Talk:British Columbia provincial highway 97
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[edit] Old Cariboo Highway
Posting this here as opposed to the Old Cariboo Highway page, which currently is only for a remaining segment of the original Cariboo Highway in Prince George, but should be expanded to document the rebuilding - actually the building - of the Cariboo Highway, which was opened in 1922 and did not start at Cache Creek, but at Yale, where the Grand Trunk Road (as it was still called; now largely extant as chunks of Old Yale Road but sometimes also of the Fraser Highway (BC Provincial Highway 1A); the name may have informally or officially applied from Hope or Chilliwack onwards, I'm not sure. The older meaning/incarnation of the Cariboo Highway, which included the Fraser Canyon stretch, either needs to added/expanded in the Cariboo Highway section overleaf, or given its own articles. There are lots of great photos of the route, including the various tunnels and some of the famous grades like Jackass Mountain, which could be used to illustrate such an article. Through the Yale-Ashcroft stretch, the "new" Cariboo Highway of 1922 did not and could not copy most of the route of the Cariboo Road (the wagon road), much of which had been ripped up and its choice of grades/sidebanks used during the construction of the CPR in the 1880s; for forty years Lytton and Spences Bridge had contact with the outside world, via "road", either through Lillooet or Merritt, respectively; the advent of the auto age saw a need for a driveable road to the Interior, so one was finally constructed (there were no others at the time; the Dewdney Trail was still largely a trail only). It is this version of the road that included the Fraser Canyon, and the name remained in use until the 1950s when re-building of the Fraser Canyon took place as part of the Trans-Canada Highway project, and it was then that the Yale-Ashcroft stretch was redesignated the Trans-Canada and the "Cariboo Highway" designation left for Cache Creek to Prince George only; the fragment in Prince George is one of the bits of highway that wasn't incorporated in later upgrades/straightening, same as you find chunks of the Dewdney Trunk in Coquitlam that are "left over", likewise Old Yale Road. Anyway, not sure if all this info and the pictures to go with should be on this page, or on the Old Cariboo Highway page; probably the latter - ?? Skookum1 21:56, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
