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| A couple of views of the Lillooet end of Seton Lake, known in the St'at'imcets language as Skimka; the picture on the left is my own; that on the right from the BC Archives.. As with other pictures of this country, the impact of the setting is hard to convey from one camera angle; the peak in front of you towers 7000' and is only a shoulder of the even higher 9890' Mt. Brew, out of view to the right. The huge bluffs at McNeils (pictured above) are immediately up to your left, and a sheer rock wall some 2500 feet high plunges directly into the water just behind the camera and to the right, forming an overhang above Seton Lake that is permanently shadowed by the mountainside that forms it. Cayoosh Creek flows behind the terminal moraine in the centre of the picture to merge with Seton Creek off to the picture's left. At that point, the rock walls of Mission Ridge and the mountane cliffs of this picture close in to form the gorge called Nkoomptch, which may only be a mile or so in length and less than that in width but measures around 6000 feet in depth, effectively a deep cut in the mountain wall of the Fraser Canyon from peak to peak of Mt. McLean to this foreshoulder of Mt. Brew. Iinvisible in the shadows in this photo are the immense overhangs a couple of thousand feet up the mountainside above the canyon floor; they are on the left side of the central peak here, and are visible from the town of Lillooet, notably when lit by end-of-day sunjshine. The shoreline in this picture is "the beach" to Lillooet residents, the left half being managed by the Lillooet Band and the right half taken care of by BC Hydro, as Seton Lake is one of the reservoirs of the Bridge River power project; there is a free public campground in behind the hill along the foreshore. The lands of the small plateau-moraine visible at the end of the lake are a mix of Lillooet Band and BC Hydro, but if I were a hotel developer with lots of bucks I'd think that site would be perfect for a Banff Springs-type hostelry; the view is spectacular in all directions from that location, as it is from nearly anywhere on Seton Lake. Seton is popular nowadays for its waterskiing; Anderson Lake, beyond Seton Portage, has become a favourite for windsurfers. | |
 BC Archives # C-01322 (Photo: Artie Phair, 1910s) |
A site adjacent to Craig Lodge came into the hands of the pioneer Durban family, who opened a lumber mill on the site; this picture is from the 1910s. I'm not sure where the timber supply for this mill was - probably up Cayoosh Creek as I don't recall any active commercial logging on Seton Lake in those days, except for some land-clearing at the Portage and a few private places around the lake. The mill's location here was more related to the rail line than the lake, I think - the line is not yet visible along the shoreline to the right, suggesting that much of the mill's business may have been in supplying ties for track construction, then progressing up the lake from the farther end; my own impression is that this is the same site that Craig Lodge came to occupy once the rail line was finished. The Durban family figure prominently in the history of the Lillooet region in various roles. Around this time they bought land at the far end of Seton Lake, which remained in family hands for many years until recently sold to outside buyers. Like other landholdings in the Portage, the Durban place was prodigious in its output of tree fruits, especially apples, and a wide variety of truck garden produce for the booming mine towns up in the country over the mountain. Other than mining and hydro development in those days, the mainstay of the local economy was orcharding and market gardening and "tourism" services; hotels, lodges, guide-outfitters, restaurants, other services. There were lumber mills in Gold Bridge and Lillooet over the years, although never at the scale common elsewhere in British Columbia as Lillooet's dryland forests and rugged terrain had to await modern engineering and techniques. Changes to the Forest Act in 1976 combined with provincial government subsidy of expanded forestry extraction led to the foundation of Lillooet's large modern mill, nearer the other end of Seton/Cayoosh Creek just next to town; road networks to feed this and other area mills in Clinton and Boston Bar were extended throughout nearly every valley in the Bridge River-Lillooet Country over the subsequent ten years; the one exception was the Stein River's secluded valley near Lytton. The mill is now down to one shift a day or less and is due to be phased out in favour of other development. Ideal spot for a golf course, if you ask me.....kinda windy, though.... |
 BC Archives # H-01302 (Photo: L.A. Genge, 1914) |
 BC Archives # H-01306 (Photo: L.A. Genge, 1914) |
 BC Archives # A-03548 (Photo: Artie Phair, June 1910) |
One of the great fishery disasters in BC history occurred in 1902-3 as a result of a federally-funded fish hatchery program on Seton Creek, which was intended to remediate damage to fishing stocks already done by a combination of overfishing by commercial cannery fleets on the Coast and the also-disastrous Hell's Gate slide resulting from construction of the Canadian National Railway. Funded at tremendous expense (evidently some of it spent on the landscaping evident in the above photos, which were professionally-taken by a photographer brought up - also at public expense - from the city), the project resulted in the near-abolition of the then-large Seton-Cayoosh salmon runs, causing near-famine to both Canyon and coastal native peoples as well as bankrupting the fishing fleet and several canneries. |
| The hatchery's spillways were revamped again later on in an effort to make up for further ecosystem damage resulting from the Bridge River Hydroelectric Development, another major fishery disaster whose cause can be found in public works in the Lillooet Country; although fishery work on the Seton-Cayoosh system from this point onwards is thought to have helped things out, rather than worsened them [?]. The weir depicted (below left) had something to do with the 1900-era hatchery project although I don't know the technical reason for its existence. A point of reference for the scale of the fishery prior to government mismanagement can be found in the picture (below right) of the native Oleman family's fishing camp and drying racks at Skimka, today's Seton Beach, "in the days when salmon were thick". | |
 BC Archives # A-03965 (Photo: F. Dundas Todd, 1911) |
 Photo: Unknown (reproduced from "Short Portage to Lillooet" by I. Edwards) |
 BC Archives # H-00633 (Photo: Artie Phair, 1910s) |
 BC Archives # E-04211 (Photo: Malm, 1910s) |
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