Ted Burns

Bob Burns

November 6th, 2018

Remembering Bob Burns

There are five people named Bob Burns in this family.

The first Bob Burns was one of the three lads that came over to Canada from Scotland in 1880. He is my cousin Bob’s grandfather. He lived in the Parry Sound region of Ontario then briefly in Nelson and finally in Humboldt Saskatchewan where he died in 1928.

The next Bob Burns was my father’s brother who was born in 1911 and drowned in Lake Athabasca in 1933. Uncle Bob was a geologist on a prospecting expedition when his canoe swamped. He was with two classmates from the Colorado School of Mines who also perished..

Then there is the subject of this note: my cousin Bob born in 1942 and died in a motorcycle accident in 2017.

The fourth is Gordon and Ramona Burns son Bob born in 1933. My only memory of him is how he defeated a character called the Lion who was supposed to be unbeatable. The Lion travelled with a fair and anyone who could stay in the ring for five minutes with him won one hundred bucks. Bob lived in his own space above the garage at Gordon and Ramona’s and I figured that was the coolest thing. He was a big, strong fellow (as the Lion discovered). He died in an auto accident at Christina Lake in 1959. He and his wife Irene had two boys: Gary and Gordie.

Then there is the subject of this note: my cousin Bob who was born in 1942 and killed in a motorcycle accident at Green Lake in 2017.

The fifth is my brother Robert Michael who was born in 1954 and only lived for a day.

Cousin Bob moved around quite a bit but we were always in contact more or less. He was in Nelson in the 1940’s and 50’s for at least some of the time. They lived on High Street and in Upper Fairview where as a little boy, Bob fell off his porch into a patch of stinging nettles. His Dad was Don Burns who slung beer at the Royal Hotel and sold furniture in Nelson. The war was not kind to his Dad who was a hard drinker. His mother May was a saint with unlimited patience which I am sure she needed every ounce of.

In the 1950’s, Little League baseball came to Nelson. Bob played for the Kiwanis team and pitched the first game. He was a long, tall fellow with a good arm. Bob and I rode our bikes around town and did a fair bit of swimming in those days but before long he was off to Calgary and I usually only saw him in the summers.

He and his family which by that time included his brother Doug would show up across the lake in their little Austin car and Don would unload a few cases of beer. He and my dad would sit on the front porch and down a few as Don lectured my brother Tom and I on the length of our hair. The family stayed at Lymbery’s cabins at Grey Creek and visited friends around Nelson, Ainsworth and Kaslo .

In the late fifties, Bob acquired a 1937 Chev and visited Nelson on his own in the summer of 1959. My folks had moved to California by that time and I wanted no part of it so I went to Calgary with Bob intending to join the army as he had done. I stayed with Bob’s family and got o know Calgary a bit. We visited the Kananaskis Valley and fished the Bow River but in the end the Army would not take me so it was California on the bus.

Bob thrived in the Army as a member of the Queen’s Own Rifles. He was stationed in Germany as part of a NATO force from 1960 t0 1962. In 1966 he joined the Calgary Police Service. As a rookie cop, one of his first tasks was to try and save a lady from a beating by her husband or boy friend. No sooner has he subdued the guy than the lady clubbed him with her purse and put him out of commission. In 1970 Bob got back to BC and joined the Delta Police Department. One of h is first jobs was to attend the terrible accident where a Russian ship rammed a BC Ferry near Active Pass. The ferry “looked like it was opened with a can opener’ said Bob. A lady who remained in her car on the lower deck was killed. Bob got married to a girl named Carol when he was in Calgary and I didn’t see much of him. They had two boys – Sean and Michael – who I met when they were young but haven’t seen since although Bob sometimes told me of how they were getting on.

After he and Carol split, he sometimes came over to Lantzville where I was holed up. I sometimes went over to visit Doug and him. Bob had bought a silver Corvette and we cruised around Vancouver looking for girls and drank at the Joe Capp bar on Broadway. Doug was working for DFO on marine patrols and got lots of time off so he was ready to party but our partying days didn’t last long.

Bob married Franca about then and helped start the Delta Police Band which took him to many places. He was the drum major and was really quite stunning in his dress and bearing.

Bob and Franca had a fine life together. They had two great kids – Bobby (the sixth Bob) and Michelle. They had some great houses and a camp at Green Lake. Franca was an avid hiker and Bob enjoyed fishing and hunting. The only real down incident was Doug’s death in 2007.

They had some great trips including one to Italy where they visited Franca’s family. Barbara and I went to their Green Lake Camp to cross country ski one winter and Bob and Franca sometimes rode their bike to Chilliwack to visit. Bob loved motor cycle trips and that is what killed him. They were close to home at Green Lake when a pick – up driver took his eyes off the road to reach for a water bottle on the floor and rammed into Bob and Franca. Franca was pretty beat up but recovered but that was the end for Bob.

Bob as a police band drum major.

May with Bob and I at Ainsworth.

Bob relaxing after a trip to Sydney.

Bob and I at the Blue Top Motel in Nelson.

Barbara, Franca and I at Green Lake

Doug as a grandfather.

Bob, Franca, Shannnon, Bobby, Michelle and Ryan.

Bob’s friend Les Blaney said Bob’s bike was his mistress. He loved his bike.

Big Bob and Little Ted – Chilliwack 2016.

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A Very Worthy Place

September 11th, 2018

LAKE COWICHAN – A VERY WORTHY PLACE

It must have been in the spring of 1969 – a spring that followed a very tough winter – one of BC, s strongest ever. The old road still meandered up to the Lake and the Black Cat Café was the downtown hotspot. The Riverside beer parlor was full on Friday and Saturday nights and logger fights sometimes spilled out onto the street. Lake Cowichan was a forestry town then as it still is but it was going at a much stronger pace. The mills at Youbou and Honeymoon Bay were still fully engaged and logging was booming –literally. The lake was full of boomed logs and the shores were laced with debris. Cowichan Lake was not the super clean lake of water skiers and boaters that it is today.
I had been living in Victoria after myself and fellow biologist Ian Smith left Nanaimo. Ian stayed working for the Fish and Wildlife Branch while I signed up with the BC Lands Branch with a group of land use specialists working with Jon Secter. We provided advice on applications for Crown land Use and I served on several special committees such as Mines Reclamation, Pacific Estuaries and Linear Developments like roads and pipelines.
I stayed at Ian’s place at Esquimalt Lagoon for awhile then moved to a fine old house on Fern Street to be with my pals from Nelson. Ross and Rod McKay were there along with Jack Carpenter and Jim Thast. Also on hand were some of Victoria’s finest such as Ken Smithers. Dave Fisher, Carl Swantje, John Block and James Campbell Moore. Rob Falls came over from Burnaby and Terry Andrews from Trail put in a few shifts. We frequented downtown saloons like the Beaver and the Drake, had Cougars season tickets and biked and hiked around the South Island. It was a very good group but it couldn’t last because our houses kept being torn down. The first place was the beautiful heritage home on Fern Street built by former premier John Oliver in 1918. The owner was a developer who told us the house was likely to go. He gave us a good deal on the rent and rented us another house nearby but it came down too.
I stayed with a friend for a few weeks then high tailed it to Lake Cowichan. I found a little cedar house with a south aspect and a nice view of Big Mesachie Mountain. I worked on the Cowichan Estuary Task force trying to find ways to reduce log storage and other intrusive uses on the estuarine ecosystem. The government had permitted a large sawmill to establish where a smaller mill had operated and hoped that the extra needs could be somehow accommodated by more careful planning and operation. It was a difficult fit at best.
Not long after I arrived at the Lake, I was visited by a group from the Cowichan Lake Salmonid Enhancement Society: Leo Nelson was the president and Earle Darling and Art Watson were directors.
Earle was the village mayor and very adept at drawing funding. Art was a teacher and expert on the Cowichan Watershed. The society had some outstanding projects just getting underway and it was evident that there were many more to be documented. At that point I vowed to take on a mission that had been dancing around me for decades – a holistic inventory of fish habitat and enhancement opportunities in an important watershed in BC. Many claimed the Cowichan was the best known river system in BC but, in truth, very little was known. I had just returned from a cross – Canada tour to assess the level of anticipatory planning by DFO and was often told “we don’t have much here but they are on top of the Cowichan in BC”. I had experienced something similar when I went down to Nanaimo to work with the BC Fish and Wildlife Branch. I was looking forward to working in an area where a lot of information was available on the lakes and streams especially maps showing where fish were present. There was nothing other than some dusty old rolled up cadastral maps with nothing on them except a few lot boundaries. Much of my time was spent working on fish distribution maps for the Van Isle Region. I could see that documenting fish habitat in the Cowichan basin was going to take some time as well. In fact it took me more than 20 years.

In the mean time the society had lots of more immediate and ongoing work to get on with.
Beaver Creek is a small, over mature stream that flows some 2.5 kilometers from small lake of the same name to Cowichan Lake. It passes through a lovely forest corridor and the backyards of Lake Cowichan and most of all; it was Leo Nelson’s neighborhood creek. He had noticed a few trout and salmon fry in his wanderings but also noted that they were gone in a few weeks because the stream, except for a few pools, dried up. The channel was also filled with muck and debris and beavers had been having they’re way with it- it would be a struggle for fish to get through the dams and masses of old logging junk.
So Leo, not one to fiddle, took a backhoe to the channel and pulled out tons of muck and debris. We were assisted by Trevor Morris our DFO community adviser who was also not a fiddler. We went on to construct a smolt release – flow control dam at the outlet of Beaver Lake and add habitat features such as pools and spawning gravel to the creek. We also added a trail and some bridges. In good years, the creek has coho returns of 600 or more and our group is still not finished. We constructed an inlet to Beaver Lake we call Jim’s Creek after Jim Humphries of Beaver Lake Resort. It also gets a very healthy return and cutthroats from Beaver Lake also use it. A headwater marsh we call Fairservice Lake is waiting to be impounded as it was in the early days of Lake Cowichan when it provided power for the village. Water storage at Fairservice Lake would deliver additional needed water to Beaver, Jim’s and Halfway Creek and more or less complete our efforts on Beaver.
Our society operates a fry salvage program for local streams that are good producers but dry extensively in summer. We are often able to rescue more than 100,000 fry and relocate them to safe habitat. This is an ongoing program started by DFO in the 1930’s but it had lapsed before we took it on with Cowichan Tribes who salvage the Lower Cowichan and tributaries such as Glenora Creek. Fry salvage was intended for students and many were introduced to fish biology and environmental stewardship by the program.
Education is another objective of the society and we think we do it pretty well. Teachers invite our input to their classes and we go as often as possible, we have been part of the popular DFO program Salmonids in the Classroom for nearly our whole existence and kids come out on fry salvage and adult counts from time to time. We also have a “Fisheries Trail” near a school and kids chip in with riparian planting. One of our members has a demonstration watershed where students can see the effects of different land surfaces on run off. We also have a small hatchery in a building we constructed with the Lions Club. We do a few thousand coho eggs each year along with some chum salmon.
Of course, habitat improvement and protection are our prime mandates. We and other public involvement groups in the Greater Cowichan Region have some 618 pages and 500 projects to work our way through in the plan I undertook when I became involved. That will take awhile.
After Beaver Creek and our hatchery were up and running, we started working on the Robertson River system which is a good producer but suffers from unstable winter flows and extensive summer drying. It has a groundwater fed side channel that was simply outstanding and drew bus loads of students from Nanaimo and Victoria to see swarms of coho navigate a creek one could almost jump across. The fish attracted plenty of eagles and bears as well. It was a real circus. However, its channel had filled to the point where the water table no longer reached the surface except for a few times in high winter runoff. The creek was shutting down. When we did our spawner surveys, all we found were pits where raccoons had dug up dead eggs in the dry channel. We removed some 45,000 cubic metres of sand-gravel overburden from the channel. Flow resumed and the fish came back. We even had more than 10,000 chum salmon one year and learned that way back in the old times that Cowichan Elders called Robertson Side channel Qualicum Creek because of the chums. They told us it was a favorite place for the elders to fish because the chums were somewhat soft and easier to eat than those further down. Our group also did a few years of chums in the hatchery with the goal of increasing them in Cowichan Lake tributaries thus improving lake productivity with the input of additional nutrients from the carcasses.

In conjunction with our friend Ted Harding who was working with Hancock Timber, we created several channels and rearing ponds on Meade and Sutton Creeks. These have all survived and are producing well. One needs to be very careful about any floodplain enhancement on the coast because floodplain means just that. A lot of money and effort has been put into channels that have completely washed away.
Another channel we created on the Robertson was designed for winter refuge. We put in lots of cover logs with root wads and planted willows and alder for overhang cover. It has produced well but is constantly being colonized by beavers that enjoy our riparian planting.
Our little group has taken on some thirty fish habitat improvement projects over the years and most have fared very well. When the Salmon Enhancement Program was first proposed in the 1970’s,DFO engineers had a strong grip on the wheel and things were headed toward more hatcheries and spawning channels with emphasis on big numbers and fast returns. But some had other ideas. I recall Dick Harvey (then manager of the Big Qualicum River project) and I attended a SEP information session in Victoria and spoke up for more natural enhancement and the involvement of conservation groups. We left with the feeling that our input was not considered to be very important. Looking back now, it is evident that public involvement is clearly one of the most important components of the Salmon Enhancement Program – indeed. I doubt that anything Dick or I said had anything to do with it. No one ever imagined that there would be so much fervor for the idea. It was a tide that could not be stemmed and has almost created a sub-culture of environmentalism. It has certainly provided a positive outlet for the energy of action oriented people like Leo Nelson. The resource has a whole new community of dedicated workers that stand up for the fish in every way they can
Looking back over the life of our group to date, the most satisfying thing for me is that we were able to change the language on the environment. When I first began living at The Lake, it felt like local governments had the attitude that any development was a very good thing and should be accommodated with gusto. People were not giving the valley the value it deserved, there was the notion that why would these big time developers be interested in our little backwater so we should not discourage them. They simply did not realize what they had and that someday developers would be crawling over each other to get a hold on Cowichan property especially along the lake or river. Our members attended lots of hearings and spoke to local government members and other community groups as often as we could to help turn the corner. I wrote a periodic newspaper column on fish and the environment. We were especially proactive about Cowichan Lake. It was becoming evident to us that people had changed dramatically in their aspirations for lake shore living. Where a decade or so back people were content with a small house or cottage, a wharf and maybe a rowboat or canoe and lived at ‘summer camp’ for a few months a year; the new people were not content with that. They wanted a large house, lots of pavement, a 500 channel TV and a roaring ski boat. Many also wanted to chop any brush and plant a lawn they could mow to the water’s edge. The Better Homes and Gardens crowd was coming and parts of the lake were looking more like California subdivisions rather than rural BC lakeshores. We mailed information packages to every lakeshore property owner and visited many and the province brought in The Riparian Areas Regulation but we still found it hard to convince people that a natural lakeshore was much more beautiful and beneficial than a manicured and artificial shore. To this day, we still struggle with this but the tide is gradually turning. The privatization of the South Island began some 160 years ago with the massive E&N Land Grant and this has made it more difficult to protect what should be public riparian shores but our efforts have gone a long way to convince people that lake and river shores are some of the most valuable lands in the province and development around them should only be done with the greatest care if at all. And if you are fortunate to live on a shore, cherish and protect it instead of trying to turn it into an urban landscape.
I still have my little cedar house in Lake Cowichan and hope to hang onto for a few more years so I can still enjoy the wonders of that oh so worthy place. The great mayfly hatches in the late spring and early summer, the sight of the lovely pastoral Cowichan River coursing through the town, swimming at the Duck Pond and Little Beach, tubing down the river and walking downtown on Friendship Trail.
Lake Cowichan, think of yourself as the best place to live on the BC Coast because you are most certainly are and make others believe that it is great privilege so they will keep it what it is as long as possible.

Tags: great places
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Lifetime Gift

September 9th, 2018

A LIFETIME GIFT
It was probably around 1952 when my father took me to my first hockey game. It was at the old Civic Center Arena in beautiful Nelson, BC, the Queen City of the Kootenays. And it was something I’ll never forget.
We walked down the long flight of stairs into a rink pulsing with noise and color. It was pure excitement. The snow white ice and the green and white uniforms of the Nelson Maple Leafs clashing with the orange and black of their arch rival Trail Smoke Eaters. This was top flight senior hockey of The Western International Hockey League (WIHL) that also included teams from Kimberley and Spokane and sometimes Cranbrook, Rossland and Columbia Valley. In those days there were no junior leagues and only six NHL teams. There were minor pro leagues like the WHL and AHL but players were not paid much and WILH teams often offered solid jobs that were highly valued. Trail had the Cominco Smelter and Kimberley had the Sullivan Mine. Spokane was a real city with lots of work. Nelson didn’t have a lot of work but it was a great town and attracted some good players. Indeed.
Our seats were across the rink on the north side and we crossed behind the Trail net to get there. As we went by players slammed into the screen and ice chips flew into the air and grazed my face. Sweat was mixed in and you could hear the players grunting and cursing. The puck went out to the blue line and was slammed off the screen with great force. I was shocked at the speed and intensity of this game and still marvel about it.
I can recall some of the players from that night. John Sofiak was the Trail goal tender and Bruno Pasqualotto was one of his defenseman. I remember Glen Smith, Don Appleton and Ernie Gare from the Leafs. Bill Haldane, Johnny Harms and Lee Hyssop were also playing around that time and were great forwards. Red and Fritz Koehle were stand outs and Gordy Howe’s brother Vic was also a Leaf. Abe Howe, their father claimed that Vic was the better player. I guess he didn’t know hockey that well. But Lester and Frank Patrick did. They also played in Nelson in the earlier days as did their sister Dora. Joe Patrick, their Dad had a lumber mill at Crescent Valley out in the Slocan west of Nelson. He might have known my Great Uncle Harry Burns who had a mill then a Tree Farm License at Passmore just up the valley. Uncle Harry was a great fan of the Leafs and always gave me a quarter when I saw him at the games. My Mom and Dad went to a few games and were friends with some of the players like Ernie Gare and Johnny Harms. Bill Vickers who had played earlier lived nearby and he and his family were friends. Mary Vickers used to come creek fishing with us and Terry and Lorraine, their kids were pals with my brother Tom and sister Kathleen. Mary was also Betty Olsen’s sister. Betty was a close friend from Ainsworth and a second mother to the Burns Kids. My mother was a very excitable fan and tended to get a bit wild. One night Bobby Kromm, a hated Trail player who later coached the Smokies to a world championship and coached in the NHL, was felled by a crunching hit and lay bleeding on the ice. My Mother egged on by her friend Marie Stangherlin, jumped up and screamed “I hope you die Kromm’’. I tried to hide but there was no place. Kromm was definitely not liked but he coached the Leafs almost to an Allan Cup one year.
Emotions ran high in the WIHL and there were some players that you loved to hate. Gord Andre of Kimberley was a giant and as rough as they came. Who can forget Tom Hodges of Spokane and Terrible Ted Lebioda? Nelson had Vic Lofvendahl who could but you right through the boards and Con Madigan played for the Leafs in 1958 and was rookie of the year in the NHL one year believe it or not. He never garnered a vote for the Lady Byng.
There was hockey in Nelson way back in the 1890’s. Old time players like Archie Bishop, Joe Thompson, Si Griffiths and the O’Genski brothers were stars. Harold Chapman played in the early years. In the 1960’s I slung beer at the Queens Hotel in Nelson. Harold lived upstairs and would come down for a shaky morning beer to get the day going. The West Kootenay Region is the cradle of BC Hockey and Nelson, Kaslo and Rossland got it started.
There was a senior league in the Okanagan in the 1950’s that rivaled the WIHL. Penticton, Vernon, Kelowna and Kamloops had some very good teams and there were some outstanding games between the two leagues. The playoffs of 1954 featured the Nelson Maple Leafs and Penticton Vees led by the Warwick brothers: Grant, Bill and Dick. Grant had played for the New York Rangers and coached the Vees. Clare Palmer and I camped out overnight for tickets and witnessed the most exciting hockey anyone has ever seen. Nelson had the Vees on the ropes and needed only a tie to cinch the series. In game seven the Leafs were trailing by one goal with about ten minutes to go. They had the puck in the Vees end for nearly the whole time. We were seated at the Vees blue line and watched Nelson’s Mickey Maglio hammer shot after shot off every part of Vees stick man goalie Ivan McClelland’s battered body. McClelland won the game for them and the Vees went on to win the world championship in Germany.
The Okanagan Senior League kind of petered out after that and was replaced by the BC Junior Hockey League but the WIHL soldiered on and entered a new era featuring younger players but just as exciting hockey.
Ernie Gare, a Leaf stalwart of the fifties started a scholarship program at Notre Dame University, a Catholic college in Nelson. Skiers and hockey players signed up and some outstanding results developed. Rossland’s Nancy Green won a World Cup and the Leafs became a powerhouse. Players like Murray Owen, Bill Steinke and Buck Crawford came down from Kamloops and other players filtered in from the prairies and joined some great local players like Don Holmes, Mike Laughton, Hugh Hooker and Howie Hornby. The Leafs won a couple of Savage Cups and came close to the Allen Cup but lost it in Sherbrooke, Quebec to a powerhouse team.
Like many Kootenay kids, I tried my hand at hockey and played at the bantam level. Tom Ramsay and Gary Kilpatrick were my close friends and played on the same team. Tom and I were third line slugs but Gary was a star. His Dad was a Leaf hero and won a gold medal while playing for Britain in the 1936 Olympics. He was the youngest player on that team. Mack Macadam was our coach and I was glad to get some playing time. I have a disease that prevented me from metabolizing glucose for energy so I really could not get up to speed and became so tired that one time I had to crawl back to the bench. My highlight was scoring a goal in Trail when I fell in the corner and everyone started back down the ice. The puck was whacked back to my corner as I got up and was not off side. I grabbed the puck, skated in front of the Trail net and snuck in a backhander much to the chagrin of some Trail fans who had been heckling me for the entire game. I think it was the only goal I ever scored. Gary Kilpatrick went on to play pro and finished his career in Nelson coaching and playing for the Leafs.
In 1987 the WIHL folded its tent for the last time. Junior Hockey in the form of the Kootenay International Junior League came in and has been OK. Trail joined the BCHL while Cranbrook and Spokane are in the new WHL, which is now a major junior league. Kimberley is in the KIJHL with a number of smaller Kootenay and Interior towns.
A lot of us dearly miss the old WIHL where the players got 20 bucks a game, often drove their own cars on road trips and drank more than a few beer parlors dry but oh did they play. Seeing those games was the gift of a lifetime.

Tags: 0ld time hockey
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Lord Stanley’s Steelhead

August 31st, 2018

STANLEY CUP STEELHEAD

There can be no finer time and place than spring on the South Island. It starts very slowly in James Bay gardens when the first snowdrops poke up in January. Out in the nearby woods listen for the tin whistle of the varied thrush and look for the Indian Plum buds. On the rocky hills of Thetis Lake Park will be Satin Flower, Blue Eyed Mary and Spring Gold. Winters on the South Island are usually quite mild and not too hard to take but spring is still much appreciated – indeed. I sometimes imagine a great satellite image of the province that starts to light up with spring. First the rims of the South Island: Victoria, Cowichan Bay, Nitinat Lake, and St. Andrews Church Yard in Nanaimo. Then Delta and on out the Fraser Valley and into the Southern Interior at Places like Osoyoos and Creston. By that time the lights are coming on strong and everyone is starting to feel some light and color.
By mid April on the South Island there is the green mist of alders. In the river valleys, some salmonberry blossoms and even some early showings of Dogwood in the canyons of the Chemainus River will be thrilling people who notice such things. Most steelheaders will be starting to pack away their gear and thinking of breaking out the trout tackle. Even the summer steelhead aficionados will take a break. But not all. There are few real fish hawks that know a spring run of fresh steelhead comes in long after the winter runs are done and gone. A surprising number of streams get a few fish and even enough that could be classed as a small run. But they are usually on the verge of spawning and shouldn’t be bothered. The males are often aggressive and easily caught with a flashing spoon.
Ted Harding Senior was an angler who knew the spring runs. Ted was a mentor to a number of Nanaimo area steelheaders including his son, Ted junior. I once fished with Ted Senior and Mike Prey on the Big Qualicum River. I had spotted a steelhead lying beneath a big cedar stump that overhung the river. If you snuck up and peered between the roots, you could see the fish clearly. Ted went upstream and drifted a piece of roe held up by a float right to the fish. You could tell she saw it and was going to take it when she shifted her position just a tad and her pectoral fins started to quiver. As the bait came, she openened her mouth and sucked it in only to spit it out in the blink of an eye. No signal went up the line and the float did not move at all. That was a lesson I would not forget and I kept a hook sharpening stone with me at all times thereafter I think many steelhead just gently mouth the lure or bait to test it and get hooked when the current is fast and they catch the hook a bit when they try and spit it out. If the angler is fortunate he feels something and tries to set the hook. If it’s sharp, bang!
It was Ted Harding Senior who told me about the spring fish in the Chemainus. “Mother’s Day Steelhead, I call them” he said. “Wait until then before you try them.”
Of course, I didn’t wait and was prowling the river in April hoping to find an early fish or two. I was not alone. Ted Harding Junior was often there too. He had a little boat he put in at Four Mile near Banon Creek Falls and took out near the highway. The river was so beautiful and the promise of a good fish was there so it simply was not possible to wait while the sun warmed the canyons and the dogwoods painted the landscape. But I never caught a fish in April despite some frequent, prolonged efforts. I fished from below the highway to well up in the rough canyons – nothing and that went on for years. I learned a lot and found some good trails to places I was sure held fish at times but I neither caught nor saw any. I would go so far as to wait at Copper Canyon falls which stop all fish except steelhead. I hoped I would see one leaping at the falls but I never did. After a few years, I wondered if the fish were still there. Summer swimmers would call me “saw some steelhead in the Forestry Pools” they would tell me. I would head down with mask and snorkel and see a dark kelt or two. Years back when I worked for the BC Fish and Wildlife Branch, I spent a lot of time working with the Cooper Canyon loggers because the upper river had been trashed and I needed them to change course. I remember Tibor Jando, Tom DeBozy, John Phillips and Cougar Clem Ingram as some of the M and B guys who knew the river up around camp. They told me they sometimes saw groups of steelhead in the upper river. But I never did. I must have stopped the Boulder Creek Pool a hundred times.
One year in the 1970’s, I swam upstream from Four Mile to Copper Canyon Falls. The river was crystal clear. It was famous for that before the loggers went wild. Trevor Green sometimes told me that he had never seen a river so clear. He said the Cowichan used to be like that before they started booming in Cowichan Lake. Trevor was a well respected historian and naturalist who lived in Lake Cowichan from around 1912 until his death in 2009.
I kept careful notes of the swim. I saw lots of resident rainbow/juvenile steelhead
Including some good sized fish of twelve inches or more, some of them had distended stomachs from feeding on caddis larvae. I could see the outlines of the gravel cases pushing the fish stomach walls. After swimming for about an hour, I came to a place so deep I could not see bottom. Suddenly a massive fish came out of the depths and sped up to the pool head where he crowded under a ledge. It was an early run Chinook salmon. I had forgotten these rare giants were still around. Quite a number of Island Rivers have them – Nanaimo, Cowichan and Puntledge to name a few. David Groves of Westholme has a small hatchery dedicated to keeping the Chemianus early spring salmon going.
It was exciting to see the big spring and I was glad for it but there were no steelhead. Later that year, I took the mask and snorkel along and poked into some more hidden holes in the canyon reaches. Some were breathtakingly beautiful and I was sure I would find some fish tucked away in a deep green pool. I had some great swims and found some lovely places but there were no steelhead.
I halted my search in the early 1990.s. The Copper Canyon logging road was gated and security guards made life miserable for people trying to access the river. I was still in the process of my inventory of Cowichan area fish habitat and used to go up beyond camp and spend a few days in my camper as I completed the work. “Not permitted” said the guards. For awhile I went in via Widow Creek, a backdoor route near Youbou that was tenuous at best but it washed out as did a portion of the mainline above Rheinhart Creek. I even found a way in from Mt. Franklin on a marmot searching expedition but it was really rough – a truck destroyer. So I kind of gave up on my steelhead search. I knew they were there and the river was recovering from the logging abuse so why bother so much?
Then sometime in the mid 1990’s, a fortunate event occurred – the Cowichan Lake Salmonid Enhancement Society of which I was a director, participated in a Fishermen’s Assistance program. The commercial fleet had been decimated by fewer openings and a buyback program. Fishing was ramping down and lots of people were at risk of unemployment. The feds started a program where regional fishers would team up with Salmonid Stewardship groups like ours and learn some fisheries management skills. It wasn’t a bad idea. I had long felt that fishermen could contribute during the off season by helping with habitat inventory and resource improvement. So a group of guys showed up and were anxious to get to work – indeed.
They would get a bit of book work and lots of field time. We had them helping with fry salvage, stream bank restoration, brood stock collection, hatchery operations and habitat inventory.
I had a couple of the more energetic guys walk the Upper Chemainus River to see if there were fry salvage needs and other features like left over log jams (the river was once really plugged up and I thought many jams would have to be removed, but all of them eventually flushed right out of the system which was remarkable). One morning in the month of June, Jim Young set out to walk a portion of the Chemainus above camp. Young was a wiry, high energy character who thought nothing of walking hard miles in the bush. On the second day of bush whacking, he and his pals came to a shallow canyon that did not show on any map or even air photos. They hopped from boulder to boulder and were suddenly staring down at a school of steelhead bunched up below a falls. I went up the following day and saw about 20 fish in spawning colours. There were a few redds in downstream gravel patches. I was amped but also humbled. I had looked for years always going to where I thought the fish should be and never were. Jim Young put has teeth into the wind and just kept on going until he found the fish – indeed.

Tags: rare spring steelhead
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Adrian Curtain

August 31st, 2018

The Adrian Curtain

I am a biologist with more than 40 years experience in working with pipelines. I am quite confident that large diameter pipelines can be constructed with little impact on the land. Streams, mountain ranges, wetlands and important wildlife habitat can all be crossed without serious harm and there are often opportunities
to improve the environment with careful planning.
However, when it comes to the marine zone, I don`t think we have enough confidence to minimize the risk variables – especially oil spills – to an acceptable risk. I have been considering possible control measures for decades and, although i haven`t been able to conjure a method that would provide a high degree of confidence in all situations, i have a suggestion that may offer an important step:

THE CURTAIN

The Adrian Curtain is a simple concept that was first proposed by a fellow biologist as a method to partition small lakes for study purposes. The curtain would be like a floating net except that it would hang much deeper. It would consist of a heavy lead line attached to a flexible sheet (curtain) supported by a float line of strong and flexible material like large “ corks “ or inflatable material like an aqua dam. the curtain would be a semi – permanent fixture around loading docks or stored on large rollers in a ship`s hold so they could be played out around a spill. Once the spill is surrounded (contained), it can be pulled into a central pool and pumped to another hold then ultimately re-processed or cleaned back to a finished product.

Ted Burns
RP Bio
3935 PORT ALBERNI HIGHWAY PORT ALBERNI V9Y 7L1
778-419-2072
tedburns42@gmail.com
tedburns.net

Tags: Dionys ahead
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Humboldt – Tines to Remember

May 22nd, 2018

Humboldt: Times to Remember

Deane Swickard and I went up to Humboldt after the 64 Flood. We crossed the Klamath River on a ferry and the hills were still weeping from their saturated condition. I was somewhat familiar with the country because I had visited Mad River Ranch with my folks who were hoping to buy it. I had spent several weeks there in the summer and fall hunting and fishing. Deane was also no stranger because he had also hunted the area. The trip up was interesting because of all the wineries in Sonoma County that offered liberal tasting. It could have been worse but Deane wasn’t a drinker.
We booked into the Mai Kai apartments which were kind of like dorms but not really. Our roommates were guys from the Fresno area: Frank Deckert and Mike Smart. Frank was forestry student and Mike was still uncommitted. We met a number of good friends around there. Rich Lamb, Jim Linn, John Ellsworth and Tom Spencer . A lot of the guys in the Mai Kai were wildlife students who amused themselves by setting traps for other residents including us. We returned the favour and no one got hurt until we jammed the sliding glass door on our neighbors and threw tear gas in. It didn’t agree with those guys because one of them ran through the glass door. As I recall, that ended our time at Mai Kai.
I ended up at the nearby Redwood Gardens and worked as a janitor in the evenings. My employer was the football coach who had set up the program for his players but not enough wanted the jobs to fill them all. We cleaned the telephone building in Eureka. It took us less than two hours but we were paid for eight. I also put in a few shifts at the Keg, a fine little watering hole in Arcata. I had a soft spot for The Keg from day one when the place closed down at 2 AM but stayed open all night for the people selected by the owner, a notorious character who I only knew as “Junior “. He impressed us by dancing with the girls with a hammer in his pants. When he rubbed against them they screamed and fled the place. Junior claimed it had the opposite effect of course. The fact was there were very few girls at Humboldt in those days because it was mainly a fisheries and forestry school. The few women were as big and strong as BC loggers and the best of them had all the action they wanted and more.
Aside from sessions at the Keg, Flynn’s Inn and the occasional shift at Marino’s or Toby and Jack’s, we went to basketball and football games. When Bill Winkelholz a six foot ten forward from UCLA who played on their 1965 championship team showed up at Humboldt and we became friends, we went to nearly all the basketball games. The Lumberjacks didn’t win much but the games were good.
I had some great Profs at Humboldt. John DeWitt, Ernest Salo and George Allen in Fisheries and Dasmann, Mossman and Yoakum in wildlife. Dasmann had written a book called The Destruction of California and went on to write others and become revered in wildlife and conservation biology. He went on to teach at UC Santa Cruz. I had a soft spot for Dr. Allen because he was a fellow Canuck and hockey fan. We had a lot of good hockey talks especially when he discovered I had a friend (Jack Stanfield) who played for the Buffalo Bisons. Dr Allen sponsored my study of the effectiveness of mosquito fish in controlling mosquitoes in log ponds. He and Dr. Dewitt had strong roles in the development of Arcata Marsh, an innovative sewage treatment system that is much admired.
I also worked at the Arcata Hotel for awhile. The owner was Mr. Greer from Fortuna. He installed beer in the coke machine to keep a supply of young guys around but he cops got wind of it and I moved on to an apartment by the Keg where many more adventures would happen.
The Keg had one of those eight ball pool tables that are common in bars. There were a few hippies around Humboldt in those days and they often played pool in the Keg. They were happily at it one night when some Green Berets fresh from Viet Nam marched in and demanded that the “damn shrubs” give them the pool table. The hippies were rather undernourished and the Green Berets were large. Everyone thought the hippies would demure and fade into the night. No way. The fight was on. The skinny hippies beat the snipe out of the Army bullies who crawled out in tatters. They never showed up again and the hippies took their business to The Boot, a bush okie bar on the downtown square.
About that time we pulled a good one on Tom Spencer who was about to go off to Viet Nam. There was a hamburger joint just below our apartment. Spencer said he was hungry and was going to head down there. As got in line just below us, we phoned the place and warned that a criminal was in their lineup and about to rob them. We described Spencer and the girl got quite excited. “I see him, I see him” she yelled. “Call the cops immediately.” They must have been nearby because they whisked our poor roommate off without much fuss. Of course we were rolling on the floor by then. But round two was about to prevail. Spencer must have convinced the cops that we were responsible because before long there was a loud knock and the Sherriff strode in.
Lamb was into his cups and decided to deny everything and denounce law enforcement at the same time – he even scuffled with the Sherriff Before long he got hauled off and they found out I had an unpaid ticket so both of us went to jail and Spencer went free and had the last laugh.
But maybe not because he was never heard from again after he went off to Viet Nam. He was a Canadian as well and could have high tailed it. Lots of Americans headed to BC when the army called and , to my knowledge, none ever suffered for it. Jimmy Carter pardoned them a few years later.
When I finished at Humboldt, Uncle Sam came for me too because I was a dual citizen and had been inducted into the army. “ report to Oakland army terminal” the notice said but I went the opposite direction to Nelson ,BC. I felt kind of bad because the Americans had given me a fine education for very little cost and I felt like I owed them . But not my life. Indeed.

Founders Hall at Humboldt

Tags: California in the 60's
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Spider Hansen – Nelson’s Greatest Angler

October 30th, 2015

It was about 1955 when Spider Hansen showed up in Nelson. Spider was a thin lad with dirty blond hair and coke bottle glasses. I have no idea where he was from. He lived in a little house off the alley at the west end of Mill Street beside a wooded ravine we called “The Gully”. I lived on Kootenay Street a short block away.
I met Spider shortly after he arrived. I think his name was Eugene – I called him Genie. He was a friendly, amiable fellow that I was to know for some twenty years. But I was soon to realize that he wasn’t always as mellow as I first supposed – he had little tolerance for teasing or bullying. Indeed. In those days skates did not have those plastic guards at the ends of the blades and could be considered a lethal weapon. One of the local players, a big lad, was teasing Spider in the dressing room at the Civic Center while he cleaned his skates. After a minute or two of this guff, Spider launched a skate at the guy’s head. It just missed and the blade stuck into the wall just inches from his head. Spider was roaring mad and foaming at the mouth. However, scenes like that were rare. Spider was usually calm and friendly.
Like me, he loved to fish. We went out to nearby Cottonwood Creek or down to the boat houses or City Wharf. Spider was a very patient angler and was easy to please. Most of the boys wanted a nice rainbow or Dolly or maybe a whitefish or two but Spider would happily spend hours in almost the same spot catching the odd shiner, chub or squawfish. One time a fine eighteen inch rainbow grabbed his bare hook by mistake as he dangled it in a school of shiners. We all cheered when Spider landed the beauty then rode his bike through Nelson with the trout on his handlebars. Another time he hooked an even bigger rainbow off the old Nasookin that was abandoned near the wharf but lost it.
I lost close contact with Spider about 1964 when I went off to California to go to school. I came home in the summers then and only saw him the odd time. He was always the same however and had an endearing habit: no matter how long it had been since I’d last seen him he always greeted me as if I had never been away. “Hi Teddy, lets go fishing.” I don’t think we ever fished again . The last time I saw him was about 1968. I was hitch hiking up to Nelson from Spokane and got stuck in Creston. It was getting dark and looked like snow so I walked back to town to try and get a bus. As I trudged along the dark street toward the bus station, there he was: ” Hi Teddy, lets go for some beer”. We settled in at the Kootenay Hotel for a few then bought a half sack for the bus ride through the snow.
I never saw him again. Some years later I asked Clare Palmer where he was. Clare said that in the last few years Spider had taken to hanging around the Nelson Truck Terminus hitching rides on long haul trucks. He would take his fishing gear and a small pack and fish his way across Canada. Clare went on to say that one year Spider failed to show at his pick up point somewhere out on the prairies – he was never seen again. I hope he is still out there somewhere pulling four inch perch out of some prairie slough.
For my money, Spider was Nelson’s greatest angler. Of course many will disagree and cite the names of some of the great ones like Danny McKay, George Bing, Skipper Wilson, Muggsy Holmes and company. Sure, those guys were great – real pros – but they lived for rainbows and wouldn’t think of fishing for anything less. Spider just loved to fish and catching something was almost beside the point – indeed. That’s how it should be.
Miss you Old Pal.