Slocan City

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.

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 ten-

foot 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.