Revelstoke
From Valemount hit the road for Revelstoke, which was a relatively long (for us) five and a half hour drive. On the way, before we got to Kamloops, we started seeing evidence of a past forest fire near the town of Barriere. While driving, if we have cell service, the person not driving gets to look things up about the places we are driving through, so I looked for information on a fire near Barriere.
It turns out there was a fire in 2003, which is called the McLure Fire. It was a hot, dry summer, and it’s very clear in the Wikipedia article that the fire was started “when Mike Barre threw his cigarette butt into the grass on his property in McLure BC. The fire resulted in the loss of 72 houses, 9 businesses, and 180 jobs in the North Thompson Valley.” Seeing the landscape looking like this over twenty years later makes me realize what the recovery is going to look like for Jasper.
In Revelstoke, we were staying at the Snow Forest Campground, which is part of the beautiful Mount Revelstoke National Park. We had a great site with a clear view of the sky for our Starlink.
They also had a gorgeous new bathroom and shower facility with beautiful polished concrete floors and wood finishes. As the theme for this trip would have it, on the Monday morning I went to have my shower and found the doors locked, with this sign up:
This brought new challenges for us. We hadn’t filled our potable water supply, because we were expecting to be connected to water at our site. There is no connection to sewer in provincial and national campsites so you have to really monitor your water usage so you don’t fill up your black or grey tank in the week you are there. (That means not using the shower in the RV and using other bathrooms as much as possible). They did bring in port-a-potties for everyone to use. We had to go into town to a dumping station to fill our blue jug with potable water every day for cooking, washing dishes and drinking water. By the time the water was turned back on Thursday afternoon, we were happier than usual to have a hot shower.
It was a nice twenty-five minute walk from the campground, downhill, into Revelstoke (it took longer, uphill, on the way back). Revelstoke is a lovely little town, with a Moderne-style City Hall that was built in 1939.
We stumbled across some really interesting street art in a alley. They recreated famous paintings using parts of skis, and snowboards.
There are also various sculptures in the town, including this one of sturgeon and salmon:
which was apparently a clue on Jeopardy?!
There is the Revelstoke Railway Museum, which we had to visit. It’s quite large, and has several train engines and coaches you can explore parts of, and some great historical photos.
They had a small interesting exhibit on the history of Black Canadian sleeping car porters, the first I have seen on this topic. According to the exhibit, in the 1860’s George Pullman developed a new sleeping car service in the states, and he hired former slaves to work on these new cars. Similarly, in Canada, sleeping cars were exclusively served by Black men until the 1960’s. There was a tradition of calling all these men “George”, stripping them of their individual identities. In the 1940’s, in Canada, the “Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters” won the right to have porters identified by their real names. I found the simple exhibit of a porter name tag from 1945 to be quite poignant.
We did drive up to the Revelstoke Mountain Resort, which is south of the town of Revelstoke. It’s quite a complex with restaurants and condo-style accomodations, and is packed in the summer with a stream of people going up the chairlift with their mountain bikes to ride some of the numerous trails down the hill. We played a round of disc golf, and then paid to take the chairlift up the hill to wander around a bit.
At the top of the chairlift, there was this fantastic bear sculpture built out of bike tires.
Closer to our campground, there were also various trails that we could walk through the National Park. One of them was the Summit trail that we took up while looking for the Nels Nelson trail.
We did end up, eventually, finding the Nels Nelson trail, which is named after a Norwegian-born Canadian ski jumper who lived in Revelstoke and is credited with bringing the sport to Canada. He was one of the world’s best ski jumpers in the 1920’s and and held the world record of 73 meters from 1925 to 1930. The trail is on the historic site of the first permanent ski jump in Canada, which was built in 1916.
This was the “A” jump, but they also had plaques showing where the “B” jump was, further down the hill, where the “women and boys” were expected to jump from.
We also drove out to see the Revelstoke Dam. It’s an impressive structure that spans across the Columbia River and was built between 1978 and 1983.
It’s 175m high and 457m long. It contains over 2 million cubic metres of concrete. To construct the dam, they built a concrete factory on site to combine the 500 tons of cement that arrived every day from Kamloops, with the aggregate that was mined 3kms south of the dam and transported through a system of tunnels and conveyor belts.
Some of the places we frequented in Revelstoke: Dose Coffee; The Modern Bakeshop and Cafe (for coffee and bread), Big Bend Cafe (a fantastic place for breakfast) and the Washateria (for doing our laundry).
From Revelstoke, we headed west to end up north of Kamloops, near McClure, for two weeks!