Work Today

Rather than city hall, work today involved an hour-long boat trip up this fjord (Indian Arm).

Along the way we passed the derelict hulk of the once proud and mighty McBarge (I haven't had time to photograph the blue-prints for eBay yet).

We also passed some three hundred year old graffiti petroglyphs. I'm still trying to figure out what exactly makes painting on a rock with fish-oil and berry crud to mark territory three hundred years ago different from tagging. Will people be pointing out spray-painted rocks three hundred years from now and marvelling at how they were done with such primitive things as CFC-propelled petroleum-based pigments? The myth of the noble savage lives on ...

The final destination was this <sarcasm>God-awful, butt-ugly part of the world</sarcasm>. The building across the water is an artifact I was much more impressed with, and is worthy of note.

The building across the way was designed by Francis Rattenbury, the architect of the provincial legislature and Empress Hotel in Victoria and built in 1914. See those big pipes going up the side of the mountain and the openings below the lower concourse of windows? This is a hydroelectric plant. There is another plant around the point built in 1903 and originally powered solely with water coming from Buntzen Lake on the other side of the mountain and later augmented with water from Coquitlam Lake via a 5 Km tunnel through another intervening mountain (completed in 1905). This plant was added in 1914. Both plants are still in use. The photo below gives it a bit more of a locational context:

I adore the combination of hubris and elegance of Victorian/Edwardian engineering.