Qualla: Jordan River, British Columbia

Jordan River, British Columbia: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Qyd assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. The chaplain got his way. In June of 1790, Sub-Lieutenant Manuel Quimper looked at this stretch of Vancouver Island's southwest shore and called the river Rio Hermoso - beautiful river - which was a fair reading of the place. The name did not last the year. When Gonzalo Lopez de Haro drew up the Carta Reducida a few months later, the water had become Rio Jordan, a change credited to Alejandro Jordan, the chaplain sailing with Francisco de Eliza's expedition. British surveyors anglicized it, and the settlement that grew at the river's mouth was gazetted as River Jordan, which is still its official name on the register. Everybody calls it Jordan River anyway. Seventy kilometres west of Victoria, the argument has simply never been resolved.

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Jordan River, British Columbia: A Camp at the Edge of the Rain

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Qyd assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. Crews were cutting the Jordan River watershed by the 1880s, moving logs by whatever method the ground allowed. In 1907 the work turned industrial: six kilometres of railway track went down, and timber started leaving the valley at a different order of speed. Western Forest Produc...

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Jordan River, British Columbia: Three Hundred Metres of Falling Water

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Colin Stepney, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Vancouver Island Power Company finished the Jordan River system in 1911, giving the island its second hydroelectric generating station. The engineering is beautifully blunt. Water gathers behind Diversion Dam, runs 8.8 kilometres down what began as a wooden sluice to an equal...

Image: Colin Stepney | CC BY-SA 4.0

Jordan River, British Columbia: The Ears Pointed at the Strait

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Qyd assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. Jordan River stares straight down the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The sightline runs unbroken from Cape Flattery, out where the strait opens to the Pacific, across to Port Angeles on the Washington shore - roughly a hundred kilometres of water with nothing standing in the way. That g...

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Jordan River, British Columbia: Winter Is the Season

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Qyd assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. Until 1912 you arrived by boat or you did not arrive. That year the Old Otter Point Road was pushed through, tying Jordan River by land to Sooke and on to Victoria. In 1953 the route was folded into the newly created Highway 14, running west from Colwood; by 1975 the road reached...

Image: No machine-readable author provided. Qyd assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain