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The Mission Mountain Road

The Mission Mountain Road was - in its heyday - one of the most famous roads in British Columbia, and to those who know it remains legendary to this day. Sometimes compared to Montana's Going-to-the-Sun Road for its torturous switchbacks and steep climb, the Mission Mountain Road has never been paved, and even with today's various improvements is still a challenge and a marvel - and torture on brakes and engines. I've puzzled for some time how to account for it in this website, but pictures of the road itself don't convey the sense of its spectacular journey. In compiling various family pictures of the area, it occurred to me that many were taken from the road, and when these pictures are laid more or less in sequence, plus views of the pass itself from opposing ranges, there is no other way to adequately display the experience of the trip; short of a video from a camera strapped on top of a vehicle running the route (I do have another clip from a different road- the Bralorne-Gold Bridge powerline road, taken by my Dad with an 8mm whilst strapped to the top of the company jeep; once I get it digitzed I'll add it to the site).

Aerial pic from Photos by Kat	Thanks to loans of photos of the area from Randall's Flying Photo Page taken by Randall's friend Kat on various flights through the area I'm able to show you the scope and nature of the road and the country it's situated in, as well as the key geographic position it took advantage of, where the Bridge River comes close to the Seton drainage at a relatively (!) low pass. I've never seen this view, but it was instantly recognizable when I first came upon it. The route the road uses is actually on a part of the mountainside that's a bit broader and more gently-sloped than east or west of it, which is why it's where it is - and it's not as bad as it might have been. There are steeper roads in the district, but all of them are backroads and none transit so much difference in elevation over 10 miles. As you look at this photo, remember that this was originally is a pack trail that became an inecredibly busy freight route for many years, and the communities at its bottom constituted a medium-sized modern town, one of the largest in the Squamish-Lillooet Regional District in fact, though unincorporated. The Shalalth rancherie (meaning the residential part of an Indian Reserve) begins in the fields at lower right, which are actually benchland; this picture is looking fairly steeply down, especially given the wide-angle distortion. The powerhouses and company townsite are themselves actually also in Slosh Indian Reserve No. 1. In the closeupat left and on the townsite page, the driveways to these parts of the reserve can be seen more clearly, as well as the powerline cut, which didn't just go to the rancherie, I think, but was the main line to Lillooet as well. The closeup below also has a better view of the townsite at lower right, and just below at left there is a closeup of the pass, where the diagonal route of the Anderson Lake-Mission Ridge powerline, the same that runs the high inside slope of Mission Ridge.then spans the opening of the Bridge River Valley and from there over the flank of the Camelsfoot towards Pavilion and Kelly Lake. The scale of the photo is more impressive considering the immensity of these high-tension lines, which come down from the distant Peace River Country and through Whistler or the Lower Lillooet Valley to the Lower Mainland and the US. Visibly ugly and always environmentally controversial, the powerlines that span the Lillooet-Bridge River are nonetheless amazing feats of engineering, and having driven a few of the powerline roads I can tell you they're spectacular to traverse by 4x or by bike. The 1600' difference in elevation between the two valleys is hinted at here - the top of the penstocks at lower left (more visible in the townsite closeup) is a certain amount lower than Carpenter Lake, visible beyond the summit of the pass, but not by much; total head is 1600' but from the penstocks it's 1300' or so. The pass crests over 5000' from Seton Lake's 750' and Carpenter's 2250 (2200? Well, depends on water conditions, really - whether the reservoir's full or not, which it often isn't). The identical hues of the waters in the two lakes are the colour of the Bridge River, now diverted almost wholly through to Seton Lake but for water-releasing ordered by fisheries of late to coordinate shared use of the river with the remnant of the great Bridge River runs that had been among the largest of the Fraser's tributaries.
Aerial pic from Photos by Kat
Aerial pic from Photos by Kat

Before the Mission Mountain Road, there were pack train trails over this same route for many decades, and of course native trails for aeons before that. The territory of the Bridge River (Country) above the Canyon was part of the Lakes People's demesne, hard-won in a long war with the Chilcotin, who also valued the basin's rich hunting - and who used Mission Pass to come on Shalalth, Slosh, Nkiat and other then-villages in the valley on raids. Seemingly isolated by today's standards, in its heyday the road carried 24-hour freight and passenger traffic to and from the railhead at Shalalth for many years - when the road was in much worse condition and the country much wilder - all the way up the Bridge River valley to Bralorne. After the road through the Canyon to Moha was built, use of the road only slowed down after the BCE/Hydro was finished construction, as the townsite of Bridge River remained the operations HQ for the power project.

The trip runs from the upper throat of the Bridge River Canyon, where that river's upper valley narrows and is today dammed, up over the ridge that connects the Bendor Range to Mission Ridge, then down innumerable switchbacks to Shalalth and Seton Portage. Originally built for construction and supply trucks for the Bridge River goldfield towns of Pioneer Mine and Bralorne from the "rail port" at Shalalth, the road was substantially improved during the construction of the Bridge River Power Project. Since the completion of that project, the road has been improved - "straightened" (you'd never know it unless you'd seen it before) - and well-graded by comparison to the old days; lately the government's been mumbling about "decommissioning" it as a provincial road, and ending public maintenance of it, which would leave Shalalth and Seton Portage reliant on the rail line, as indeed they had been prior to the building of the road connecting the Mission Mountain route to Moha c.1958. The Mission Mountain Road was for forty or so years the only means of road access to the Upper Bridge River Valley and its goldfields, and was travelled throughout that time by heavy transport trucks as well as passenger stages and and amazing array of private vehilces of various quality. All had come to the road's base at Shalalth by means of rail ferry from Lillooet (occasionally from Vancouver, but this was rarer as mostly only passengers arrived from that direction); this rail ferry was known as the Gas Car when it was for "civilian" use; the mine and hydro companies would rent their own flatdeck cars. What's amazing about the heavy transport traffic in the old days - and the movement of gold concentrate out by truck as well - is that it was done on the road in the condition it was in in those days. Even my memories from the late 1950s are of a severe journey; apparently ten years before it was more like a 4x4 road. Yet it was a highway.....a very high highway......

There's little more to be said by way of introduction. The pictures that follow come with commentary and are as much in sequence as I can manage to arrange.

The Mission Mountain Road - Visual Journey

BC Archives # D-05721	BC Archives # I-29057
Perhaps no other road in the history of British Columbia - other than the Fraser Canyon itself (but only because more people have seen it) - has been held in such dread and awe by travellers as that running from Shalalth over a switchbacked route known as Mission Mountain, leading over the steep mountainside into the Bridge River Valley to Bralorne and Pioneer Mines. It has been compared to the Going-to-the-Sun Road in Montana, and the famed descent into Bella Coola from the Chilcotin Plateau; in its time it was busier than either of those torturous routes, due to the heavy traffic to the goldfield towns as well as during hydroelectric construction; to both enterprises the road gave a sense of epic adventure, and was itself a triump of engineering on the scale of the deep delvings of the Bendor mines or the grand design of the power development. The picture of the iced-out truck at top left would have been at something like the twentieth switchback on the route up (matter of fact, it looks kind of familiar - think I've been stuck there myself!), and there would have been at least a dozen or so to go! Oldtimers tell me that at one time there were over four dozen switchbacks between Shalalth station and the summit, with around a dozen on the descent into the Bridge River Valley on the far side. After a series of attempts at straightening the road, there are still nearly two dozen sharp switchbacks on the climb up, and half a dozen or so on the way down to Carpenter Lake beyond. The view from many of the road's vistas is precipitous - the descent of almost 5000' is made in less than one and a half horizontal miles - and looks directly down to Shalalth and the BC Hydro townsite deep and far below. The road over Mission Mountain was once as world-famous as the goldfields it led to - and rightly so! Just in the area where the road hits the flat valley bottom of the upper Bridge River meander-valley upon its descent from the summit of Mission Pass, the Bridge River enters the gates of its 10-mile Grand Canyon, a gorge equal to Yosemite or any of the other famous canyons of the world in depth and grandeur. From the summit of the Pass roads and trails lead off into the Bendor Range and Mission Ridge. Upon visiting Bralorne and seeing the scope of one-time economic development and industrial infrastructure installed (and since largely abandoned), it is difficult to image that nearly all of it came over Mission Mountain after being shipped in by rail or boat to Shalalth (today's road from Lillooet via the Bridge River Canyon was not built until the late 1950s). The picture of freight trucks struggling with an icy slope at left doesn't tell the whole story - note the bit of road in the foreground, hinting at the sharp switchback these trucks have just manoeuvred only to become stuck on an iced-up uphill.
The picture at right is of one of the Evans Transportation Company's freight vehicles adjacent to the PGE tracks at Shalalth station; immediately to the right out of sight is the very bottom of the road up the pass. The log retaining wall at right is still there today, the office building of the transport company visible above them today serving as the band office of the Seton Lake Indian Band. Who knows how many miles of rough road this truck has seen, and how many times its brakes, suspension, and transmission have been replaced! The hump in the mountainside in the background is the slope followed by the route of the Mission Mountain Road, which is visible in places in the photo if you know what you're looking at. In summer, tell-tale trailings of dust help locals keep an eye on traffic coming into and out of the valley; at night, headlights from vehicles on the pass are clearly visible from most of the valley. The Evans Transportation Company had a virtual monopoly on freight and passenger traffic to and from the mines for decades, and its offices were one of the hubs of life in Shalalth. The picture at top right is of the Evans Co.'s other main shipping item - bags of gold concentrate, here waiting to be loaded onto the PGE for shipment to Vancouver. Bev Hurley, who worked in the Evans office for years and still lives in the Portage, told me that there were no security worries about the gold in those days - the only ways in and out of the valley were via the rail line and the lake, so it could be left unguarded until it was loaded onto the freights, sometimes for days.	BC Archives # I-29059
Photo: E. Cleven