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

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.