From the June 2020 Newsletter

Long-time club member Joan Best was inspired to post a brief article on the infoline after reading about the loon seen on Kamloops Lake. Knowing how important Tranquille is to club members, I have included it in the newsletter for those who aren’t on the infoline.

Margaret Graham

Joan receiving her honorary lifetime Kamloops Naturalist Club membership in January 2018

Joan leading a field trip in June 2018

Some of you have heard all this before but the post about seeing a loon on Kamloops lake and walking the tracks between the two tunnels brought on an attack of history! My father worked for the then Tranquille TB Sanitarium for 25 years from 1928 on. We four kids, therefore, grew up there. We lived on the Cooney property in what had been their cowboy and farm workers’ shack as there was insufficient housing for families at the Sanitarium.

Also, as there was a definite class system amongst the employees and given that our father was a common labourer; gardening, etc., and our location, we four were on our own. So, we went hiking; everywhere within a hard day’s hike of Tranquille we went, as children, on our own. From the lake in Lac du Bois to Frederick, but our favourite was Cooney bay, up on Little Bluff which, at that time, featured a tunnel through it as the tracks were, then, single. And so on up to Battle Bluff and beyond; all that territory was part of our back yard. But we walked along the tracks all the way to the Big tunnel numerous times. From one portal one cannot see the other but there is a side tunnel, built for safe exit, that allowed the view of the opposite portal being no bigger than one’s thumb nail. In between there was a promontory where a fellow with about 24 dogs lived for years and just beyond the little tunnel there was a home for the track walker, a Mr. Bennett. He and his wife lived there until he either retired or was phased out and we sometimes met Mrs. Bennett carrying groceries all the way home from the Sanitarium grocery store! One day, from a perch on the Little Tunnel bluff, we kids saw something that made us hurry home to tell our mother that there were whales in the lake; we had seen a pod of sturgeon.

During the War there was an armed guard posted outside each portal. One lone soldier; brilliant! No, he would not allow even kids to pass. Sorry about going on here; I’ve been told I should write a book about what it was like growing up at Tranquille; well, there you go!