Paddler News Feed

 

•	Letter from the Editor
•	Features
•	River Runner Supplement
•	Eddylines
•	Hotline
•	Letter from the ACA
•	Paddle Tales
•	First Descents
•	ECO
•	Destinations
•	Gear
•	Skills
•	Different Strokes
•	Flipside

< March/April 2000
	River Runner Supplement
Site Zed Chalkboard M.I.A. Historical River Running Document Can't Be Found

"Site Zed" sounds like a military zone, or some secret government out-in-the-desert type place where Martians land and we never get to hear about it. But to the three dozen or so boaters who've reached Site Zed on British Columbia's Grand Canyon of the Stikine, the name signifies a milestone, a place to camp, and a chalkboard.

"I'm sure I took the last picture of the board," says Aaron Pruzan, who ran the Stikine in September of 1996 with Joe Larrow. "The Park Service tore the buildings down the week after we were there and it's kind of a mystery now where it is."

The chalkboard in question hung in a small abandoned building about 16 miles down from the put-in. Signing your name on it became one of the rites of passage for the proud few who'd been there.

"It's basically the first place to camp," says Rob Lesser, whose name appears on the board four times, and who ran the Stikine again in 1998, after the buildings had been removed. "We definitely made an effort to find the board when we were there in '98, but they did a good job of cleaning up and there isn't much there. They told us they were pretty diligent about looking for it, but it hasn't turned up."

Lesser says the building site was pretty active in 1981, when he and four others made the first attempt. "There were probably 25 men living there and working for B.C. Hydro," he says. "They had a commissary, barracks, everything. Now it's pretty much back to its natural state."

Pruzan says Site Zed was welcomed for more than a place to camp. "About a mile or so upriver you start seeing all these markings on the wall where they were going to build a dam," he says. "And then you get there, and you're scared from the first day on the river, and you see all these familiar names on this chalkboard and it's sort of comforting."

Lesser says there may be some pressure to find the missing chalkboard after a movie on the Stikine is released this summer. "You don't have too many historic documents up there to begin with," he says. "And even though this history is fairly recent, it is still significant."

- tb