 |
|
|
|
The TCH is one of the world's great highways, and Hope
to Spences Bridge is surely one of its most spectacular
sections. You can almost sense the land still lifting,
long after the ice age, forcing the Fraser and Thompson
rivers to |
Hope to Spences Bridge
|
|
| cut deeper and deeper into their
canyons.Yale marks the transition from coastal influences
to the dry Interior. As soon as you cross the Alexandra
Bridge, you enter the rain shadow of the Coast Mountains.
The pronounced as you travel northward, through the Douglas-fir
Zone in the canyon (but still visibly flanked by moister
zones at higher elevations), until you reach Canada's
hot spot. Swinging east at Lytton, the TCH enters the
dramatic Thompson Canyon. Narrow and bone- dry, it provides
little room for human enterprise, let alone habitation.
Yet crammed at the bottom of the canyon are two national
railways, utilities, the TCH and the Thompson itself,
rushing to increase the Fraser's flow by half. As you
approach Spences Bridge, the dry Ponderosa Pine Zone,
here in its most basic form on the slopes above the river,
soon gives way to the even drier Bunchgrass Zone.
For much of the route between Hope
and its departure from the TCH at Lytton, the Fraser is
difficult to see and to reach. Yet every vantage point
of rock or beach along this turbulent stretch of water
has long been a traditional fishing spot for aboriginal
peoples. Carbon dating of artifacts indicates a history
of more than 9,000 years of fishing in this area. Sto:lo
people fish below Spuzzum; the Nlaka'pamux fish above.
They set short lengths of gill net along the edge of the
swirling current or use long-handled dip nets to scoop
up the salmon as they leap. The main prize is the sockeye.
The flesh of the salmon is etched with crosscuts, then
hung on racks to dry in the canyon's parched summer winds
--as early as possible, before the wasps and the flies
can take their share. You may be able to spot some drying
racks from the highway between Spuzzum and Boston Bar.
|
|
|
|
|
