June 14, 2025 - Driving to Alaska
Hinton - Beaver Boardwalk/Town Museum
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| Our lodging at Jasper Gates Resorts was only ten miles or so down the road from the little town of Hinton, which had a few attractions so decided to check out. The first was the Beaver Boardwalk. |
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Beaver Boardwalk is a scenic network of trails -- boardwalk and gravel -- around the wetlands and through some forest.
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The star of the show are the beavers, and their lodge and dam, or course. Here is their lodge. We didn't see the beavers; apparently they are best seen at dawn and dusk since they work at night.
The Maxwell Lake beaver colony has lived here for more than 20 years. Each beaver colony consists of an adult pair and their young from the previous two years.
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| This is part of the dam the beavers built. |
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| A better look at the dam, which is very wide. |
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Walking through the forest.
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| This is Canada. |
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| The trail loops around Maxwell Lake. |
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West Fraser Mills, Inc. sponsorede the construction in 2006 of the Beaver Boardwalk to commemorate the 50th anniversary of West Fraser's Hinton pulp mill operation and the town of Hinton.
I'm guessisng West Fraser Mills is associated with West Fraser Timber, a Canadian forestry company that produces lumber, laminated veneer lumber (LVL), medium-density fibreboard (MDF), oriented strand board (OSB), plywood, pulp, newsprint, and wood chips. As of 2018, "West Fraser has become the largest lumber manufacturer in North America with 8,600 employees globally – about 5,000 in Western Canada – at about 50 locations.
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Then we headed over to the nearby Northern Rockies Museum. It is housed in the old railway station.
Concidently, the Town of Hinton is named after its railway station, which in turn was named after William Hinton, a manager for the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway at the time it was built, in 1911.
Aside from a coal boom in the 1930s, the population around the Hinton station remained low until 1956 when Northwest Pulp and Power built a pulp mill.
The New Town of Hinton was incorporated on November 1, 1956. The community grew rapidly, as did a new village to the east called Drinnan. On March 27, 1957, the two communities amalgamated, with a population of about 3,500. The mill was completed in April 1957. It became Alberta's first pulp mill.
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Well, it's not live but we can say we saw a beaver in Hinton!
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| HInton was on the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway (GTPR) line from Edmonton to Jasper and beyond. In 1911, the GTPR built a station house at mile 978 west of Winnipeg. The station was named after William Hinton, a Vice President and General Manager for the GTPR |
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Mountain goat.
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| The coal-fired steam engines of the railroads both opened access to, and provided a market for, coal from a thick seam underlying the Hinton area. By the late 1920s, the region contributed 22% of Alberta's total coal production. The coal mines gradually died out although a few are still operational. |
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| Piacture of a giant coal mine. On Google Maps you can see one just east of Hinton. |
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| A big coal mine up by Grande Cache, Alberta. |
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Model of one of the huge machine shovels.
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The very same Hinton train station in which this museum is now located, back in 1913.
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| One of the old passenger cars that plied these rails. |
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| Capitalism isn't the most efficient system. At one time there were two rail lines between Edmonton and Jasper. Competitors Canadian Northern Railway and Grand Trunk Pacific Railway each had one. It was crazy since only one was needed and they were so expensive to build. The need for track was so great during World War I that they removed track from both lines and shipped it to Europe, forcing a consolidation of the two lines. |
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Old picture of the brand new Hinton timber pulp mill back in 1955.
Our last thing to do in Hinton was have a nice breakfast at a family restaurant; then it was time to continue our journey to Alaska.
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