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Page last updated June 5, 2012
© Michael Kluckner
Sketches from 2003. Few places in the world combine nature beauty and industrial despoilation as effectively as Howe Sound. Britannia Beach's copper concentrator and compact company town attract tourists and the filmmakers of Hollywood North. The site has become a major tourist attraction. The bottommost sketch was from the wharf where the Union Steamships once connected the town with the outside world (the Sea to Sky Highway, as it's now called, wasn't completed until the 1950s), and looks across to the pulp mill at Woodfibre, a scene recalling politician Phil Gaglardi's quip that 'pollution is the smell of money.' Woodfibre has since closed and Squamish, at the head of Howe Sound, is increasingly a bedroom community for Vancouver and Whistler rather than the gritty industrial town it once was. |