Ireland day 0965. Monday 20 May 2024- Vancouver 6

Today’s summary	Drove about an hour east of Vancouver to visit the Stave Falls hydroelectric power station which was having and open day today (Victoria Day provincial holiday in BC). Absolutely fascinating. After the tour, walked down the Hayward Lake shore trail for a couple of hours. In the evening, had dinner with the family in Mt Pleasant Vintage and Provisions on 6th Street. Excellent though the Canucks lost game 5 of the hockey series
Today’s weather	Dry sunny and warm. Light south westerly wind. Appx 18c

Today’s overview location (The green mark shows the location of our route)		Close-up location (The blue line shows where we walked) (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): Stave Falls and Hayward Lake

Commentary

(Summary blog only. Last full blog was Day 0368).

We have been to Vancouver several times over the years and by now we have seen most of the major attractions on the typical tourist visitor’s “must do” list. So we thought today we would do something a bit different to mark the Provincial (British Columbia) Victoria Day public holiday. After a bit of googling, we discovered that about 1 hour’s drive east of here, BC Hydro (an electricity company) were holding an open day at one of their hydroelectric power stations. We though this would make an ideal target for our visit today.

So as soon as we had finished breakfast, we jumped into the car before the free on-street parking expired and headed down Trans Canada highway 1 to Stake Falls. The 50MW power station we visited today operated continuously from 1911 until 2000, when it was decommissioned and replaced with a newer facility next door, which generates twice the power from the same amount of water flow. By the way, we also learned today that over 90% of British Columbia’s electricity is carbon free, mostly coming from hydro, but also supplemented with a small amount of solar.

An excellent guide, Keith, showed us round and gave us a well informed hour long tour of the facility, and the history of its construction and operation. (As an aside, we were surprised to discover that Keith came from Cuddington in Cheshire – a village that is well known to us as we have friends that live there. Small world).

After the tour, we had a lunch of crisps, empire biscuits and coffee then headed downriver to walk for a couple of hours on the shore of Lake Hayward. The trail follows the bed of a disused railway line, which makes for mostly easy walking apart from a couple of sections where landslides have demolished the track and necessitated the construction of inland detours.

We made it most of the way down the lake before we ran out of time and had to return to the car. A straightforward drive took us quickly back into Vancouver and to our guest house on 11th street. Late in the evening, we went to dinner with the family in Mount Pleasant Vintage and Provisions – a pop-up style bar and diner on 6th street where we watched the hockey game as we ate. Sadly, the Canucks were beaten by the Oilers and as this was the last game of the playoff, they were ejected from this year’s championship. Ah well, we shall just have to come back next year to cheer them on through the re-match.

Anyway we move on to our next port of call tomorrow so I better stop now and start packing. Onwards and westwards!

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Overview of the Stave Falls power station from the outside	Generator – the blue turbine is about 6 metres / 20 ft in diameter and used to spin at over 200 rpm with no cage to stop operators accidentally getting limbs caught in it. Perhaps HSE does have some merit after all

Detail of the control room, all pre-computerisation	Remains of the old railway line that we followed most of the way down the shore of Hayward Lake

On the lakeside trail	Our car – a Hyundai Elantra. Absolutely unremarkable. Does the job

The turbine hall. Each unit generated 10MW – the four smaller grey ones are Swiss, the larger green one is the newest and is Canadian