A Visit to Hell’s Gate

Today a colleague and I jumped in a car and drove up the Fraser Canyon to meet a collection of engineers and technical support staff from the Pacific Region and visiting from out east. It was a spectacular sunny day with a chill in the air. The snowline was relatively low, but the roads were bare and dry. It was a fabulous drive.

Hell’s Gate is a pinch point on the Fraser River. In 1914 a rock slide blocked the river at Hell’s Gate and, in 1946, the first two fishways were completed to restore volitional passage for salmon migrating upstream. Additional fishways were completed over the next 20 years to allow passage at higher and lower river flow levels; they line both sides of the river below.

There are three ways to get across the river to the original camp built during the construction of the Hell’s Gate fishways.

#1. Take a tram ride down from the highway. The tram descends about 1000 feet from the highway to that platform on the other side of the river. At this time of year the attraction is closed to the public.

#2. A virtual goat trail of a road that switchbacks precipitously down the canyon wall and requires a driver of a suitable truck to turn into, then back up each corner halfway, to make the turn. Once at the bottom one walks across this footbridge

#3. Take the train (top left corner below) up the canyon and get it to stop on the tracks above the camp – this is actually why the camp and the original fishway were constructed on the side opposite the roadway, down to the north of where the tram lands today – in those days the, there were only trains on the far side of the river (CP Rail) and it was the easiest mechanism for moving the people, equipment, and materials needed for the monumental project.

Most people who visit Hell’s Gate see it from the vantage point of the tram at the highway, or the footbridge you see above.

Today I had the good fortune to see Hell’s Gate from a view that few people get to experience….from the edge of the mighty Fraser and on top and inside of the fishways that line this part of the river to help salmon and sturgeon pass the raging waters below. Since we are here on DFO business to see the fishways during low water….we took option 2.

We left the car we came up to this part of the canyon in up at the side of the highway in a pullout and caught a ride in a more suitable vehicle, a truck, down to the bridge crossing below.

To the north of the public viewing platform for tourists to the area, lies the original camp that the workers used during the construction of the fishways between the 1940’s and the 1960’s. Some are still in basic use for those working at the site today. The buildings reminded me of my grandparent’s farmhouse – the cheery white buildings with the bright green trim, familiar door hardware from the 1940’s, and even the sink seemed vaguely familiar.

From the vantage point on the other side, the scope of the project and its monumental engineering are apparent. It’s a bit difficult to imagine that at high river flows, during the freshet that will start in a month or two, the waters in this stretch of river will reach more than halfway up that concrete fishway just below the red supports on the footbridge. I believe that it will accommodate fish passage when the river rises to 92 feet above gauge level; the river is about 100 feet across at the bridge point, and the water can range from between 90 feet and up to 210 feet of water depth. The structure on the upper left in the photo below is the entrance to the train tunnel on the highway side of the river, and provides a little bit of scale to the fishways below it. The highway lies about 1000 feet above the river and far up and out of the frame.

We picked our way carefully down a partially washed out pathway, over loose rock and across frozen and slippery puddles hidden in the shady hollows between piles of rock.

I’ve stood on quite a few fishways, but the scale of these are a bit mind-boggling by comparison. If you want some crazy scale perspective, a couple of photos in the series below have people in them…zoom in and see the size of the fishway across the river relative to the engineer walking on it….and that’s not the biggest fishway of the bunch. Zoom in on one of two of the others and you’ll see a teeny tiny person far in the distance and below the base of the left side of the bridge above.

And, as a last little treat, the moss growing on the fishways in the belly of Hell’s Gate was the most amazing technicolour green, and this particular patch reminded me of a forest and islands on a river viewed from above. It has an ephemeral life since the river will rise at some point soon and will likely scour it away, basically sandblasting all the material it rages across with the fine sediment it carries in its grip on its trip to the ocean roughly 200 kms to the south.