Looking ahead from a shady road through the trees towards a bright sky and distant mountains

How Gorge Harbour Road changed Cortes Island

Squirrel Cove was much more important during the first part of the 20th century. Union Steamships tied up at the long wharf twice a week. There is still a Squirrel Cove General Store and post office, but there were once log boom, a sawmill, boatyard, machine shop, community hall, church and a school. Much of this infrastructure disappeared during the years that steamships were supplanted by motor boats and floatplanes. However Lynne Jordan, former President of the Cortes Island Museum, has another explanation for Squirrel Cove’s decline.

Cropped image of an early ‘road’ in Whaletown- Photo courtesy Cortes Island Museum

It starts back in the years when there were no roads on Cortes Island.

“For the longest time, there was no connection from anywhere in Whaletown to the other side of the island. There was a wagon road to where Robertson road is now, then it became a walking trail. You went up over the hill and down into Squirrel Cove on a very rugged rocky trail that  more or less follows Whaletown Road,” she explained. 

There was a road connection from there to Mansons Landing, but anyone travelling between Whaletown and Mansons had to pass through Squirrel Cove. 

This changed during the late 1950s, when the Hansen brothers built what is now called Gorge Harbour Road. 

“Everybody could bypass Squirrel Cove and go to Manson’s Landing if they wanted to,  rather than the long way around. That made a big difference to Squirrel Cove, because it was a major place that people went to from both Mansons and Gorge and Whaletown,” she explained.

Photographs from the Cortes Island Museum online archives depict a network of gravel roads throughout Cortes Island during the 1960s.

Mike Manson described his family’s trips from Southern Cortes to Whaletown during that era.

“The roads were always here, since the early days, but they were twisted crooked wagon roads. When the automobile came, they had to straighten them out a bit, but when I was a boy they were still pretty crooked. We would bring our car over on Robbie Graham’s barge and we’d have a car for the summer.”

“And every summer we’d make this drive to Whaletown. It would take us one hour, one way. The roads were so windy and so dust, and my dad refused to open the windows to cool off the car, cuz he didn’t want any dust in. So we’d take this hour long journey. I’d be car sick. We’d be hotter than blazes and get down to Whaletown or Bergman’s store and have an ice cream cone. Then come back an hour, car sick again and all hot.”

A picture of the gravel road entering Whaletown in 1972 states, “Note, the road is not yet paved.”

The Squirrel Cove route may still have been important when BC Ferries arrived in 1969.

“In the first few years, I think you had to drive all the way around to get to Mansons. You had to drive through Squirrel Cove,” said Jordan.

Whaletown General Store as “Petrie’s Trading Post,” 1945 CIMAS Album – Photographs and Stories, Whaletown 1931–1949
Whaletown General Store as “Petrie’s Trading Post,” 1945 CIMAS Album – Photographs and Stories, Whaletown 1931–1949. Cortes Island Museum & Archives

Construction of the Gorge Harbour Road also changed the face of Whaletown. 

“Between where the post office building was and the library, there was actually a little tiny bay. When the connector road was built from Gunflint over to Whaletown Road, the  loose rock was used to fill in that bay. Also just below the church, above the library, rock narrowed the road. They blasted and all that rock went into that to fill in that bay.  It’s now a parking area between the old post office and the library.” 

Lynne Jordan is writing a history of Whaletown for the Cortes Island Museum.  

Top image credit: Entering Squirrel Cove, along Whaletown Road – Photo By Roy L Hales

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