Tuesday, Sep. 13, 2022: Myra Canyon

A trestle at Myra Canyon

Tuesday,  9/13/22

Today we traveled through one of the highlight areas for the entire TCT across Canada:  the Myra Canyon.  The canyon is steep sided, and was a tough challenge for the railroad.  To navigate the canyon the KVR built 18 trestles, in a span of 11 kilometers of track.  Of varying sizes, the photos capture some of the larger trestles.  50,000 cyclists would travel from around the world each year to make this bike ride.  In 2003, a wildfire threatened the Kelowna area, and while it spared the residents of the city it ravaged  Myra Canyon, damaging or destroying 14 of the 18 trestles.  Residents in the area had restored all of the original trestles during the 1990's, and now they faced a full new restoration.  The federal and provincial governments provided $17 million in aid.  The rest of the money was raised by lotteries, raffles, telethons , and other fund raisers.  All of the damaged trestles were rebuilt and 5 years later in 2008. the TCT  in Myra Canyon was re-opened.  Now the area gets about 100,000 visitors a year.  

I had a personal experience in which I was able to appreciate the difficulty of the landscape.  I had recorded the coordinates of a geocache in the canyon, which was a short distance off the trail.  Navigating with my GPS device, I easily found the geocache, as there seemed to be a faint trail leading up to it.  (These are called geotrails, and they are formed by geocachers walking the same path to a geocache.)  However, returning to the  TCT trail became a challenge, as I quickly realized that I had lost the track back to my bike.   Eventually I got to a spot where I could see a nearby trestle overhead, maybe 50  feet.  I had descended too far and needed to climb back up to get to my bike.  And there was not a direct path to the trestle overhead.  Finally I extricated myself from the canyon with a greater appreciation of the difficulties faced by the original railroad. 


The largest of 18 trestles at Myra Canyon


Myra Canyon Terrain

 






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