Work in Golden

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

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.