Arrow Park Cable Ferry

At the landing on Highway 6, 22 kilometres south of Nakusp, the road runs down a ramp to the channel where Upper Arrow Lake meets Lower Arrow Lake. The vessel at the ramp is Arrow Park III, a cable ferry rated for 24 vehicles, 48 passengers and a maximum load of 141,400 kilograms. It runs on demand. Chris Doering, who crossed with Connie Biggart in May 2022, gave the procedure: “Just show up at the landing and if they’re not on your side, they’ll spot you and come over.” There is no fare. All of the province’s inland ferries are free to users.

The wire on the channel floor

The crossing takes five minutes. A long wire rope is anchored on each shore, and when the ferry draws on it, the vessel moves. Between trips, Doering wrote, the cable lies on the bottom of the channel and rises only when it is pulled. The boat works from five in the morning until just past noon, then from 2:15 in the afternoon until 9:20 at night, and in the gap it stays at its landing.

On the far side is the small community of Arrow Park. In Doering’s account it would be cut off from the highway system without the ferry. On his trip his was the only vehicle aboard, apart from a truck that one of the crew had parked on the deck, and he doubted the ferry had ever been full because few people live on that side. Foot passengers ride as well. Behind both landings rise the mountains and a long stretch of forest. WaterBridge Ferries Inc. runs the service under contract with the Ministry of Transportation and Transit. According to Doering, the crew comes from a subsidiary of the firm that built the boat.

Launch day, March 2020

That firm is Waterbridge Steel of Nakusp. In 2016 it won a $27.9-million contract to design and build four new cable ferries for the province’s inland routes. Adams Lake II went into service in spring 2017, Glade II in 2018 and Harrop II in March 2019. Arrow Park III, the last of the four, was scheduled to be running by the end of 2019. On March 2, 2020, the ministry posted a photograph of it on its way to the lake, captioned “launch day aka today!” By March 31 it had finished sea trials and was ready to enter service that week, “once operations and environmental conditions permit,” Castanet reported. The same notice asked British Columbians, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, to avoid non-essential travel and to stay inside their vehicles during sailings.

The new ferry was larger than the one it replaced, with capacity raised to carry commercial vehicles at full highway loads. The ministry’s release called it “the first vessel of the ministry’s inland fleet that will be fully electrified, an important part of the Province’s CleanBC commitment,” and set full electrification for 2021. On all four ferries in the contract, onboard batteries were to supply power while the boats sat docked in off-peak hours. The aim was less noise at the terminals and lower emissions.

John Robins and the boat called Arrow

The earliest ferry at the Narrows in the record was a raft of logs. Negatives in the Arrow Lakes Historical Society collection show John Robins running it across the Narrows of the Columbia River between 1926 and 1928, carrying a vehicle. A boat named Arrow, at the right of the frame, was used to steer it. One 1926 picture, given by the Robins family, shows passengers crowded on the raft, with a Mr. Johnson in a suit at the left foreground. The Society catalogues another image as “prob. John Robins’ 1st ferry.” Other negatives record what crossed in later years: a Buerge truck in 1930, a Forestry truck in the late 1930s, a load of poles, and Robins himself at high water in 1948.

In 1949 an all-metal ferry was assembled at Nakusp for Arrow Park, and at first Robins pushed it. Charlie Rollins photographed a steel ferry for Arrow Park in the Nakusp shipyard as it was built, launched and set afloat. In 1954 he photographed a new Arrow Lakes ferry, MV Arrow Park, under construction at the same yard. The Canadian Pacific’s Nakusp & Slocan line runs at the left of that frame, and a piledriver and crane stand in front of the railway workshop. In 1955 Robins posed aboard the old Arrow Park ferry on its last run. He retired after it.

Doering, writing in 2023, said he knew nothing of the first ferry. He reasoned that the crossing could have come no earlier than the 1960s, when the reservoir raised the water at the Narrows. He also wrote that Arrow Park III replaced a ferry built in the late 1940s that had worked the run since the early 1990s. He placed Nakusp’s earlier shipyard in the 1890s to 1910s, building sternwheelers and tugs, and called the present yard a recent one. The Society’s photographs show a Nakusp shipyard at work on ferries in 1949 and 1954.

Arrows in the rock, graves on the hill

The lakes take their name from arrows. The Columbia widens into Lower and Upper Arrow Lake between Castlegar and Revelstoke. The narrow place between them lies about 42 miles (67 kilometres) south of Revelstoke, just south of Arrow Park. The lakes first appeared on a map in 1832. The Catholic missionary Pierre Jean de Smet passed through in 1845 or 1846 and wrote: “We passed under a perpendicular rock, where we beheld an innumerable number of arrows sticking out of the fissures. The Indians, when they ascend the lake, have a custom of lodging each an arrow into these crevices. This is the reason why the first voyageurs call these lakes the Arrow Lakes.” One early explorer put the arrows 30 or 40 feet above the water. Several versions of the story hold that an arrow that stuck meant good luck for the shooter, and one that fell meant the opposite. The rock stood about 25 miles upriver from Castlegar, just north of Deer Park.

The settlement at the ferry was also called West Arrow Park, with East Arrow Park across the water. The Hugh Keenleyside Dam, opened in 1969, flooded towns and farmland, and in Doering’s words it made one body of water some 230 kilometres long, from Revelstoke to Castlegar. The water would have covered the West Arrow Park cemetery, and the soil there was unstable. In 1967 the cemetery was closed and its graves moved to the southeast corner of the Glenbank extension of the Nakusp cemetery. Many of them are marked only by a small plaque bearing a name. A stone at the corner of the section reads: “This section contains the graves of former residents of Arrow Park who were buried in the cemetery there.”