Biking Into History on the Slocan Valley Rail Trail

Sunday, July 9, 2017 was the coolest of our days in Slocan, British Columbia, so we planned our bike ride for that day down the Slocan Valley Rail Trail. 

The northern end of the trail begins in Slocan, at the south end of Slocan Lake, and it runs 52 km south along the Slocan River. Here is the view up the river and Slocan Lake from the north end of the trail at the Slocan Bridge:

The railway route was built during the mining boom in the Kootenays during the 1890s. A major silver find on Payne Mountain immediately grew into the city of Sandon (now a ghost town) and the Canadian Pacific Railway ("CPR") wanted to connect the region with the CPR main line to the north.  The CPR obtained charters for a series of railways to carry ore from the Kootenays to the CPR main line.  The Nakusp & Slocan Railway would carried the ore to a smelter in Revelstoke.  Unfortunately, the smelter eventually became unprofitable and closed. This made the Nakusp & Slocan Railway useless and resulted in the CPR’s acquisition of lines directly west from the Kootenays to Vancouver on the Pacific Coast, including the famed Kettle Valley Railway, whose right of way we bicycled in Myra Canyon outside of Kelowna, B.C. The last train travelled the Slocan Valley rail line on September 14, 1993.  The Slocan Valley Heritage Trail Society, which was formed in 1994, eventually won rights to manage the right of way as a trail.

The trail is a picturesque path that generally parallels the Slocan River through farmland and estuaries, as well as the occasional woods, with access at each of the villages or towns along its way:

One notable historic feature of the trail is that its route runs alongside the sites of some of the Canadian Japanese Internment Camps from World War II.  Much like Manzanar, in Lone Pine, California, which we visited and described in an earlier blog entry, the camps on the Popoff Farm and at Lemon Creek housed whole communities of Japanese who were Canadian citizens and permanent residents.  Historical markers along the trail, located at the actual sites, explain the history of the camps:

The trail boasts some very heavy-duty benches, raised to facilitate viewing of the river and estuaries.  We took full advantage of them!

The views across the river to the Valhalla Mountains were inspiring:

At one rest stop, we encountered these berries, which reminded us of blueberries.  However, these berries grow on taller bushes with relatively larger leaves than blueberries, and the berries grow in clusters.  Eventually, we ran into someone on the trail who informed us that these are the famed Saskatoon berries, which we have tasted and loved but never encountered in the wild.  These little guys grow all over here, and they are ripening now, so we picked a bunch of them and ate most.

Another wonderful berry surprise was our good old friends, the Thimbleberries, which we first discovered in Glacier National Park in 2013, and which we visited and enjoyed again in our trips through Canada across the Great Lakes in 2015, and again throughout B.C. and Alaska during the summer season of 2016.  We've been seeing the bushes, and then the flowers, and then the unripe berries, but this was the first time this year we've found RIPE Thimbleberries.  Yay!

Here's what they look like when picked.  They collapse easily, because they leave their thimble-shaped core on the bush:

Here is what they look like when eaten:

In places, the trail gave us intimate views of the Slocan River, including this one of a drifting log that has floated undisturbed so long that it has become a floating garden:

We encountered an historical sign that explained the history of human occupation of the Slocan Valley.  The sign focused extensively on the prehistory of the area, which interested us because we had just seen pictographs on the cliff wall on the west shore of Slocan Lake.  The sign revealed that, throughout the area south of the town of Slocan, and especially at the Narrows of the Slocan River where we were standing, archaeologists had discovered innumerable ruins of pit houses which had been occupied by the Sinixt (pronounced “Sin-eye-kst”, meaning “People of the Place of Bull Trout”), or the Many Nations.  One archaeologist, Dr. Nathan Goodale, has been leading the excavation of these pit houses by teams from Hamilton College, in New York State, and Selkirk College, a local institution, for over a decade, and the sign explained what his teams have found.

The Sinixt are a First Nations People descended from indigenous peoples who have lived primarily in what are today known as the West Kootenay region of British Columbia in Canada and the adjacent regions of Eastern Washington in the United States for at least 10,000 years. The Sinixt are of Salishan linguistic extraction, and speak their own dialect of the Colville-Okanagan language.  Today they live primarily on the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington, where they form part of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, which is recognized by the United States government as an American Indian Tribe. Many Sinixt continue to live in their traditional territory on the Northern Side of the 49th Parallel, particularly in the Slocan Valley and scattered among neighbouring tribes throughout BC.

No sooner had we finished learning all about the work of Professor Goodale, then we ran into a gentleman standing under a pop-up cabana, giving a presentation to several visitors.  Passing him, we ran into a woman who explained that this was, indeed, Professor Goodale himself, who was leading their biennial event, opening their archaeological dig to the public to help explain what they are doing.  Here is a photo of Drs. Goodale and Nauman (the woman who we met there) from their 2015 event:

Dr. Nauman invited us to stay so that Dr. Goodale and his team could give us a tour.  Every two years, the professors, along with the archaeology students from the two colleges present their work at four different locations within the diggings.

We gladly accepted!

Dr. Goodale explained that the site along the Slocan Narrows is one of the most significant archaeological sites of its kind in North America due to the fact that the river has not been dammed, leaving most pit house sites intact. There is evidence of a substantial winter settlement between here and Slocan city, with some 90 pit house sites identified. At the narrows, the settlement was divided by the river, with some 23 houses located on the west side and another nine on the east.

Here is a photo of the students working on one of the pit house excavations:

If you'd like more information about the archaeological project and what the researchers have discovered, check out this blog article.

Not far beyond Dr. Goodale's diggings, we crossed Lemon Creek, which empties into the Slocan River and gives its name to a small hamlet south of the town of Slocan:

Below Lemon Creek, the river braided into estuarial streams interlaced with farmland.  Horses, sheep, cows, alpacas and other livestock grazed alongside waterfowl and other critters:

We were planning to complete a bike ride down to Winlaw, which would have been 20 km (12 miles) each way, but about 2 miles short of Winlaw, as we stopped for a sip of water, David looked down and saw that his front bicycle tire was BULGING.  We know what that means:  impending blowout.  The front tire is as old as the bike - 12 years old - and probably was starting to rot.  It had split lengthwise, and the split had grown to about 3 inches long and had spread to about half an inch wide.  The only thing preventing a blowout was the inner lining of rubber-band-like material and the inner tube itself, which, luckily, had not yet been punctured.

Being handy with our tire repair, we pulled the tire, patched it, strengthened the patch with good old Duct Tape, and decided it would be prudent to turn around:  if a blowout occurred, one of us would have to bike back to Slocan and get the Jeep while the other waited.  This didn't sound like fun.  So, patch in place, we turned around:

The trail was posted with warning signs about bears being active along the trail, and with the ripe berries, we understand that is not an unreasonable warning.  However, we saw no bears.  We did, however, suddenly see a deer bound across the trail just feet in front of us.  She bounded down into the tall grass on the river side of the trail.  Because of a fence, she didn't immediately run more than 20 feet away from us, and she evidently adopted a strategy of being still and hoping we wouldn't see her.

It didn't work.  We could see her.  But it's amazing how she could cause herself to blend into the grasses and flowers.  Here are two photos of the little deer watching us warily to see if we knew where she was:

After our wild deer encounter, we pedaled safely back to our campground, logging a total of a little over 20 miles, with an afternoon of discoveries of all sorts!