The Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure is inviting people on a trip down the memory lane on Highway 99, from Horseshoe Bay to Squamish.
Many improvements were made to the highway over the years, but in 1966, the highway was a single lane of traffic in each direction, carved into the dramatic cliffs of the Coast Mountains where they met the sea.
In 1966, there was no paved provincial highway connecting Squamish and Whistler, then called Alta Lake.
The ministry photolog in this video ends after Squamish, from where a narrow gravel road continues to Whistler.
“We recorded these nostalgic videos (or photologs) from 16mm film footage taken in 1966. The original photologs were collected by rigging a camera onto the dash of a car that took still images every 80 feet or so and then running them all together as a single film,” the Ministry said.
“As far as we know, the “Highways Department” (as it was then known) was the first organization in Canada to collect information this way in order to create a visual record of road condition information from across the province, thereby allowing our engineers to study a stretch of road without having to travel there,” the ministry added.
BC Road Trip Time Machine is a historical program of the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure.
Marissa Lyne Boehm says
Until Britannia beach I feel the highway didn’t change much from 1966 till 2004 before the Olympic expansion of the highway. This video brought back my car sickness from when I was kid lol
Corinne Lonsdale says
What a fun trip!!!!!! A trip down memory lane for sure…. Very little traffic on hwy 99 then. Iforgot about the overhead conveyer belt at Construction Aggregates in Britannia and even the mine was working then. I didn’t think the Red Bridge had disappeared in 66 but I guess it had. Good trip up Government Road and even down to the south end of Squamish and the PGE housing…loved it
Gerry Kristianson says
The video brought back memories of the unofficial opening of the new highway on June 1, 1958. Early that morning, after a grad party that included a swim in Alice Lake, five of us from the Howe Sound “Class of ’58” set off for Vancouver by car, having been invited to after-grad celebrations in the big city by friends from Kitsilino High School. We had to push the car across a couple of streams where bridges were not yet finished, but we made it!
We took the PGE back to Squamish on Sunday afternoon. It wasn’t until August 7 that Premier WAC Bennett cut the ribbon to officially open the new road.
Gerry Kristianson