It’s been 40 years since the first vehicles drove down the newly opened Coquihalla Highway, but Canyon Shell owner Randy Young still remembers what it looked like before.
Back in the ’80s, Young transported all kinds of goods for his dad’s company, Young’s Transfer, which was one of many B.C. companies involved in the creation of the Coquihalla Highway.
“We delivered a lot of stuff up to the Coquihalla as it was being built,” said Young.
“Back then, you drove on the old road. It was all dirt, and you had to watch out for wild horses. There was someone out there with a towing company who had probably 20 wild horses, and they were always on the road. Anybody who’s alive and hauled up there would know them.”
Experiencing the creation of the highway up close and personal allowed Young to witness some very interesting moments, he recalled.
“I remember when one of the overpasses was finished, one side was about eight inches higher than the other, so they had to redo the on-ramp to it,” said Young.
He also recalled a memorable experience he had just before the grand unveiling of the new road.
“We delivered all the paper products to the toll booths,” said Young. “In May, about four days before it opened, we had to drive through eight inches of snow.”
He explained that in the years following the opening of the Coquihalla, snow was almost always a possibility, no matter what month it was.
“I remember coming home with my trailer one day in September, and we found out that the Coquihalla had about a foot of snow overnight, so we ended up having a picnic in Lytton in 20-degree weather. That was the difference between them.”
Michael Jacobs, chairman of Emil Anderson Group, is also quite familiar with the infamous amount of snow that can often be found on the Coquihalla.
When his dad, Gil Jacobs, was the president of Emil Anderson Construction, the company was tapped to help build the highway, with this progress often being tested by heavy precipitation.
“When they were building up there, you used to get a whole lot more snow,” said Jacobs.
“We had a camp up there in the early ’80s, and they had to send people up to shovel snow off the top of the bunk houses because the roofs were caving in.”
However, Jacobs maintains that the majority of the time, the Coquihalla offers a very scenic and enjoyable drive, and is notable for countless reasons, including its innovative use of mechanically stabilized earth walls.
While this road infrastructure method is now commonly found in places like on- and off-ramps, Jacobs said the use of it on the Coquihalla was a major step for the entire province.
“That was one of the first projects in the world to use that cutting-edge engineering at the time,” he said.
Another challenge for the project occurred when Premier Bill Bennett did his tour of the Coquihalla projects in May 1985.
“Emil Anderson Construction had set up a blast for the premier to set off,” said Jacobs.
“They had the ceremonial plunger so the premier could push it. Unfortunately, the wire to set it off had been set up two hours earlier, and some traffic had driven over it, and there was a short in the wire. So the premier pushed the plunger, and nothing happened.”
It took the crew 45 minutes to identify the issue and get it fixed, finally allowing the then-premier to get his ceremonial blast, which ended up on the front page of some local papers.
”My dad was very upset it had been delayed, but I told him he wouldn’t have gotten front page if it had gone off on time, and that any publicity is good publicity,” said Jacobs.
As someone whose job took him out on the road quite often, Young said that finally having the Coquihalla available made a world of difference.
“For so long, if you didn’t get out of the canyon on a long weekend by noon or 1 p.m., it would be a three or three-and-a-half hour trip from Lytton to Hope.”
His average travel time was cut down to a third of that once the new highway was available, which Young said made a world of difference for him, even if the drive became more pricey because of the new toll booths.
The toll was $5 per motorcycle, $10 per passenger vehicle, and up to $50 for big trucks when it was finally removed in 2008. Young said that despite all the complaining people did about the cost, the toll booths played an important role.
“The toll booths supplied a lot of jobs at that time, and they were pretty good-paying jobs,” he said. “I remember we lost one of our workers at the Shell station to there when it opened.”
In addition to shorter and pricier commutes, the Coquihalla also made one other major change in the Fraser Valley, explained Young.
“I hauled freight then to the Fraser Canyon, as far as Lytton, and during the summer every rest stop was packed with trailers and Hell’s Gate had 30 buses lined up and an overflow lot that would be full,” he said.
“The week that the Coquihalla opened, it was like somebody turned out the lights. It was eerie and almost scary.”
Someone who remembers that moment well is Brian McKinney, whose family operated Hell’s Gate Airtram when the Coquihalla Highway was opened in 1986.
“My dad was in a public relations and marketing role in the spring of 1986 for the company that owned the attraction at the time,” said McKinney.
He said the Specialised Expo held in Vancouver in 1986 helped bring a major tourism boost to the Fraser Canyon area, but things dropped off considerably the following year.
It didn’t take long for the number of vehicles travelling through the Fraser Canyon to be cut in half after the Coquihalla was opened.
“Tour operators cancelled contracts and changed itineraries for the following years, replacing scenery and history with cost-cutting measures to get clients to Kamloops or Vancouver one hour sooner,” said McKinney.
This wasn’t a temporary decline either, with McKinney adding that reduced traffic volume on Highway 1 through the canyon continues to be a problem for local businesses.
“Right up until we sold the attraction in the fall of 2014, it was a struggle capturing the attention of the travelling public and encouraging them to drive the Fraser Canyon,” he said.
“The real loser here was the visitors to our beautiful province.”
Young said things may be starting to turn around for those local businesses negatively impacted by the opening of the Coquihalla, as he’s seen a modest improvement in recent years.
“The canyon has come back a bit, but I’d say probably 60 per cent of the businesses are no longer there,” said Young.
Despite these consequences of creating the Coquihalla Highway, Young still believes it was a major improvement for the Lower Mainland.
“I couldn’t imagine not having the Coquihalla now,” said Young. “We couldn’t live without it now, there’s no way.”