‘Saanich Scoops Blenkinsop Lake, Land’

 

So said Victoria’s Times-Colonist of Saanich Municipality’s recent $1.2 million purchase of 13 hectares of farmland abutting Blenkinsop Lake. The news brought back fond memories for me.

Growing up as I did, one house removed from the CNR line in the Swan Lake area, much of my early youth and that of my friends was spent on or about those railway tracks which, now removed, form part of today’s phenomenally popular Galloping Goose Regional Trail. I can’t really explain their fascination for us as kids, other than that they were an inviting playground and a shortcut to almost anywhere we wanted to go before we graduated to cars.

Even as a newly-minted teenager, after we’d moved to the Lake Hill area, the former railway line was part of my life as I crossed over it every day, walking to and from Mount Douglas High school. Before they tore up this last remaining set of tracks, the occasional freight still came as far as the Growers Winery on Quadra Street, to Borden’s Mercantile across the road and, sometimes, as far as the dead-end beyond Borden’s, at Cedar Hill Cross Road, with materials for Sidney Roofing and others.

Originally, the CNR ran all the way to Patricia Bay in the Sidney area. (Rather, it began at Patricia Bay, passing through Saanich, Sooke and the Cowichan Valley en route to Youbou. This is the same line which has the famous Kinsol Trestle and is now part  of the Trans Canada Trail.)

To do this, it had to cross Blenkinsop Lake (Lost Lake to us locals)

This became my second playground. Then surrounded by farms and trees, the spring-fed lake was a natural park, the water clean enough that we cooked the sunfish that eagerly responded to nothing more than a hook and a worm. But that was before two of the adjoining property owners logged their acreages almost simultaneously and ‘Lost’ Lake was almost lost–for real.

That summer of ‘57, I remember, was a particularly hot one. So hot and dry that, thanks to  the logging of much of its foreshore, the lake receded to little more than a large puddle, with dead fish littering the mudflats of what had been its bottom, and dying fish floundering in its remaining shallow and heated depths. It made for an early and indelible lesson in environmental mismanagement that even a callow youth could comprehend.

Lost Lake’s real attraction for me had been the abandoned CNR trestle that spanned its width about a third of the way from its eastern end. From the very first time I set eyes on it, from a distance as my parents drove along Blenkinsop Road, I was enchanted. Its skeletal pilings that bespoke ‘ancient ruins’ called out to me, and I yearned to get a closer look.

There was no chance of crossing it, of course

By then most of the deck and stringers had been removed. There was even less to see by the time I moved to Lake Hill and, older and more mobile, was able to indulge my explorations. A float plane owner had dynamited the middle bents so he could land and take off on the lake. How I cursed him! (Worked, too; he died recently, in his 90s.)

The accompanying black and white photo, taken with my father’s 1948 Kodak Tourist, shows the ghostly trestle as it was back then, the colour shot as it is today. Quite a difference, eh?

The building of the Galloping Goose involved more than the trestle as, even in my time, the right-of-way on both sides of the lake was so overgrown as to be all but indistinguishable because of the bordering rich bottomland that encourages vegetation. Hence my first visit in almost 40 years, in September 2012, was a homecoming of sorts capped by the long dreamt-of opportunity to actually walk across the old trestle.

Okay, its successor, but why be picky?

Foot and cycle traffic was heavy that lovely autumn afternoon as per usual on most sections of the Galloping Goose. A quick stroll from the bottom of Nicholson Street and we were on the grade, another five minutes or so and we were on the ‘trestle.’ After all those years, and after all those hopes of so long, long ago that I’d given up as futile!

I know my companion, with whom I’ve walked 1000s of miles of railway grade, enjoyed the experience but, for me, this was so much more. This was like going back in time and doing that which had been denied me as a youth. Admittedly, on a world scale, it was a blip. Those who walk this stretch of the Goose regularly probably give it little thought.

But for this aging walking warrior it was, as they say, a blast.