​​Why Highway 23 isn’t (and other Nakusp navigation nuisances)

As a cartographic obsessive since the day I was found abandoned on a doorstep next to a Rand McNally road atlas and a complete set of the 1977 Merit Students Encyclopedia my mother was suckered into buying from a travelling salesman (the last part of that sentence is actually true), one of my eternal pet peeves is the seeming inability of any mapping service to properly chart the course of British Columbia provincial highways 23 and 6 through the humble burg of Nakusp. The strange layout of the highway system in Nakusp, and the frequent change in alignment over the years, has led to a rather confusing situation for locals and travellers alike. Even government bodies get confused.

Given the current hullabaloo about the responsibility of online mapping services —particularly the sector-dominant Google Maps — to maintain accuracy, whether physical (how many times have we heard about vehicles being led by their GIS satnavs into lakes and up remote logging roads?) or political (whether imposing disputed political boundaries on world maps, using USAmerican terminology for Canadian provincial parks, or God forbid we bring up the Gulf of Mexico), now seems as good a time as ever to chart the confusing history of provincial highways and street names in Nakusp. (My apologies to Greg for the preceding 90-word run-on sentence.)

It wasn’t always so confusing. In the early days of automotive travel, getting out of Nakusp was fairly simple once roads suitable for cars began to be built in the late 1910s and 1920s. For those headed toward the Slocan Valley and Nelson, there was the “government road” leading east and then southeast from Nakusp that paralleled the Nakusp & Slocan Railway (hence the name Government Hill in Nakusp for the twisting climb out of the village centre; a parallel would be Government Road in Nelson for the old alignment of Highway 3A/6 leading out of what is now Railtown).

For anyone headed toward Burton and Vernon, there was the road due south along the east shore of Upper Arrow Lake leading past the Columbia River Narrows. For anyone headed north, driving direct just wasn’t an option, as there was no road between Nakusp and Galena Bay. Instead, a boat trip on one of the Canadian Pacific sternwheelers would have to suffice for anyone looking to visit a hot spring resort or to connect with Arrowhead, Revelstoke, or the upper Lardeau.

There was, however, a bridge across Kuskanax Creek at Nakusp Canyon north of town at the same location modern Highway 23 crosses the creek today between the Esso and 13th Avenue NW. Built in the 1900s, this bridge was a pedestrian crossing reached by a 20-minute walk through the forest from town, and really served as a sightseeing bridge for picnickers and fishers spending an afternoon at the canyon.

A group of Nakuspians at Nakusp Canyon, Kuskanax Creek, June 1906. The original Canyon Bridge is at top. Government agent Walter Scott and Elizabeth Scott are at top left directly below the bridge footing. Early Nakusp entrepreneur and booster Lewis Edwards is seated with his dog beneath Walter Scott. Ellen McDougald (Gayford), early proprietor of the Leland Hotel in Nakusp and the Queens Hotel in Burton (not to mention the owner of the Nakusp Hot Springs mineral claim) is second from right on the right side of the canyon. (Eugene Tucker photo, ALHS 2014.003.1592)

This aerial image taken ca. 1940 shows the Canyon Bridge at centre with a small tote path leading to Telegraph Bay at top. The looping Nakusp & Slocan Railway separates both the bridge and the path from Nakusp townsite with a large swath of forest in between. (Province of British Columbia photo, ALHS 2014.030.6)

 This moderately improved version of the Canyon Bridge, large enough to carry one logging truck at a time, was around by the 1930s, but the “North Road” wouldn’t be extended much further until the 1950s. (John Grigg photo, ALHS 2014.003.1709)

As early as the 1930s, serious plans came about to construct a proper highway along Upper Arrow Lake. It helped that the local MLA for Kaslo-Slocan, Sid Leary, was not only from Nakusp but also Minister of Public Works in the Duff Pattullo cabinet. An Arrow Lakes News clipping from March 27, 1936 tells of Leary advocating for the immediate commencement of highway construction between Nakusp and Arrowhead and between Edgewood and Robson to stimulate development and tourism in conjunction with the soon-to-be-completed Big Bend Highway. Later that October, Premier Pattullo reiterated the importance of the routes’ construction.

In late 1938, a survey team of fairly well-known locals, including Jack Harris, Joe Parent (who would become Nakusp’s first mayor 27 years later), Albert Ehl, Arvid Gran, Dan Berard, Herb Bowes, Mickey O'Neal, Ted Brown, and Axel Wetterstrom, were hired to chart a route for the “North Road,” a name many long-time residents still use for Highway 23 to this day.

By this time, Harris and Parent’s horse-logging outfit had been working in the region between Nakusp and Galena Bay for years and were well familiar with the area. The route they chose was much closer to the lake than the modern highway, which ironically uses much of the right-of-way of Harris’ old logging trails. For all the work that was put in, the survey ultimately amounted to not very much, and a highway north from Nakusp would have to wait until after World War II.

In the meantime, Highway 6 entered the vernacular in April 1940, when Minister Leary announced the first numbering scheme for British Columbia’s highways — nine numbered highways in total. While many routes have changed significantly since the original numbers were introduced, Highway 6 is rather remarkable in that it has basically maintained the same Vernon-Nakusp-Nelson-Nelway route for the past 85 years.

At this pre-Keenleyside Dam stage, Highway 6 entered Nakusp along the road from Burton (Marine Drive), which became Nelson Avenue as it entered the village from the southeast at the location of the modern Nakusp wharf. Highway 6 was carried north along Nelson for three blocks before branching onto the aforementioned Government Hill Road.

Not only were the inaugural class of provincial highways given numbers, but they were assigned colours as well; a scheme wisely abandoned as the list of numbered roads grew. (Arrow Lakes News, April 4, 1940)

By the time of this 1945 image, the new Canyon Road had now slashed its diagonal path through the forest to Nakusp Canyon, but transportation beyond the Kuskanax remained largely a series of skidder trails leading to Shoreholme. At right, the farms of Glenbank still dwarf Nakusp, which had yet to even fill in the blocks that were laid out back in 1892. The Highway 6 switchback on Government Hill is at bottom centre. (RCAF photo, ALHS 2014.030.2)

An aerial photo from 1947 shows Canyon Road at top sharply angling away from Nakusp across the tracks toward the bridge. (Pat Archibald photo, ALHS 2017.021.4.1)

In the early 1940s, a driveable road — the “Canyon Road” — was built out from Nakusp townsite across the railway tracks to the Canyon Bridge. Canyon Road extended out from the north end of Lake (now 6th) Avenue, angling northwest toward the bridge. In 1956, Celgar finally constructed a long-awaited 50 km logging road between Galena Bay and the Canyon Bridge, allowing travellers who weren’t averse to driving a logging road that took almost as long to traverse as the ferry to drive north.

With the expansion of feasible road travel north of Nakusp, the modern industrial area on the northwest side of the village began emerging, led by the movement of the Bell Pole Co. yard in 1955 from the Nakusp waterfront to the north side of the railway east of Canyon Road. It was only a matter of time before the road became a public venture.

Spurred on by the various promises of infrastructure development it laid out alongside the Columbia River Treaty, the provincial government purchased Celgar’s logging road in 1964 at the cost of $30,000 per mile, according to a 1977 Jack Harris interview with Milton Parent, with the intent of joining it via ferry to the newly-numbered Highway 23 (numbered that year, in fact) at Arrowhead.

Still, it was nine years before the actual highway between Galena Bay and Nakusp was completed and paved in 1973. Some maps used by companies involved in the forest industry still list small remnants of Celgar’s logging road left standing near Nacillewaet Creek and Halfway River as Old Highway 23, although that would be somewhat of a misnomer.

Nakusp’s rapid expansion in the late 1950s and 1960s is on full display in this 1962 image. Canyon Road has become a conduit for two new schools and the new Celgar subdivision being built at the north edge of the village. Celgar’s new logging road is now seen extending north from the Canyon Bridge. (BC Hydro photo, ALHS 1999.016.1A.200)

With the long-awaited completion of Highway 23 in 1973, a proper Ministry of Highways direction signs finally appeared at the intersection of Broadway Street and 6th Avenue in front of the DuMont Motel (now the Lodge at Arrow Lakes). (Denis Stanley photo, ALHS 2014.018.3078)

In the meantime, Nakusp finally incorporated as a village in 1964. Along with the other growing pains of incorporation, one of the tasks the newborn municipality took on in its first five years was the assignment of address numbers to buildings, which somehow had never been done in the first 73 years of the village (not to speak of the street adjacent to the future Arrow Lakes Hospital, which never had a name at all despite being built in 1912).

Along with the assignment of address numbers, in 1970 the village decided to rename its streets entirely, ditching the original 1892 street names for a new numbered grid (a common practice in many municipalities around this time, as it supposedly made things easier for emergency responders) using cardinal direction suffixes (North, South, East, and West). 

Confusingly, despite having just assigned address numbers for the first time, the village decided to renumber its addresses again to match its new street names. This time, the village put the zero-point of the grid at the extreme southeast corner of the village at Broadway Street and Nelson Avenue (the soon-to-be-junction of highways 6 and 23). In such a small village with only so many streets to begin with, this meant 90 per cent of the village would have an address ending in North or West.

The only street names left untouched within village limits were the two grid division streets (Broadway Street and Nelson Avenue) and the two diagonal streets that didn’t adhere to the grid, Canyon Road and Government Hill Road. The new Highway 23 would run along Canyon Road, which became 6th Avenue N — the former Lake Avenue — and into the core of the village, turning east on Broadway, running the length of downtown to meet its end at Highway 6 at the intersection with Nelson Avenue.

As part of the new street scheme, streets received fairly basic black spray paint-on-white background street signs. In 1974, a new residential subdivision designed for low-cost housing was built along the northeast side of Canyon Road north of Nakusp Elementary School. Called Columbia Heights, the neighbourhood would also receive numbered streets (8th and 9th Avenues) to match the new grid, except for Columbia Crescent, the looping street that encircled the development.

A makeshift podium stands in the centre of what is now the cul-de-sac at the top of 9th Avenue NW just off Canyon Road, Oct. 19, 1974. (Denis Stanley photo, ALHS 2009.004.35)

One can reasonably assume that this was the first time a sitting British Columbia premier cut the ribbon for the opening of a mobile home park. This trio would head up the road after this ceremony to attend the grand opening of the modern-day Nakusp Hot Springs complex. L-R: Mayor Earnie Harding, BC Minister of Labour Bill King, Premier Dave Barrett. Oct. 19, 1974. (Denis Stanley photo, ALHS 2009.004.36)

Fast forward to 1993. Coincident with the annexation of the southern third of Glenbank, the Village of Nakusp introduced brand new blue, large-font street signs (but only for certain streets; a few of them are still around), and most importantly, adopted quadrants rather than cardinal directions for the names of streets and avenues, which now meant that nearly everyone in the village core now had an address ending in Northwest.

Even today, asking someone to describe the difference between, say, 4th Street NW and 4th Avenue NW requires the respondent to stop and think for a few seconds. A running joke is that if you ask a Nakuspian their address, they’ll have to go outside and look at the front of their house and the sign on the corner before they can answer. The village also decided at this time to rename the western portion of Columbia Crescent to 9A Avenue NW to fit within the street numbering grid, creating three decades of billing and delivery headaches for residents who many agencies to this day still think live on a street two blocks away called Columbia Crescent.

In 1998, the village completed its street signage when it installed its current-style blue street signs; this same design would also be used by the villages of Salmo and Slocan. Most significantly, this was the first appearance of the village using Highway 23 as a municipal street name rather than Canyon Road, although Canyon Road lived on — sort of — in the names of the Canyon Court Motel (originally Canyon Court Cabins, 1967; the motel just closed within the past year) and Canyon Court Mobile Home Park (built in 1975 as part of Columbia Heights).

For residents of the mobile home park, which for years was located on the same legal parcel as the motel despite being on entirely separate streets, their legal addresses must have been a nightmare: their addresses were now 937 Highway 23 instead of 937 Canyon Road, even though they were located on 9A Avenue NW which itself had just been renamed from Columbia Crescent. (This would be remedied a few years later when the park finally got a 9A Avenue NW address.)

Only between 1998-2000 were the Highway 23 designation and street name congruent, and all was right with the world. It didn’t last long. Around this time, the long-awaited “It’s a truck route, not a bypass” was about to be constructed along the former Nakusp & Slocan Railway right-of-way; a long-needed solution to keep the endless stream of industrial traffic out of downtown Nakusp. While it was a success in stemming the village’s traffic woes, it’s been a nightmare in the world of online mapping.

The bypass ... er, truck route was opened in June 2000, allowing traffic on Highway 6 East to forego the Government Hill switchback and carry straight on around the village to the Esso station on Highway 23 just south of the Kuskanax Bridge. As a result of the new alignment of Highway 6, BC Highway 23 now ended at the Esso (and does to this day), and Highway 6 now completed a loop around the village, taking the old Canyon Road/6th Street NW route away from BC Highway 23. Nelson Avenue and Government Hill Road became regular village streets.

In order to keep heavy traffic headed for Burton, Fauquier, and Vernon off Broadway, new Highway 6 directional signage directed traffic along 1st Street NW rather than Broadway. 1st was widened to accommodate highway traffic, and the village took over maintenance of Broadway, but Broadway remained the legally designated highway until 2018 (and remained so in the BC Landmark Kilometre Inventory, the official tool for identifying locations along the provincial highway network).

This point is where the current major problem was created: the three blocks of Highway 6 between 8th Avenue NW and the Esso now run along a municipal street called Highway 23, which means a bunch of residents and businesses live along BC Highway 6 but have Highway 23 addresses. Some of them, like two of my colleagues at the Arrow Lakes Historical Society, even still receive notifications listing their address as Canyon Road (in a recent example of address frustration, they just ordered a delivery of new siding for their house using their Highway 23 North address; the delivery driver’s GIS attempted to send him to Revelstoke).

Another artefact still available on most mapping sources is the now-demolished link between Glenbank Road and 3rd Avenue NW along Stevie’s Hill (named in the 1920s for the Stevenson family of Glenbank, not some random dude named Stevie), which was obliterated by the construction of the new truck route.

A quarter-century later, Google (and pretty well everyone else — even the Regional District of Central Kootenay) still shows a roadway crossing the highway and climbing into Glenbank via Stevie’s Hill along what is now merely a four-foot wide walking trail on a sand bank hanging 20 metres high above the new Highway 6. Even more hilarious is that many mapping services still show the entirety of 3rd Avenue below the highway along Stevie’s Hill as perfectly fine to drive despite being permanently closed in 1984.

The current view looking south (top) and north (above) along what was Glenbank Road along Stevie’s Hill, long excavated away to make room for the new Highway 6 alignment. A smidgeon of pavement from the old road is still visible in the first image. Good luck driving on it. (Kyle Kusch photos)

3rd Avenue NW as it appears today at the bottom end of Stevie’s Hill, cordoned off since October 1984. Until the 2010s, a lone streetlight halfway between the barricade and 6th Street NW still lit up part of the overgrown street. (Kyle Kusch photo)

2018 saw the official transfer of Broadway to the village and the legal adoption of 1st Street NW as part of Highway 6; this was done to allow the village’s downtown revitalization project to proceed. With the construction of new sidewalks and installation of new light standards came the removal of the late-1980s/early-1990s highway sign at the east end of the village above the corner of Broadway and Nelson.

Despite the construction of the new Highway 6 occurring 25 years ago, almost no online mapping sources have acknowledged this. Google, Apple, OpenStreetMap, ESRI and Bing have Highway 23 running through the village down 6th Avenue NW onto Broadway.

Of the major online mapping services, only MapQuest correctly identifies Highway 23 as ending at the Esso and Highway 6 as wrapping entirely around Nakusp, albeit with the pre-2018 Broadway alignment, plus it still lists Government Hill Road as part of the highway. (And, no, McDonald Creek Provincial Park has not been relocated to the bottom of Government Hill.) Even local authorities have gotten confused. In February 2020, an erroneous Highway 23 sign was installed alongside the Nakusp Secondary School field, directly contradicting both the (correct) Highway 6 sign just three blocks down the street and the signs at the junction installed in 2000.

This wouldn’t be the first time the Nakusp area fell victim to faulty signage. It took until the summer of 1980 for rural roads in Glenbank and Brouse to receive standardized signage, as noted in the Arrow Lakes News of Sept. 3, 1980. Three roads in Glenbank — Church Hill, Alexander, and Zak — bore the brunt of misdirected typesetting.

This clipping from the Arrow Lakes News of Sept. 3, 1980 noted the arrival of street signs on Glenbank’s “Churchill” Road. While “Alexandria” Road would eventually be corrected back to Alexander on the east side of Glenbank, “Churchill” never was. In addition to the names shown here, other local nicknames for the road included Nishimura’s Hill and, most famously, “The Snake.” 

Glenbank Methodist Church (built 1908), which gave Church Hill Road its name, as it stood below the intersection of Shakespeare Avenue and Nakusp East Road. The village of Nakusp is in the distance. (Mary Keys photo, ALHS 2014.003.623)

Even these Village of Nakusp signs installed in 1998 just 240 metres apart couldn’t sort the Church Hill/Churchill mess out (not to mention that the Glenacres Road sign is missing its ‘S’). Also, for Glenbank denizens: Shakespeare Avenue is the original name of that road and the name still used by the village for its portion of the road; Shakespeare Road is the form used by the Regional District of Central Kootenay in the unincorporated portion of Glenbank. (Kyle Kusch photos)

Perhaps the most egregious Glenbank street name error in Glenbank — one that ended up being legally entrenched with help from the 1980 road signs — was Zacks Road, which persists even though members of the Zak family (just three letters) still live on the road to this day. Zacks Road is seen here in October 2023 with its modern Village of Nakusp street sign. (Google Street View image)

In this age of convenience, it’s important to remember that none of these online mapping services — Google, Apple, MapQuest, OpenStreetMap, Bing, ESRI — are official sources of information. Heck, it took all the way until this year for Google to stop showing Highway 31 between Galena Bay and Meadow Creek as a seasonal winter road closed four months of the year, which would be quite the inconvenience for the hundreds of residents who lived along it if it were true.

In closing, I’ve prepared a small map to help you remember that: 1) Provincial Highway 23 ends at the junction at the northwest end of Nakusp and hasn’t made its way downtown in 25 years; 2) you can’t drive Stevie’s Hill anymore because the road is literally demolished; 3) it is Highway 6, and Highway 6 alone, that does a near-complete loop around the village; and 4) Broadway Street West and Government Hill Road haven’t been part of any highway for years.

(They should have just left it as Canyon Road.)

Kyle Kusch was the archivist for the Arrow Lakes Historical Society between 2011 and 2023 before heading off to Ireland to obtain his MA in Archives and Records Management at University College Dublin, which complements his prior MA in Geography from the University of Northern British Columbia. And, no, he wasn’t actually left alone on a doorstep with a Rand McNally road atlas — it was a copy of Fischler’s Hockey Encyclopedia.