That calculator graduated to the laptop computer that we have today that just calculates everything. Surveying developed further when accurate global positioning, GPS, came along, giving surveyors the precise position of any place. So long as you could see the sky, you could pick up the position of your instrument.

Luckily, when I first used GPS, I had a student with me who graduated from the University of Calgary and had been trained in the new machines. We were the first ones in the area to use that equipment. It was very handy in determining a boundary line that was sixteen miles long. The line would go over the mountains and down the valleys and we did not have to chop up the line, so you could see it. It just leapfrogged from point to point.

Also, simultaneous with all the modernization of the field equipment was the advent of plotting machines. Up to that point, we needed an employee who was good at drafting and neat and tidy and knowledgeable and who could do some of the calculations. The first plotting machine I had was what is called a flatbed plotter. It could make drawings on a horizontal scale. The newer ones are on a drum and allow you to make a drawing up to forty-eight inches wide and any length. The machine draws whatever you ask it to. I was the only surveyor in the area who would use different line weights to represent different features of the property, like creeks and roads and street names.

Calligraphy changed, too. I remember working with a professional draftsman. He did a lot of the printing and calligraphy—very pretty drawing. Both the quality of the drawing and the writing was important. I know of two people who were told by a government agency that they had to

146

redo a drawing because their work was not good enough. One fellow decided to quit working. He was older. The other fellow decided to hire somebody to make his drawings. The agencies, specifically the federal government’s Land Branch, were particular about the quality of their drawings. They wanted a standard type of print.

Surveying is not a very popular profession. There are still only the same number of professional surveyors as there were when I started, and when I started there were no more than there had been at the turn of the century. I have had a couple of fellows leave my employment because they did not like the profession; it was too strict and regimented for them. There was zero tolerance for mistakes, and most people did not want to become a surveyor. For many, it just was not worth going through all the stress of getting through the exams and keeping track of the work.

It is now more than twice as difficult to pass the exam as it was in my era. The association is very, very demanding and sets its own exams. As I said, there is no tolerance for mistakes.

When I started, nobody was surveying highways, but then the government got smart and budgeted for surveying when they built a highway, including a final wrap-up legal survey at the end. They're not building any more highways in this part of the province. But my God, the surveyors involved in the highways did a lot of work.

147

Professional Integrity I often found it hard to convince people that I was not cheating or doing something inappropriate. To this day, I wear my iron ring from the professional engineers and hold to the code that we will not do anything that's detrimental—or improper or crooked.

The tradition of giving an iron ring to all graduating engineers in Canada came about after a Canadian railway bridge collapsed in the early twentieth century, killing many people. An inquiry found that the cause was poor engineering. The iron ring represents the need for accuracy and precision in engineering: no nonsense, no errors, no mistakes. The first rings were made from pieces of steel from that bridge.

In engineering when you design something, you are allowed to increase the strength by two and a half times. This standard policy is called the factor of safety and is there to cover any mistakes.

I like to point out to people that I have a ring made from steel from the collapsed bridge. I'm old enough. When I received professional registration, I was number 2,300, or something, in BC. Now there are close to a hundred thousand professional engineers in the province!

148

Thoughts on the Expertise of Surveyors As I reflect on my career in surveying, it is useful to consider how much things have changed.

This is particularly true with the legal and regulatory environment. Many of the decisions that were made over the course of my career are no longer made, including decisions I made on my own as there was no precedent to follow. I did things that I thought were appropriate. The law does not always go along with the decisions made in the field.

The law is not always practical. It is very judicial. Lawyers are very formal and rigid in their approach to property and land matters, but they generally have no practical experience. I think of them like schoolteachers trying to build a house. I knew a fellow who thought it was easy to build houses. He built three in a row. And they all had serious problems because he made mistakes.

A carpenter or person with training knows what to do. But those who think they know how to do it, do not necessarily know how to do what is right. I ran into this problem countless times throughout my career. Lots of people think that they understand land, property, and development. But vital technical elements, including an obsession with precision, accuracy, and the recording of information, are both essential to the surveyor’s craft and to the sustainability of our land management systems. I always point out to people that land surveyors are five times as strict as engineers. As we’ve seen, surveyors have zero tolerance for any mistake.

149

Reflecting on My Career The process of writing this book has forced me to reflect on my life as a surveyor, planner, and engineer. Our profession does not get a lot of public attention and, to be honest, we are not looking for it. But you can see our work in every part of the world around us—the roads, bridges, hydro dams, urban designs, recreational facilities—everything.

My professional life has spanned an era of vast and rapid technological evolution, beginning with my first job in 1958 and ending with my retirement in 2008. In that time, big changes occurred in equipment and technology but also in the bureaucracy, government, and organization, especially with the creation of inspectors and planners.

The work adds up—and it adds up fast. I did some hundred miles of highway right of way, more than two thousand miles of powerline right-of-way surveys, twenty miles of gas pipeline corridors, three hundred subdivision surveys, fifteen hundred house locations, and hundreds of other projects. The highway work was extensive. We would be assigned a highway job every year on stretches of road about five miles long. We would have to survey all the properties bounding the highway. It was the same thing for the gas pipelines.

The projects I worked on were small—like laying out residential lots—and large—like supporting the construction of the Nelson Bridge. I look back on my career with great pride in the work that my company and my colleagues completed over the years. I love Nelson and the Kootenays, and I know that our work has made it a better, richer, safer, and more exciting place to live, work, and play.

150