According to his account, while on a westward trapping and hunting trip in the 1921/22 winter, he realized he had crossed the continental divide through a lower pass, either on locating a spike from the 1904 Grand Trunk survey, or on meeting trappers who had canoed from the Fraser River.
By 1920, grain prices were low and freight rates high, and many settlers, who had been attracted by repeated government assurances that a line would be built imminently, were forced to abandon their holdings.
When CNR president, Sir Henry Thornton, visited the Peace Country in 1924, he promised to build a railroad westward when the region produced tonnage equal to 10 million imperial bushels (360,000 m3) of wheat.
[12] If a further line through the mountains were economically viable, railway survey engineers favoured the Monkman route,[13] because of lighter snowfall and no chance of slides in a 0.25-mile (0.40 km) wide pass at its narrowest.
Residents unfairly compared this choice to the then Pacific Great Eastern Railway (PGE), which "started nowhere, ended nowhere, and served no settlers".
[23] Though the Peace Pass was favoured,[24] the projected traffic did not warrant the expenditure, but the railway companies were open to the federal government constructing a line.
[26] Politicians lamented that if the existence of the Monkman Pass had been known earlier, it could well have become a rail route,[27] but the GTP rationale makes the claim questionable.
[29] In 1958, the PGE opened a Pine Pass link from Prince George to Dawson Creek, where the line connected with the Northern Alberta Railways.
[30] By the late 1970s, a railway line through the Monkman Pass area was foreseen as part of developing the Tumbler Ridge coal deposits.
Channeled away from live overhead wires,[34] water pouring from the roof of one tunnel section beneath a lake was called the "carwash".
[35] With coal mines closing between 2000–03 on the Tumbler Ridge Subdivision, the government did not recover its $400 million capital investment before progressively abandoning parts of the route.
[41] After frustration in not securing a direct rail link, the Peace Country newspapers launched a campaign to build a highway from Prince George via Hansard and the Monkman Pass to Beaverlodge, Alberta.
[49] Initially, the Yellowhead Highway Association believed the proposal equally jeopardized their potential funding for linking Longworth with McBride,[50] but ultimately lent their support.
[64] In the summer, a 250-man Alberta crew recommenced the work, keeping connected to the Finlay Forks radiotelephone station by a portable radio transmitter.
[65] When a party of four, guided by trapper Martin Framstad, carried a symbolic 50-pound sack of Marquis Wheat (grown on Arthur Smith's farm) across the pass, it was the first commercial produce to come directly overland from the Peace Country.
[66] By July, in addition to loaning camping equipment, the Alberta government had provided slip and Fresno scrapers[67] and plows for the 15-mile (24 km) section within that province.
[68] While the Rio Grande-Stoney Lake section awaited final grading, the next 20 miles were passable by truck and a pack trail existed for the remainder.
[73] In mid-September, the "Pathfinder" car (a 1927 Model T Ford, modified as a light truck fitted with a ruckstel axle to improve gearing), headed westward with a set of replacement parts.
[76] Expected in Prince George by early November,[77] the "Pathfinder" had struggled through days of one-foot deep snow, before Francis Murphy's 16-man and four-horse team reached Henry Hobi's cabin at the junction of Moose Creek and Herrick River.
[86] Although originally proposing a regular service to Monkman Lake, the specially equipped tractor busses[87] only ran as far as Kinuseo Falls.
[95] While making a Beaverlodge-Hansard hike in the summer of 1951, a trio's encounter with fellow beings was limited to a few First Nations campers at Stony Lake and Henry Hobi at his Fontoniko Creek cabin.
[98] Following an intense 1961 air and land search, a long overdue father and his two young sons, attempting to reach Hansard, were rescued five miles (8 km) south of Monkman Lake.
[99] In 1967, a 17-member team, including Gerry Stojan, one of the original drivers, retrieved the "Pathfinder", bringing it first to Prince George to complete its historic journey.
[103] Despite widespread local support, the government opposed a road through the pass as part of developing the Tumbler Ridge coal deposits, possibly owing to a potential McGregor dam (see #Railway Proposal).
[106] The next year, UAT, renamed Yukon Southern Air Transport (YSAT), introduced a direct Prince George-Grande Prairie route over the pass.
[108] The following month, a helicopter pilot made a chance discovery of the Cessna 180 wreckage in a lonely wind swept canyon near the pass.
[109] The same year, a solo pilot, flying from Grande Prairie to Chetwynd, became lost overnight in a blinding snowstorm in the Monkman Pass area.
[117] The following year, Richfield Oil Corp. abandoned a runaway gas well after spending over $2 million, because of equipment losses and misinterpreting seismograph findings.
[119] Under contract to the Peace River Petroleums and Central del Rio consortium, Gray Oil Co. drilled for natural gas two miles (3.2 km) south of Stony Lake in Grizzly Valley, near the abandoned Richfield well.
[125] To survive financially, Peace River Petroleums entered a partnership with Imperial Oil, which assumed all drilling costs,[126] but the former was soon delisted from the Vancouver Stock Exchange for failing to file relevant statements.