In early May I drove up the dusty Lac du Bois Road past McQueen Lake and continued northwest to the Pass Lake Recreation Site.    The one-lane road goes down to a campground and two boat launch areas.   At the farther one I parked the truck,  then used the gravel launch for the kayak.     I paddled around the lake twice, once in each direction, 5 km of kayaking on a quiet lake.

There were several fishermen on the lake.    I spotted some winter-killed fish, but the loons were busy so there were fish to be caught.    Ducks, geese, blackbirds, and marsh wrens were spotted in the marshy bays.

At the southwest end of the lake, there are the old buildings from the Agriculture Canada Research Site, 1928 to 1985.

Part of the history:

Until 1931 the Dominion Forest Service was responsible for the administration of the forested lands around Pass Lake, about 20 km north of Kamloops. The Forest Service built a chain of cabins and lookouts
from Pass Lake north and west toward Criss Creek. Sydney Bruce, the first Pass Lake forest ranger, built a cabin on the west shore of Pass Lake in 1912. Alan Parlow, later district forester at Kamloops, worked on this cabin as a University of British Columbia student in forestry. Gradually the operation expanded as more cabins were constructed and a telephone line was established linking the far cabins and Porcupine Ridge lookout to the Pass Lake ranger station and to Kamloops.  During the fire season, from mid May to mid September, the Pass Lake buildings were the rangers headquarters. From there he would ride patrol routes of varying lengths, some of which took him to the other cabins. One cabin was situated on the east end of Tranquille Lake. During the fire season, a lookout was located and manned on Porcupine Ridge at 1800 m elevation, north of the Tranquille Lake cabin. The ranger kept several horses at Pass Lake as fresh mounts and pack animals to bring supplies from Kamloops.  Hay was put up from the two irrigated meadows on Watching Creek.  A telephone line was strung from tree to tree through the thickly timbered areas. From Kamloops it was carried over the open grassland by poles along the Lac du Bois road between Kamloops and McQueen Lake.  An infestation of lodgepole pine beetles in 1928 killed many trees, which fell over the telephone line through the forest, making it very difficult to keep the line operating and the trail to the cabins open.  In 1931 the Railway Belt lands were returned to provincial control, except for certain portions such as the 486 ha around Pass Lake. This land and the Pass Lake ranger station buildings were transferred from the federal Department of Mines and Resources to the Department of Agriculture in 1941. The Dominion Range Experimental Substation used it when it opened in 1935, in addition to the headquarters on Mission Flats. By this time much of the abandoned telephone line had fallen down and ranchers were cutting it up to prevent injury to their stock. Some of the substation crew brought the telephone line down on horseback and used it along with barbed wire fences to reestablish telephone communication between Kamloops and Pass Lake. This operated for only a short time because the substation was closed in 1940 after the start of World War.

Canadian Archives