Roadtrip like it's 1966

February 28, 2016 7:26 AM

Every year for the last 50+ years the BC Ministry of Transportation has had a instrumented truck drive every mile of every highway in the province to record highway conditions. Part of the instrumentation is millions of pictures (one every 10-30 metres). The Ministry has compiled selected sets of those pictures from 1966 into video photolog trips of selected highways. Highway 1 from Lytton to Revelstoke; The Island's Malahat; Highway 99 from Horseshoe Bay to Squamish;

Highway 1 - North Vancouver & Port Mann Bridge
Highway 1 - Hope to Lytton
Highway 3A - Nelson to Balfour
Highway 97 - U.S. Border to Penticton
Highway 97 - Penticton to Kelowna
Highway 97 - Kelowna to Vernon
Highway 97 - U.S. Border to Vernon (reduced speed)
Highway 97 from Prince George to Parsnip Bridge
Highway 97 from Parsnip Bridge to Chetwynd
Highway 97 from Chetwynd to Dawson Creek

Bonus playlist: Time lapses of recent infrastructure project construction.

posted by Mitheral (17 comments total)

Wow, so, Prince George to Parsnip Bridge is the route from where I went to high school and where I actually lived growing up. Except that where I actually lived growing up didn't exist in 1966. So it was weird to follow the highway out of town, recognize the landmarks -- oh yes, there's Johnson's Dairy Farm, last place to pass someone before Salmon Valley Hill, there's the Salmon Valley Bridge, and then the hill, and hey, I think that's the sheep farm that they're clearing land for, and this is clearly Summit Lake, and somewhere along here must be the spring but I can't see it, maybe it was still just a spring then, and here's the forest road where they housed the goats that year, and the gravel pit and railroad crossing but not the entrance to The Pas, because it doesn't exist yet, and here's the park, I didn't know it was there already, and now here's where Bear Lake would be if it had existed and it's just not there.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:54 AM on February 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

Also, there were apparently a *lot* of trailer parks in Prince George in 1966.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:55 AM on February 28, 2016

Also, also, this whole thing is what Google Street View would be if the thing that Google thought was important was the actual streets.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:08 AM on February 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

Malahat: still a death trap. Only the trees are bigger now.
posted by klanawa at 8:34 AM on February 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

The controls at the bottom make me think of what a Fallout-inspired racing game would look like.

Road. Road never changes.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 8:51 AM on February 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

As a transplanted Islander this really made my day, thank you!
posted by mikek at 9:15 AM on February 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Nelson to Balfour has hardly changed at all, except at the Nelson end - even the ferry dock at the Balfour end looks the same.
posted by ssg at 10:13 AM on February 28, 2016

Any idea if the original image collection is available?
posted by underflow at 10:31 AM on February 28, 2016

Paleostreetview.
posted by fairmettle at 11:23 AM on February 28, 2016

Amazing. The Horseshoe Bay -> Squamish video goes under the conveyor of the Britannia Mine (then operating, now a museum) and looks pretty broken and patchy as it rolls on to Squamish. Would have been gravel road to Whistler in that era, I believe.
posted by gumpstump at 12:56 PM on February 28, 2016

underflow: "Any idea if the original image collection is available?"

I couldn't find it for free. The BC government is unfortunately pretty tight with their copyrights so even if it is it is likely to be expensive.
posted by Mitheral at 1:00 PM on February 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Man. I was born in Revelstoke in 1965 and moved to Squamish in 1974 so these really hit home, so to speak. Some of my earliest memories are vacationing in Sicamous in the late '60s and it's quite an odd thing to look at that last section of the Lytton to Revelstoke link. On Metafilter no less!
So thank you for this amazing post.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 4:27 PM on February 28, 2016

I couldn't find it for free. The BC government is unfortunately pretty tight with their copyrights so even if it is it is likely to be expensive.

Ah, okay, thank you kindly. I thought it might be an interesting project to do some environmental profiling over the years.
posted by underflow at 5:05 PM on February 28, 2016

Loved this! There are more than a couple of routes on here I'm familiar with (though not the 1966 version).
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:32 PM on February 28, 2016

It brought back fond memories of travelling to (and from!) Hope to Lytton holding my breath through the tunnels.
posted by squeak at 5:57 AM on February 29, 2016

My Dad would honk through the tunnels. When we were kids, that was exciting. Then as teenagers, it was embarassing. Somewhere along the line, it must have become cool again, because when I drove from Prince George to Vancouver with my parents for the last time (they've since moved to Vancouver, so no reason to make that drive ever again) I honked the horn while we drove through the tunnels.
posted by jacquilynne at 3:44 PM on February 29, 2016

I was usually travelling by Greyhound going somewhere (I lived in PG for awhile too). I remember sticky floors, too much cigarette smoke in the air, and the mistake that was soggy tomato sandwiches on one trip. I loved that route.

My partner recently said, "want to go to Hope?" but after that I think I'll trick him into taking me to at least Alexandra Bridge, or Hells Gate.
posted by squeak at 6:59 PM on February 29, 2016