Day 12, Thursday September 22nd

Hippies, invalids and ghost towns. Kaslo to New Denver

Kaslo

A very short trip today. In fact it would have been better if we had stayed in the same motel and done a round tip. Anyway, we have breakfast in the Tree House Café in town, within walking distance, where the locals meet, gossip and ask us where we come from. Everybody so far has been very inquisitive and very pleasant and helpful. A woman who looks like the mother of one of my friends, even hugs me when we leave the restaurant. The number of people with crutches or zeemer frames so far has been amazing, as well as the number of hippies, some mature and of our generation, some young. Our motel owner walks with a stiff leg, the café has some older customers who really have to drag themselves along on crutches, and also outside in the streets the number of people with disabilities strikes me as disproportionate. I feel I am walking in a Jeroen Bosch picture, full of colourful but somehow very different people.

Our motel in Kaslo

The town is very pleasant, situated on the lake and offers views of high mountain tops in the distance.  We walk along the shores, visit an art shop, and eventually pack up. Here as well we find artists, and many of them. I suppose this, like Nelson, is a place for hippies, artists and retired people.

Kaslo

The route we take to New Denver is beautiful. It follows the disused rail tracks along the winding creek. There are rapids, hillsides clad with dark pines, lakes and glimpses of tantalising high mountain tops, with blindingly white snow. This is a former mining district for gold, silver and nickel. Not much is left of the towns of that glory time, except for a few houses hidden among the new forest growth. There are several ghost towns around here, one along the road.

At Retallack, a ghost town

We turn off into a gravel road which leads to Sandon, which was a major town around 1900 with about 5000 inhabitants, three breweries, two different trains and five trams which went up the steep hillsides. It had a hotel and a number of brothels. The trees on the surrounding mountainsides were all felled and used to build the town. The creek which is still there, was guided through a wooden flume and covered by the wooden paving of the main street. The mines closed and people left the towns. The bare mountains sides were the cause of avalanches and floods. Fires, snow and the force of water destroyed the town in the long run. What is left now is just a museum in one of the old buildings, some original houses and buildings, and rusting machines and farmers tools.

Remains of the flume at Sandon

Plus a locomotive and some carriages of one of the old trains. In the nineteen fifties the last of the inhabitants left the town. It is difficult to visualise a booming and busy town here, as the flume has been destroyed by the floods and what remains of it is wreckage. The creek gurgles freely over big boulders and stones, not encaged by a flume. There is new forest growth where once were houses, shops and streets, as we see on pictures in the museum. What is horrible and spoils the atmosphere is a large number of old trams rusting away at Sandon and obstructing the view of what once was. It spoils everything and also proves that some organisation or somebody lacks any historical sense.

When we are ready to go back, after a failed attempt to reach a lookout point on Mount Idaho via a gravel road full of deep potholes and sharp stones, we go on to New Denver, which at one time also was a hippie stumping ground. However, the tiny town with its short main street seems totally deserted. Shops and café s are closed after the summer season, and there is nothing except two food markets and an outdoor clothing store which has beautiful things but is extremely expensive.

Lake at New Denver

We leave New Denver, but return when we see a nice motel as we are rather late anyway to catch the ferry across the lake. So it might be wiser to stay in New Denver. It takes a long time after we have rung the bell at the reception desk before someone answers our call. We see why when first one crutch appears, and then painstakingly another one on which a man is heavily leaning! Is it possible that one can only run a B&B with a broken or lame leg or artificial hips? It is our day for invalids. However, this nice motel with a view of the snow capped mountains is fully booked we are told. Funnily enough we do not see too many cars parked there, in fact just two or three. The owner points out another motel, an unusual one, with dome shaped cabins like gigantic acorns which are modern and very well equipped. However, the price exceeds the daily budget, so in the end the only option is a very basic motel run by Chinese people. Ironically it is called Valhalla Inn! It will have to do, but it means we have to eat out as there are no cooking facilities and there is not even a kettle. We buy groceries for tomorrow’s breakfast in two different stores, and decide to have a Chinese meal at the restaurant in the motel, which turns out to be the only restaurant in town at this time of year! When we open the menu, it appears to be very American, with burgers etc. In the end we eat egg rolls and soup, the only Chinese dishes available.  It clearly was a mistake not to stay in Kaslo or to go on to Revelstoke, for this town is completely dead.

We’ve been lucky with the weather today. There is some very light rain every now and then and the sky is very cloudy, but the temperature is rather high which is good. The website tells us that Revelstoke had rain today, but tomorrow things will be better with more sun. Later that evening we drink the cider we bought at Kaslo, and enjoy the last of the chips. Tomorrow is another day. It is exciting to realise that we are getting closer to the really high peaks and glaciers of the Rocky Mountains.