Conquering the Pacific Northwest: Power

After so many early mornings and hundreds of miles, sleeping in at my mother’s place felt like heaven. We slept in until about 9:00am. For us, this is sleeping in. Eventually we got the whole family together: mom, dad, grandma, Chris and I. Our Mustang not having five seatbelts, we all squeeze into my dad’s Ford Focus wagon and went to Denny’s. After breakfast Chris and I went our own way, to the bakery section of a nearby supermarket. Chris and I had an important date to celebrate.

Meanwhile, my mother was preparing one of her signature meals. After getting everything over to my grandma’s place and eating, it was time for dessert. I put the cake on the table and three sets of eyes were quizzically looking at the cake wondering what “one month” meant. There were no correct guesses. Chris and I let my family know that we got married exactly a month before. My mother ran to the bathroom crying, my dad had a stunned look on his face, and the smile on my grandmother’s face was a mile wide. Overall, the reception was good. Later on my mother confirmed that they were tears of happiness once she got over being so mad that we had not told her sooner, especially considering she had visited me in Pennsylvania for about two weeks, arriving three days after Chris and I were married by a judge at the courts in Morgantown, WV.

With a single full day remaining in Canada, Chris and I had to decide what the perfect day would be. We unanimously decided that De Dutch was the only place we could even consider getting breakfast. There is nothing like getting multiple types of meat in addition to eggs served on top of a pancake the size of a large dinner plate. Their location in Burnaby on Hastings is hidden on the lower level of the back side of a non-descript commercial building. It’s never overwhelmingly busy, but that’s fine by us!

After gorging on food Chris and I decided to visit the Stave Falls Power Plant.  The visitor’s center at this old hydroelectric facility is a hidden gem in the Lower Mainland. There are two hydro facilities at Stave Falls. One of them is brand new and generating power, the other is a facility that is about 100 years old, made obsolete by the new facility. Unlike tours of currently operational hydro facilities, guests are able to get up close to the controls and machinery at old Stave. If you’re really interested in how hydroelectricity is generated this is where you need to go.

The tour is self-guided, but begins with a video explaining how rain is a great thing (sometimes you need this reassurance in the Pacific Northwest!) because of the power it provides. This is followed by a gallery of interactive exhibits illustrating the history of electricity and municipal power systems. I particularly enjoyed the interactive exhibit where I had to connect different components of an electric transmission system to move power from the plant to homes.

After learning about the history of electricity and electricity transmission, visitors turn a corner and are suddenly in a great hall, the heart of where the power of water turns into the power in your home. Here visitors are above the generation equipment and it is impossible not to feel small among equipment capable of such power. In the distance on this upper level are rows of controls, manufactured by Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, that were staffed by numerous individuals around the clock before computerization, to manage the equipment on the lower level.

The view entering the great hall, the generators on the level below

On the lower level there is a door that takes guests onto a patio showing the old penstocks. It is difficult to get a sense of the size of the pipes feeding water into the electric generating equipment, but an employee did a wonderful job of expressing not only the size and magnitude of the pipes, but the sound of the water rushing through them. Returning indoors we mingled with equipment that was impressively immense. Simply the thought of how all of these materials made it to this, relatively, remote lake a century ago was amazing.

This is where the power was made, and this is how close you can get to it

Finally, there is another exhibit hall filled with artifacts of the early days of B.C. Hydro. This stroll down memory lane elicits feelings of nostalgia even in people too young to remember the old trolley cars, advertisements, and logos of the utility that enabled Vancouver’s development into a world-class city. Of the three hydro facility tours I have done this year: Grand Coulee Dam (Coulee Dam, WA), Stave Falls (Mission, BC), and Sir Adam Beck 2 (Niagara Falls, ON), Stave is by far the best and absolutely worth the $6 admission.

Transportation, Light, Heat, and Power

This winds down our final day in Canada. Tomorrow, the journey home begins. But remember, no vacation is over until you’ve paid for your airport parking.