Fire & bikes
By Masa Takei with photography by Darryl Leniuk
Discovering the splendour of British Columbia’s Kettle Valley five years after flames destroyed 12 historic railway trestle bridges
“Firestorm 2003,” as it became known, was, by almost any
measure, the most devastating season of wildfires in British
Columbia history. It followed the three driest years ever recorded
in the southern part of the province. When lightning struck near
Rattlesnake Point in Okanagan Mountain Provincial Park
on Aug. 16 of that year, there wasn’t much the thousands of
forest firefighters could do to stop a force of nature that, within
weeks, consumed 239 homes, more than 25,000 hectares of
forest and a dozen wooden trestle bridges.
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| Click map to enlarge |
Five years later, I am coasting through the valley on mountain
bike. My ponytailed guide, “Trailhead” Ed Kruger, points out
Kalamalka Lake in the distance. Before the fire, he says, stands
of lodgepole pine and larch had obscured this sweeping view.
Before the fire, the grand wooden trestle bridges of the Kettle
Valley Railway (KVR) soared across this forest.
The railway and its bridges began construction in the 1880s
to transport rich silver deposits from the Kootenay region of
southern British Columbia to the coast. When the KVR was completed
in 1916, it navigated 525 kilometres through the hard rock,
sharp curves and steep grades of three mountain ranges and
became one of the most costly railways in the world. The advent
of highways and trucking led to the its decline in the late 1950s.
The last freight trains passed through the mountains in 1989,
and the tracks were dismantled the following year.
Yet, almost a century after the KVR was completed, it continues
to transport resources critical to the area’s economy as part
of the Trans Canada Trail. Now tourists are the principal commodity,
rolling through on rubber rather than rails. As if by
design, the requirements for heavily laden trains match those of sightseeing cyclists. With
the tracks removed, the right-of-way
makes for a wide, flat gravel road where they can ride two
abreast beneath open skies. No part of the rail bed has more than
a 2.2 percent grade. And during my three-day bike trip with
Monashee Adventure Tours, Kruger makes sure that the grade
always works in our favour.
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