There’s renewed interest in getting a second road in and out of the Bowron Lake area.
Rod Graham, a spokesperson for the community, says he was asked by John Massier, the CRD Director for Area C, to gauge local support for it.
“He asked to me to go and just kind of do an informal survey to say do you think we should have this, basically a secondary egress out of the area, so I probably canvassed probably 40 people, and I didn’t have one that was against it.”
Graham says if there is a forest fire, there is no way out.
“The way the fire was this summer. If they wouldn’t have hit it as hard as they did, the prevailing winds would have taken the fire right across the road. It was right at the peak of the extreme weather. And they hit it, like within an hour they were on it, it was an old lighting strike that came up and they hit it with bombers the first day and the second day and helicopters, they really did a good job.”
And Graham says it’s not just community members that would be at risk.
“It’s not just the neighbours in this area here, it’s the people that frequent the campsites, which are pretty busy in the summer time, and then the Bowron Lake chain as well. There are quite a few people that take part in the canoe circuit.”
A bridge across Indian Point Creek was decommissioned a number of years back, but Graham says Canfor has now built a new bridge so he doesn’t think an egress road would cost that much.
“Because the old roadway is there, it just has to be brushed out and fixed up. It’s not that we want a two lane highway by any means, it’s just a means to get out if there was a problem. Basically just a good logging road, it doesn’t have to be anything really, really good.”
Graham says the road would basically just follow the east side of the Bowron River all the way down to the main Prince George logging roads and come out about 40 minutes east of Prince George on Highway 16
The Cariboo Regional District Board supports the road and voted at its October 1st meeting to send a letter to the Provincial Government.