While most of us in the Elk Valley are moving through our days, little do we realize that deep in the woods all around us, much work is being done to construct the Trans Canada Trail, all the way from Round Prairie (just north of Elkford) to Elko.

What a great collaboration of the communities in the Elk Valley! Here are some of the highlights, broken down by sections.

Round Prairie to Elkford

A 2.3 km re-route to bypass a very muddy and ATV-damaged section was completed by Cornerstone in July and is now a high quality cycling trail. Cabin Forestry is currently working on the remainder of the trail upgrades and re-routes on this trail.

One challenge will be to keep motorized users off the trails in Elkford. There have already been both ATVs and dirt bikes exploring the incomplete trail. This is currently being addressed through signage, community notifications, and word of mouth via the Elkford ATV club.

Elkford to Line Creek

Land use agreement with Jemi is in place and Cabin Forestry will be doing the new construction on the Elkford South. Cornerstone will be constructing the Sulphur Springs Connector trail section. A geotechnical assessment of one steep side slope section revealed no terrain stability issues; just difficult trail construction.

A route that would utilize 3.5 km existing low use roadways and would require approximately 2.75 of easy new trail construction closer to the Elk River has been proposed. It would make for a very nice alternate to the Sulphur Springs main haul road. This trail will be started this fall by Cornerstone and hopefully completed before winter sets in.

Line Creek to Sparwood

Cypress trail within the District of Sparwood is complete and the contractor, Elk Valley Excavations, is now working on the Whiskey Jack frontage trail.

Permission from Teck for the Wilson Corner / Lower Elk Valley Road section is now in place and Elk Valley Excavations is scheduled to work on this section very soon. The proposal to route the trail under Wilson Creek bridge was investigated and deemed too expensive because the trail would need to be located below the high water level.

Most of this section simply involves sign installation on roadways and existing trail. This will be done when the connecting trails are complete.
Sparwood to Hosmer

Work on the Coal Discovery Trail south from the Sparwood Campground is nearing completion, with 4.5 kms of trail upgrades, approximately 700 m of re-routes and 1.5 kms of new trail, which have been completed by Cabin Forestry. All they have left to do is a 250 meter re-route above the Sparwood Campground and a small amount of trail brushing.

Work is underway on the Coal Discovery Trail in the Ingham Creek area. Mow and Snow is working on a diverse mixture of new machine built trail construction, upgrades to existing trail, some new hand built trail, and bridge installation.

The owners of the deactivated road that connects the north end of Stephenson Road with the BC Hydro Powerline have agreed to have the trail run on their land. An agreement is in the works with the District of Sparwood and we hope to convert the deactivated road to trail this fall.
At this point it looks like the budget for the Sparwood portion of the Elk Valley Trail will be tight, so it is unlikely that significant work will be done of the portion of the CDT from Hosmer to the gravel quarry this year. District of Sparwood may be able to contribute to improvements here, but with a limited time window and limited contractor availability, there is uncertainty as to how much work is feasible this fall.

To see what’s happening from Hosmer to Elko, see Part 2 of this article in next week’s paper.