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.