The Case of the Skeena’s Last River Ferry

I’m dangling in a tin can over the Skeena River.

An engine whirs above as we grind our way from the south to the north shore, a 200-metre distance that takes four minutes by cable car. Below, the blue-green river drifts lazily under a grey sky.

“It’s beautiful on a sunny day,” says Scott, the cable car operator.

In fact, it’s beautiful today. Looking west through the rain-spattered window, a coastal fog hangs low over Kitselas Mountain. It’s the kind of view tourists travel thousands of kilometres to admire. I’m sharing it with three other people — my fellow sardines on this rainy mid-March excursion to Usk.

For Usk’s two dozen residents, ferrying across the Skeena is just part of their regular commute. For the better part of a century, the trip — either by water or by air, depending on river conditions — has been Usk’s lifeline to the outside world while also keeping it at bay.

Soon, river levels will begin to rise and the cable car will be temporarily retired as the community transitions to using its reaction ferry, a vessel powered solely by the river’s current that can accommodate a dozen passengers, two cars and a couple of horses. The number of daily crossings will increase over the summer, when about one in five passengers is an out-of-towner here to cross the river and see what’s on the other side.

“Everyone wants to come to the store or the café over here,” says Ernie Webb, an Usk resident who oversees the small team of operators who keep the ferry running on demand from 6:45 a.m. to 11:15 p.m. every day, all year round.

Webb has already established himself as a joker, and his deadpan delivery gives him away. There is no store or café in Usk, he admits.

Not anymore, at least.

This tiny hamlet was established 20 kilometres northeast of Terrace, just upstream from Kitselas Canyon, when the railway came through north of the Skeena in 1913. Early excitement about logging and mining attracted people to the community, which quickly grew to include sawmills, hotels, a two-room schoolhouse, a general store and a church.

The ferry was installed the same year to access timber resources and mining claims south of the Skeena. When the river iced up in winter, the ferryman was still responsible for getting residents across safely by marking out a trail with wooden planks. Former resident Helene McRae described crossing to work at her father’s sawmill on a bitterly cold day in the mid-20th century when ice jams backed up all the way from Kitselas Canyon.

“Luckily we were able to turn back or we would have been caught in the moving ice,” she recalled. “For three years, I crossed the Skeena for work — lots of scary times.”

When Highway 16 was completed south of the Skeena in the 1950s, the valley’s main travel corridor shifted across the river, leaving Usk isolated. Its population peaked sometime mid-century at more than 100 residents, and has gradually declined in the decades since.

Today, the “aerial ferry” offers a backup when the reaction ferry can’t run.

The cable car was originally an open platform used to haul lumber from the mills across the river. The enclosed pedestrian car was installed in the 1960s, providing a transportation option when the river is too high, too low or too dangerous to operate the reaction ferry.

That happens quite a bit.

Watching the weather and the water gauges

The reaction ferry typically runs May through November, operating when the Skeena is between just over five metres and up to about nine metres in depth. It’s usually out of service for a couple of weeks in June, when a deluge of snowmelt floods the river, and again in July when the water gets too low.

Fall rains bring the river level back up late in the year, providing residents with an opportunity to stock up on firewood, livestock feed and food supplies before the ferry shuts down for winter and transportation shifts to the walk-on cable car.

There’s usually a few days’ notice, Webb says, giving Usk residents a chance to shuttle their vehicles across the river, where they remain until spring.

Over the past five years, the reaction ferry has operated, on average, 147 days a year, according to B.C.’s Ministry of Transportation and Transit. During that time, the most operating days in a single season was when the ferry ran 202 days in 2020.

But B.C.’s recent drought has impacted ferry operations. Two years ago, it ran just 93 days, hampered by low river levels. Although last year looked like it might follow a similar pattern, a wet fall extended the season into December.

Usk’s team of four ferry operators are constantly watching the weather and the water gauges. Ice and logs can make crossings treacherous. Submerged boulders can migrate downriver unseen. Even the riverbed rises and falls as it’s sculpted by the currents.

“There were a lot of adrenalin rushes,” remembers Maureen Bostock, who spent several years working as a ferry operator while living in Usk from 1978 to 1992. “You would look upriver to see where there was an opening, where the debris was less, and then plan your run across.”

Changing water levels meant that the ferry docks needed to be pulled up or pushed out nearly every shift, she says. On her first day, she was wrestling with a dock when William Seymour, an experienced operator from nearby Kitselas First Nation, asked why she wasn’t using heavy machinery to get the job done.

“He spent that time and showed me how to use the loader,” she says.

In addition to teaching Bostock the mechanics, Seymour taught her something else — a life lesson about working with the current, rather than against it, to propel yourself toward your destination.

“He said, ‘You have to listen to the river. You have to pay attention to what the river is doing, and you have to let it go,’” Bostock recalls, remembering how the faster current near the shore would shoot her into slower-moving water mid-river. “Instead of fighting to keep control of the ferry, what he taught me was about letting go and working with the river. It was so beautiful. I will never forget that.”

The reaction ferry has been pulled from its tether only once, in 1936, when flooding engulfed the community. The vessel was found lodged several kilometres downstream, above Kitselas Canyon.

When the community’s cut off from the outside world

Sometimes, even the aerial ferry becomes too dangerous to operate.

When river levels rise above 10 metres, the surface of the water is within a couple of metres of the cable car. Once, during spring floods in 2007, a “great big tree came down” and its roots snagged the cable, breaking it, Webb says.

When the river gets that high, the aerial ferry shuts down. That means the community is occasionally completely cut off from the world for days at a time.

Residents are given an opportunity to evacuate, Webb says. But many don’t.

“We ride it out,” he says. “There are contingency plans in place. We have had to evacuate people for medical reasons utilizing a helicopter.”

Despite needing to constantly adapt to changing conditions, incidents have been few and far between.

The crew recalls one time when a local resident who was heading into town to get his vehicle’s brakes fixed rolled right across the ferry bed and into the river on the other side. The driver made it out safely, they add.

Not like Mr. Chinn, someone says, as the mood grows sombre.

The Terrace resident rolled his vehicle into the river while visiting the community in June 1968. He was never found.

The last Skeena ferry left standing

Once upon a time, the Skeena River provided the main transportation route through this region.

Starting in the late 1800s, sternwheelers paddled up the river to Hazelton. When the sternwheelers were made obsolete by the railway, ferries were used to shuttle people and goods across the river at various points between Terrace and Hazelton. Nine ferries began operating between 1910 and 1917. Two of the last three, at Cedarvale and Kitwanga, shut down 50 years ago.

Now, Usk is the only ferry left.

The Usk ferry, which was started by a private operator and taken over by government in the early 1920s, is operated today by Emil Anderson Maintenance under a contract with the Ministry of Transportation and Transit.

In 1991, the province briefly considered a bridge to Usk.

The highways ministry undertook a study to cost out road options into the community. The expense would be measured against ferry operating costs, it said, which at that time were about $250,000 a year.

When the cost for a one-lane bridge across the Skeena came in at $3 million, the province balked. The local district manager suggested Usk residents might not welcome the intrusion anyway.

“They moved out there for some reasons that are personal,” John Newhouse told the Terrace Standard. “A bridge would significantly change the lifestyle and have an effect on the community.”

Usk is one of five reaction ferries across the province and only one of two without motorized backup. (It does have a lifeboat in case of emergency.) As with B.C.’s 13 other inland ferries, there’s no cost to travel on the Usk ferry.

That almost changed in 2002. That February, the transportation minister announced that the province would implement a toll on the route and reduce its schedule, part of provincewide budget cuts that saw several inland ferries eliminated altogether.

Residents rejected the idea.

“It better not happen or we’ll sink it,” an unnamed person told the Terrace Standard at the time. “We don’t have to kiss the government’s butt to get transportation.”

Just as the $18 monthly fee was to begin the following January, the province paused its plans, saying it would undertake a “transportation strategy” to look more broadly at road, bridge and ferry tolls.

The tolls were never implemented. They would have cost more to collect than what they would have brought in, Webb says.

That has left the ferry foreman free to prank the tourists.

He stifles a grin, taking a moment to compose himself, as he recalls the story of two unsuspecting young women whom he ferried across the river before asking for their “tickets.” Panicked, one of the women said she would need to call her father in Terrace.

The woman’s father “was my superintendent,” Webb says, bursting into laughter.

The job is mostly fun, he says. He loves to see the reaction from children as they cross the river, and he once helped a local father bring his autistic son across on the cable car.

“He was so excited, so happy,” Webb remembers. “It was a big moment in his life.”

Bostock, who moved to Ontario in the early 2000s, has fond memories of the community. “It was very welcoming,” she says. The Usk Community Association threw a party every year when the ferry started running, holding a lottery to guess its launch date, and a ribbon cutting when that day finally arrived.

“Then everybody from the community came down and went across on the celebratory first trip,” she says.

As temperatures warm and spring rains fall, Webb hopes there will be enough water in the river for the reaction ferry to begin operations later this month.

These days, the inaugural sailing happens with little fanfare, he says.

“The first thing that typically happens is a lot of Usk residents will get their garbage, load it up and take it to the dump,” he says. They’ll often return with new household appliances or building supplies to begin a summer project.

“It takes about a week or 10 days and then the travelling public catch on that the ferry’s open,” he says. “Then they want to come over to Usk and have a look or ride the ferry.”