Construction of the Whitecourt Valleyview Cutoff, by W. C. F. Beattie

Transcription

1 Construction of the Whitecourt Valleyview Cutoff, by W. C. F. Beattie Following completion of construction on Highway 35 to the NWT boundary I went to the Edmonton office with Jack Church sometime in mid summer of I had been promoted to Senior Instrument Man during my time on the Mackenzie Highway and I stayed with Jack until the spring of We worked in the Edmonton office until we had completed the Finals for the contactors who had built and gravelled the Mackenzie highway and then went back out into the field on various survey and construction projects. These included survey of highway from Redcliffe- Medicine Hat, Bieseker- Three Hills, Blue Ridge-Whitecourt, Carrot Creek-Edson, and Barrhead-Fort Assinaboine. We also commenced grading from Barrhead to the Ferry crossing before winter shut us down in the fall of In the spring of 1950 Jack and my other superiors decided I was capable of running small construction projects on my own and I was sent to construct a new highway from Chipman to Mundare. This was a fairly simple project that involved paralleling the railway for a distance of approximately 15 miles and construction was with a good crew. I completed this job in early fall and was working in the Edmonton office to finalize the paper work when I was advised to go to a meeting with the deputy minister and chief construction engineer. Alex Frame (a dour Scotsman) who I had not previously met and Allen Bull who I had met. It was with great trepidation that I prepared for this meeting as I had always been told that anyone called into the corner office was in for a serious reprimand and possibly dismissal. I could not think of anything I had done wrong so reluctantly proceeded as requested. Alex Frame came directly to the point and stated we had to construct a highway from Whitecourt to Valleyview and I was the only engineer available with bush experience. They wanted me to commence the survey from Whitecourt as soon as possible. He stated that Allen Bull had rented a plane and flown from Whitecourt to Iosegen Lake along the old railway survey. (few people know that the railway from Edmonton- Grande Prairie had been surveyed on this route which extended up the Athabasca River approximately 30 miles and then more or less straight North past Iosegun Lake prior to WW 1. Some construction on this route had been done and some rail had even been laid north and west of Whitecourt. This rail was apparently pulled up during the war and used to make swords and guns. They then flew back over the Swan Hills and said that neither location was suitable so I would have to go somewhere through the middle. This left a pretty big window through totally un-surveyed territory. Alex said we want you to start on the South end and another crew will start on the North. Hopefully you will meet somewhere near Iosegun. They will have it pretty easy because they will follow the old railway survey to near Iosegun Lake. You on the other hand will be going through virgin un-surveyed territory. He was right after we crossed the Athabasca there was no sign anyone had ever been there before until we encountered a dog team trail near Iosegun Lake made by trappers Wes Reed and his wife. Alex said we have a new tool which should be a big help aerial photos. They haven t been used before for this purpose but they should be helpful. You have free access to any

2 personnel and equipment you require and the only condition we have is that you have 20 miles located, cleared, surveyed, designed, and ready to go to contract by April 1 st. Do you have any questions? I said yes sir, I was planning to get married at Christmas. Alex replied Well, it doesn t take long to get married so you can have a couple of days off. Good luck laddie and we ll see you in the spring With that the interview was over and I left with my head swimming. Here I was a 24 year old farm boy being given the largest project in the province. Little did I know that I would spend the best part of 5 years on this job, and that during that time 5 engineers would come and go on the North end. The first thing I did was get a map and find out where this place called Valleyview was. I knew where Whitecourt was from being there with Church. I then started to round up survey crews. One instrument man was Bill Mueller who was with me for the entire 5 years. I contacted Mike Craig, a government foreman who I had worked with on a previous job, and told him to move to Whitecourt with a full clearing crew and start building an ice bridge across the Athabasca as soon as it stopped flowing. Mike was a giant of a man and somewhat unorthodox but he got the work done. I arranged for a camp and cook and told her to prepare to stay isolated at spring time and take groceries accordingly. I arranged for a supply of dodge army jeeps for the crew and a nearly new Ford pickup for myself. I discussed the starting point with my supervisor Jack Lestor who was an old railway surveyor and we decided to start from the end of the earlier survey I had done with Church and cross the Athabasca below the confluence of the Athabasca and Macleod, about ½ mile downstream from Whitecourt. We moved our vehicle entourage to Whitecourt and found the river running slush and we could not cross. We set up camp in Whitecourt and started to do what surveying was necessary south of the river. Mike was busy trying to get an ice bridge started but wasn t progressing too well. Eventually we got enough ice to walk across and started survey on the north. I had picked a bridge site and had planned to follow a creek up the north side but this soon proved unworkable so I decided to abandon the survey Church and I had done to get into the river valley. The location we had established would have been adequate only as an access to Whitecourt but wouldn t provide a new highway. I therefore decided to cross the Macleod and the Athabasca and plan on a revised access to Whitecourt. I phoned Jack Lester and told him what I was planning that a bridge on the Macleod would at some time in the future be required, that we would have a shorter bridge on the Athabasca, and that I was sure we could get a better location into Whitecourt. He simply said you are doing it but don t forget you must have 20 miles ready to go by April So with that we took a bearing of the railway and headed North to this place called Valleyview. Mike was having trouble getting an ice bridge sturdy enough to carry his Cats and he finally decided he had enough ice to sloop them across but not to walk them. He got 2 long logs and some shorter ones and built a big stone boat. Then, with a pulley attached to a big tree on the first ride and hundreds of feet of cable he loaded the first cat

3 and we all held our breath until it made the trip. After that it was just a case of pulling the sloop back and forth until we had them all across. I then decided it was time to make use of these wonderful aerial photographs and plot our route. That was my first disappointment. The method was to take 2 adjoining pictures, lay them side by side under a stereoscope and move them until you got a third dimension relief. The theory was great but the photography wasn t as the pictures we taken at different angles and different altitudes and weren t what I had hoped for. I had though I could lay them out on the cookhouse table, pick out muskegs, creeks, hills, etc., draw a line on them and away we d go. It didn t work, although I used them to pick out some creek crossing etc., and we were back to the old system of running trial lines and walking miles every day ahead of the surveyors. Survey went fairly well until we got to chickadee creek and I pulled my first blunder. I had picked out a good creek crossing had the surveyors hand level through it- decided it would be OK, and told Mike to clear it before we had the detailed survey. Unfortunately when I started to design it wasn t OK and would have required 3000 Ft of 8% grade which was unacceptable. In those days we were using wooden bridges with a maximum elevation above stream bed of I believe 34 Ft. By this time Mike had cleared another mile or so and rather than abandon that I decided to put in 2 dog legs and got enough distance to get the necessary grade. This was know as Beattie s folly by many of my cohorts but I told them that some day the road would go straight through and it did when the highway was 4 laned. With the advent of large multi-plate culverts it became possible to get much greater fill heights. Just as an aside I installed the first 14 Ft. diameter culvert in the province south of Wanham in We were camped about 3 or 4 miles south of Chickadee Creek when we shut down for Christmas. I went to Edmonton on Dec. 21. We were married on Dec. 23 rd, went to Calgary on our honeymoon and had Christmas dinner with my Aunt, back to Edmonton on Boxing Day, hooked onto our mobile home with my father in law s one ton grain truck, and moved to Whitecourt. I had purchased this 18Ft. trailer in preparation for getting married and it had a wonderful new innovation propane heater. I had been accustomed to nothing but wood and coal heating up to that point and this seemed wonderful. Wrong propane gives off moisture and the first night the walls were dripping wet and the blankets were frozen to the wall. Some start for a marriage. Dorothy s mother had said when Dorothy told her we were getting married it s your bed, you ll have to lie in it and don t come back. Little did she know what kind of bed it was. It was only a short time later that one evening when the crews came in for supper that I learned one of the jeeps had frozen up and they had left it several miles from camp. After supper I took one of the instrument men, the cat skinner, and a 5 gallon can of gas and we went to retrieve it. We were going to thaw the carb with a blow torch so we placed the torch on the tailgate of my pickup (torches in those days had a priming cup below the burner which you filled with gas and lit. After the burner got warm you turned the gas on to it and it was supposed to light. It didn t light the first attempt so we

4 set it back on the tailgate and like 3 idiots we watched as I poured more gas into the cup from the 5 gallon can. Apparently there had been a small flame burning inside the tube which we didn t notice and the 5 gallon can blew burning gas over us all. We all dropped to the ground and pulled snow over our faces and got badly burned. I also lost my glasses and I could barely see without them but insisted on driving. To this day I m not sure how we got back to camp because the trail was barely passable for a pickup and I hit one bump so hard I bounced my 45 gallon barrel of gas out that I used for traction. When we got to camp we were a pretty sorry looking mess and my wife thought she had just lost her new husband. Luckily Bill Mueller had his old Chrysler in camp and got it started and took us to Mayerthorpe Hospital. The doctor there bandaged us up and the next morning we went to the U of A Hospital. I was off work for I believe about 3 weeks and was replaced by Earl Danchuk who I had worked with before. When I returned we finished up the 20 mile section we required, shut down camp, and worked in the Edmonton office preparing the contract. The 20 mile section was awarded to Western Construction and Lumber and following break-up we moved back to Whitecourt. Western Construction operated a ferry for their logging operations so as soon the river cleared up we crossed over their ferry. The crew went back to our camp but Dorothy and I stayed in Whitecourt. The weather was terrible and construction very slow. In the summer Jack Leslie said it would be a good idea if we rented some pack horses and see if we could ride through to approx. Iosegun Lake. This sounded like a good idea so I arranged for saddle horses and 2 pack horses from Western Construction and had them trucked to our camp at Chickadee Creek. I thought that Jack knew all about pack horses as he was an old railway surveyor and he though I did. Anyway, Jack and I and the four horses assembled at camp and we proceeded to get the pack saddles on the horses. I m sure the horses were amused at our attempts because there is a very proper way to throw a pack saddle, however we finally got the pack saddles on the horses backs and tied down in some kind of way that appeared would keep them there. We then saddled up our riding horses and took off. Jack said we will have to lead the pack horses, but I said they will follow us. All went well until we reached the end of where the right of way was cleared but once we got into the virgin forest things were different and we had to cut our way through the underbrush for the horses. I should have known we would have to cut a trail because I had walked through many miles and knew the windfall was so heavy you had to climb over or crawl under it. Anyhow the pack horses soon decided they had enough and turned around and headed home on the gallop. When running their feet were banging against the pack saddles and soon came loose and spilled our groceries, bedding, etc.. It was easy to follow them because our sliced bread left a very good trail. When we came to our bottle of Scotch we had taken for medicinal purposes we decided it was time to go home so much for that trip. Jack returned to Edmonton.

5 I had an office man who had been taking flying lessons at the Edmonton Flying Club and had obtained his passenger carrying permit just before coming to work for me. After our failed pack horse trip he suggested that if I would pay for the plane rental and gas we could drive to Edmonton, rent a plane, and fly over the proposed route to Iosegun Lake area. I had never been in an airplane up to that time but it seemed like a good idea so we picked a time, drove to Edmonton, and rented a Fleet Canuck plane that had a terrible smell of gas in the cabin. We flew back to Whitecourt and then over the proposed location. In winter of we continued surveying and moved camp to Iosegun River. Dorothy worked at Mayerthorpe Hospital and came to camp on weekends. On one weekend I picked her up in Whitecourt along with a load of camp groceries but we encountered a bad snowstorm and finally could go no further. I shovelled until I got tired and decided we should have something to eat. Dorothy didn t know what we could eat but I built a fire, got bacon, eggs, and bread from the supplies, and using the shovel as a frying pan we had a delicious meal. She is possibly the only engineer s wife who has eaten bacon and eggs out of a scoop shovel. About the time we finished our supper Bill Mueller thought we were having trouble so he arrived with a jeep and we made it back to camp. I took my holidays in February and Dorothy and I flew to Windsor to pick up a new 1952 Dodge car. While I was gone I was replaced by Bob Cronkhite who later became the Deputy Minister of our department and a good friend of ours. We met the other surveyors from the north and tied our surveys together at the first curve south of what is now Fox Creek as planned. We moved camp back to Chickadee and spend the rest of the winter with office work, looking after the clearing crew, etc.. Once the rivers froze over we were marooned for several weeks until it was safe to cross on the ice. During this time the only method of crossing the river was in the basket suspended from the ferry cable. This of course was very obsolete by present standards and consisted of climbing up the ladder on the side of the tower, climbing into the basket which was probably 5 long, 3 wide, and with 4 sides, untying the rope which held the basket to the tower and then let go. You went to beat hell until you got to the middle of the river and then had to pull yourself up to the other tower. I never could get Dorothy to use it. This was not the greatest method of getting to town, but there was no alternative if you wanted to go. There could be problems such as somebody else wanting to go the other way while you were in town- then you had to hope someone would make the return trip or you were marooned in town. We awarded the first grading contract for 20 miles to Western Construction and they commenced grading on both sides of the Athabasca River and we camped at Chickadee Creek for 2 years. Weather was lousy and very little construction was completed. We kept the camp at Chickadee and supervised the clearing and whatever surveying needed to be done. The following spring was no improvement over the previous year and again

6 the weather did not allow much progress however we prepared and let an additional 20 mile section for grading, gravel, etc. This contract was won by an unknown contractor Rundle Construction. They moved into Two Creeks with a limited number of pieces of new equipment, flashy camp, etc. and they very soon bogged down in the mud like Western Construction and it became obvious that this was a new experience. They apparently had traded 2 draglines for 2 tournapulls and 2 bulldozers and had absolutely no road building experience. I had moved our camp to Two Creeks and remained to be our home site for the balance of our five years on this project. It very soon became apparent they were not road constructors and we cancelled their contract and we retendered with Western Construction winning the balance of approximately 30 miles. This made a great deal of work to establish a fair payment for both Rundle and Western. The times when we were totally isolated from the outside world were pretty difficult for Dorothy and the only female companion was our camp cook. I kept trying to convince her that the experience was something rich Americans would give their eye teeth for but she never became convinced. From my standpoint I thought it was an opportunity of a lifetime, but she didn t buy it. I have no idea why 5 engineers worked on the North end which was much easier surveying and construction. By the fall of 1952 I had the survey completed, designed, and ready to go to contract so I suggested to Jack Lester that rather than moving into the Edmonton office I could locate a new route into Whitecourt. He agreed this was a good idea and we moved into Mayerthorpe where Dorothy was considerably happier. We located what is now the highway from Mayerthorpe to Whitecourt and prepared to move back to Two Creeks. Prior to moving to Two Creeks we went to Edmonton, traded in our little trailer, and bought a huge mobile home 41 X 8. We moved to Two Creeks where I installed running water (a 100 gallon tank on a stand), sewer system (hole under the trailer), and a light plant. We were camped right on the creek and it was not a big project to keep Dorothy s running water and she was much happier. By now we had the Athabasca and Macleod bridges partially finished and were no longer isolated. This made Dorothy much happier but I missed the solitude. Why the 5 engineers all disliked the north end I will never know and they missed the satisfaction of an accomplishment rather than widening an existing road on a road allowance. We continued construction until we tied into the survey from the north and had a happy celebration. We then completed the necessary work to allow the field work required to finalize the contracts and moved into the Edmonton office. I kept my office man and instrument man to help me with the final details to allow final contractor payments and close out a 5 year project. The other crew members were given well deserved holidays until other work was available. My crew was highly regarded in the Dept. and it was only a short time until we sent on another bush job, albeit much simpler than the previous one. This was somewhat of a disappointment to Dorothy who thought we were finally to spend some time in

7 civilization, however it was not too bad. We were loaned to the Air Force to locate and build a road from the Cold Lake Airbase to their bombing range at Crimson Lake a distance of approximately 35 miles. We moved into Cold Lake and found a primitive campsite but very friendly spot where I thought we were settled for probably a year or so but this turned out to be my mistake. The campsite was very primitive by current standards but very liveable and friendly. The washroom was an outdoor building where you went in and bolted the door, fumbled around for a light bulb in a socket, reached up to the ceiling until you found a bare set of wires, and got light if you were lucky. The whole campsite was very similar to this but it was an improvement from where we had been. The owner and his wife were very friendly and if anything were overly friendly and he would walk into the kitchen and check to see what you were having for dinner. The owner and his wife were friendly with two commercial fishermen who lived near by and we soon had a chance to go commercial fishing when the season opened. Never having commercial fished before I jumped at the chance, and with my crew not needing my help at the time the season opened I bought a license along with a young girl whose husband was stationed on the Air Base and the manager of the trailer camp and the commercial fishing operator and we went ice fishing as a new experience for myself and the new girl. We bought a new net and licenses when the season opened and tried the new experience which proved not to be comfortable by we caught and sold enough fish to pay for the nets and licenses. So much for our experiment. The clearing and surveying was progressing without help very little as I had a very competent crew and I had time for extra activities such as fishing. In early spring I was called into Edmonton office and advised I was being moved to Cochrane to replace the engineer who was having problems with the Indians on the Trans Canada Highway and I was replaced by Jim Newnham. I was rather disturbed by the move because several engineers had been having problems with the Indians through the reserve and I would be leaving a plum of a job for a troublesome project however a job was a job and I prepared to move. I had never met Jim but found him to be very likeable and liked to fish. Jim moved to Cold Lake a few days before we moved to Cochrane and by now we had struck up a friendship and I borrowed a 14 ft boat and 25 HP motor from our commercial fisherman friend and skirted around the ice which was moving out and travelled approximately 30 miles. We fished all day and had the boat nearly full when we got home. It was not very smart. We then moved to Cochrane where we had a fairly eventful summer when we had our first son and a fairly busy summer. There was nothing to do during the winter so I was moved to Red Deer to locate a by-by-by-pass around the city. If you want to be the most hated engineer in the town.