Ben Oostdam's
Autobiography:



page 12

1957 - 1960
Montreal

From August 9 to 11, 1958, I had the pleasure of riding with Brian and Peggy Smith, two British exchange students at Berkeley. We went around the Big Bend, of which I have a dozen pictures, but I rather do not show them because they are too puny. We passed Copper Mountain, a major mine after its discovery in 1882, yielding as much as 665.000 tons of ore to the Allenby Mills in 1926 - closed down in April 1953 because of falling copper prices.... Now it is a ski resort, boasting 280 inches of snow per year. They took me as far as the Capilano Park in Vancouver, where we said our sad good-byes...

On the Road in British Columbia by Lorry Patton:
The Big Bend through the Rocky Mountains was just a dirt road between Banff and Revelstoke in 1954 when we piled into an old jalopy and headed west for the mild coast of B.C. I'll never forget the precarious wooden one-way bridges, the sharp curves that had us hanging over the edge of cliffs, or the giant mosquitoes that were ready to pounce on us every time we stopped for fuel. (The gas attendants wore masks!) No wonder I didn't pay much attention to the bears or the deer, or the ragged mountain peaks; my eyes stayed shut most of the time. Now, it's merely a popular section of Trans Canada Highway through famous Glacier National Park and Rogers Pass, albeit, a section that took six years to build (1956-1962)
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