Cruising into the Columbia Valley

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Recently Brother Ken, aka MrTJ in geocaching circles, and myself decided to make a foray into a forgotten corner of the Fraser Valley, someplace where neither of us have visited for 50+ years.

Cultis Lake, 60 miles east of Vancouver, B.C. is Vancouver's local favourite summer time destination. Cultis Lake is a fair size lake surrounded by long time summer cottages on the east, new lake front houses on the north, and densified during the summer by multiple campsites both in Cultis Lake Provincial Park and private campsites along the south shore. At the west end of the lake is the small village of Lindell Beach, an old clutch of summer cabins turned mixture of permanent residences and long time family cottages.

Beyond Lindell Beach, west along Columbia Valley Road, lays a large valley mostly forgotten about by the summer visitors. The craziness of the boaters, paddlers, swimmers, campers, and the occasional obligatory moron, is quickly left behind in just a few minutes as Columbia Valley Road ascends a small bluff and emerges into the Columbia Valley. Due to glacial action thousands of years ago, the Valley is officially classified as a "hanging valley."

The first impression you receive is that you could be in any rural green valley near Salmon Arm, or anywhere in the central part of Vancouver Island. The look of the valley belies its nearness to Canada's third largest city. 

Ken and I barely remember the valley from those many years ago, safe to say neither of us remembered it as we seen it this day. There were a few newer hobby farms with big new houses, but for the most part it seems like the farms and houses we seen years before are the same ones we seen today.

We had approx. 30 caches to find in the valley, with a bit of crossing our tracks back and forth due to the limited number of roads and the spread out nature of the cache placements.

Although I had made an adhoc route for the day, as usual that changed a bit once we got our feet on the ground. We came to realize there was a north side to the valley, a central part, a south side, and then two east sides divided by a ravine watershed. Once we understood the road layouts and the cache placements, the order to find the caches in changed and in turn, made our stops more orderly.

We started our route grabbing the caches along the north side as it was the more straight forward section. We then crossed the valley and started on the south side caches. I had looked at the maps and noticed that the south road ran close to the border. We were very surprised when we arrived on a straight section of road and noticed the forest cut line on the hills nearby. Knowing the cutline ran along the 49th Parallel delineating the International border, we eyeballed the path of the cutline running on the hills in front of us and behind us, and realized we must be very close to the border. We were even more surprised when we realized that the we conveniently stopped next to an obelisk used as the Canada-US border marker. This marker was two feet off the roadway, meaning we were _right on_ the US border. 

We took pictures of both sides of the obelisk; one side says Canada and the other side says United States. Technically I stepped into the US when I went to the other side of the obelisk but all worked out - no floodlights, barking dogs, or armed guards appeared out of the woods to challenge me, so I figured I was good! 

We soon made our way to the eastern side of the valley, and were slightly mystified as to how to get to caches on the other side of a ravine\creek, until we determined we had to go back to the main road, and then tackle the next set of caches from a more eastern access.

Ken and I were surprised by how many blueberry farms are now in Columbia Valley. The Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows areas with their wetter fields are well known for their vast blueberry fields. The ground here was harder and dryer, although we did notice their seemed to be a lot of sand in the soil. Perhaps the good drainage was an optimum growing environment for the bushes.

One of the caches to find was on a long a right of way road into the very ravine which caused our initial confusion. Ken recalled that he had a book on the old railways of the Columbia Valley and that this ravine access road was one of the main spurs for the railway back at the turn of the century when the valley was logged. Matter of fact, Ken mentioned that, due to the steep bluff from Cultis Lake up into Columbia Valley, the trains could not get down or up the bluff, so the main line went south into the US and the logs were distributed at Maple Falls in Washington state. 

Ken and I did our good deeds for the day for our fellow geocachers whom had hid the caches. As this group of caches were far off the beaten path, I came prepared with a trunkful of trinkets to refill the caches. I even had a dozen or so new cache containers of various sizes and I in turn replaced probably half a dozen missing caches. I also cleaned up, dried out, and replaced paper to use as cache logs for the benefit of cache finders to follow. Looking at past logs, many of these caches had not been found for 6 months. Safe to say these caches were the "way out there" finds to make and did not generate much geocaching traffic during their existence.

Ken and I thought our day might have ended early; you know, get out on the path by 10.00 AM, not find some missing caches, get frustrated and over heated due to the hot weather, quit, go for lunch and then go home! LOL

Instead, any cache we could not find we replaced, any cache found in bad shape was fixed up to be serviceable for months to come. Ken and I spent the entire day in this beautiful corner of the larger Fraser Valley area and thoroughly enjoyed our day. I was going to make a joke about the "company being dubious" 😀 but the fact is the siblings in the family get along great and we all appreciate the quality family time we spend together. But there is something special about hanging one on one for the day and remembering that the kindness and strength of your family is why your life is as good as it is !  

 Please leave a comment if you liked the trip report. I hope to create more in the next while.