Dig Where You Stand

By Eric Andersen
Published: Feb. 4, 2012.

A few years back I found a book in a Stockholm used book shop, Gräv där du står! Hur man utforskar ett jobb (by Sven Lindqvist, 1978). The title translates as “Dig where you stand! How to go about researching the history of a job” – your job, a workplace.

“Gräv där du står!” (pronounced like “grave dare du store”) – “Dig where you stand!” – is an old Swedish proverb. It could alternatively be expressed as: “Take charge of the problem yourself!”, or “Look for the possibilities in your situation!”, or as advice for the entrepreneur, “Start with what you have skills for, with what you know!”

However, in the Swedish language I have also seen: “Dig where you stand! World domination starts here!”, and “Cultivate a dream – dig where you stand! Nature tourism in your [economically depressed] country village!”

“Economic democracy” is an important theme of the book; and a belief in the importance of history – it is still with us, still has power and influence.

I was to learn that this little book Gräv där du står! has had a huge impact in inspiring a “Dig-where-you-stand” movement in Sweden – and more recently in Quebec also, where the book is now available in French.

Sweden is a very organized country. (Oppressively so, some think.) Ambitious national programs, movements and campaigns under slogans like “Dig where you stand!” are a special feature of the culture.

From the 1970s into the 1990s, the “Dig-where-you-stand” popular movement involved over 10,000 groups around the country studying local industrial or agricultural history, places of work, genealogy, natural and built environment surroundings – and producing publications, TV programs, school course materials, and building of museums.

Quite impressive, what has been achieved for heritage interpretation, and community pride – and also for the Swedish tourism industry!

So, I’ve been inspired by this book and the impacts of its message elsewhere, and I’m standing and digging on a bench of the “Smoke Bluffs” – my own doorstep, and back yard.

What can I learn and report about, digging here? Is it a very interesting, exciting place to stand and dig?

The name “Smoke Bluffs” was popularized by UBC students organizing weekend climbing up here around 1980. Since then, climbers have gone wild naming and re-naming rock features and recording bragging rights.

Around the bottom of the Smoke Bluffs is the old course of the Squamish River’s East Branch, an ancient riverside trail route beginning from an old ceremonial/ gathering site (Harbourview Place, called “Potlatch Rock” by early settlers), and at least one abandoned village site.

Although prone to wild fires, the bluffs have been a refuge during floods – and for the odd ‘hermit’ settler (‘Trapper Jack’, ‘Popeye’). Cows, horses, goats and chickens have been kept up here.

Brothers Ernie and George Harry used to come up here from Sta-mus village to hunt grouse. The old stories they knew mention wolves being around in former times. But there are only coyotes today, and they are new here. So are the Scotch broom and Himalayan blackberry. It’s been quite a few years since the last good fire, so the native blackberries and huckleberries are rarer today.

Rock bluffs, mountains are obstacles to movement. Captain George Vancouver and crew, arriving at the Head of Howe Sound in two rowboats in 1792, were frustrated laying eyes on the Smoke Bluffs – the only height of land they could see during miserable weather. “Dreary, comfortless region!” No Northwest Passage here.

The Smoke Bluffs (and Mamquam River canyon) were obstacles in the way for the famous Lillooet to Burrard Inlet cattle drive of 1877. Cattlemen Carson and Hoey might well have taken their herd up and along one of these benches on their way up to the Stawamus River/ Indian River headwaters. Incredible!

Just down below, by the Adventure Centre, gold rush explorers, railway surveyors and their Squamish guides would exchange their large sea-going canoes for river canoes – while scouts looked down from our bluffs, watching these curious visitors carefully

These Smoke Bluffs benches have always been good viewing platforms. (There are photos in the Library taken from here going back 100 years.)

The river below was used for log drives. One log driving operation had a contract to supply Douglas-fir dredge spuds for the Panama Canal construction. And up around our bluffs hand loggers rolled the best, accessible timber over the cliff edges, from one bench down to the next and into the water. The marks of the early hand loggers were still visible, I’m told, when the Northridge subdivision lots were developed in the late 1950s.

Plateau Drive up from Valleycliffe, and Northridge Drive were originally grades built for Merrill & Ring Lumber Co.’s railway logging. The company had a 200+ men camp along today’s Westway Avenue in the late 1920s. The Northridge – Smoke Bluffs area was logged over in 1928.

Returning to the Swedish “Dig-where-you-stand” movement’s interest in worker and industrial history it was, in fact, a crew of Swedish men who built these roads – and 30 more miles of road through the rock of “Crumpit Woods” and back through the hills of Quest University, Garibaldi Highlands and above.

With only hand tools, and a Fordson winch with a drag line, this Swedish work gang built several of today’s streets and good stretches of our most popular mountain bike trails.

We are very lucky to have a few (Ed Aldridge) photos of these men, and some recollections of their camp life (published later by one of a crew of Norwegian tree fallers who worked with them, Jack Fossum). And their long, bitter spring 1934 strike for better pay and working conditions is written about in newspaper clippings and police reports preserved in archives.

The truck logging method which replaced railway logging was more family-friendly, and more flexible, adaptive and environment-friendly too. Truck loggers would build homes for their families here, and could come home every night. Many of the homes in the Northridge and Southridge neighbourhoods on the Smoke Bluffs lower benches in the 1950s and 60s were built by truck logging families.

Their children and grandchildren have since taken up mountain biking and rock climbing.

Granite cut from the quarries near the entrance to our “Smoke Bluffs Park” can be seen in the facades of buildings on Georgia Street in Vancouver, and in Victoria harbour. (I think the product was called “Whistler white”. Tsk, tsk!)

So, not at all an uninteresting place to stand and “dig”!

“Dig where you stand!” is really not so far from “Know thyself!” (Socrates) – or, perhaps, “Think global, act local!”

Anyway, I believe any place in the Squamish Valley can be at least as worthwhile and interesting to stand and dig – whether as historian, entrepreneur, or naturalist. Anyone can dig here. Newer people and visitors too, can dig with pride.