Bridge River Power Project

It harnesses the power of the Bridge River, a tributary of the Fraser, by diverting it through a mountainside to the separate drainage basin of Seton Lake, utilizing a system of three dams, four powerhouses and a canal.

The potential for the project was first observed in 1912 by Geoffrey Downton, a land surveyor, visiting the goldfield towns in the area who noticed the short horizontal distance between the flow of the Bridge River, just above its impressive canyon, and the much-lower Seton Lake.

It was developed as a model community, with a community hall, a combined rink and tennis court, lavish guest houses for visiting executives, parks, a school, a private beach and a full-service hotel which served the busy travel trade over the mountain to the goldfields towns of Bralorne, Pioneer and Minto.

Its most notable resident during that period was Masajiro Miyazaki, an osteopath who was engaged by the provincial police in Lillooet to serve as coroner despite wartime restrictions, and stayed on as the town doctor for years after.

The only access to the railhead for that road, at Shalalth, was via the rail line itself from Lillooet and, to get there, via the old pre-Trans-Canada "Cariboo Highway" from Hope to Lytton that had not been upgraded much since it was built in the 1920s.

2 Powerhouse by two much larger ones, which supply the water from Carpenter Lake, created by Terzaghi Dam, from the tunnels bored through Mission Mountain.

The rising lake waters flooded out several large ranches and homesteads in the valley, some of which dated back to the 1890s, and also the short-lived company town of Minto City, which lay at the confluence of Gun Creek with the former Bridge River, despite a long holdout by Wally O'Keeffe; owner of the Rexmount Ranch and his attempts to rally the people of Minto against the project.

This was of mixed success, and as far as many locals concerned only served to make the water at the public beach at the foot of Seton Lake colder than it already was.

[citation needed] Much of Carpenter Lake today is mudflat when reservoir levels are low, and for many years it was a stark reminder of older environmental standards, with vast forests of dead trees sticking out of the frigid, milky-blue glacial waters.

Programs in the 1980s to engage prisoners and others in the removal of these trees were launched during low-water levels, and the lake today is largely safe for boating, and while stocked for fishing it is still inadvisable for swimming due to its icy-cold water.