The iconic road stretches from Yale to Barkerville and was essentially the road that opened up the interior and built modern British Columbia.
Don Hauka is the Communications Director for the New Pathways to Gold Society…
“It was quite a marvel of engineering and there are big chunks of it that are still intact and we want to restore as much of it as we can because we believe it would be a world class, both heritage and recreational, asset for the province.”
Hauka says they have received just under $55,000 from the BC Rural Dividend Program.
“We need to have them surveyed, we have to have them GPS’d and mapped and know exactly what we’re dealing with. This phase focuses on the chunk between Clinton and Lac La Hache, so what we’ll be doing is sending a team out into the field hopefully in late June or early July and they’ll be doing that work.”
Hauka says the initial work will then lead to developing what’s called a prescription.
“Once we know what we need to do, what we’re dealing with, then we can develop a budget to say we can restore x number of sections and it will cost us y number of dollars, and here is the level that we can bring it back up to, and then we’ll go back and continue to fund-raise and make this project a reality.”
Hauka says the Clinton to Lac La Hache portion amounts to about 100 kilometers, while the entire Cariboo Waggon Road stretches about 630 kilometers.
He says some chunks of it have been restored recently, as Barkerville did some work in the Richfield area.