Wed, May 24, 2017
We are camping in Fort Nelson at Historic Milepost 300 of the Alaskan Highway. We’re actually at milepost 284 but the road’s been straightened and they lost 16 miles of the original route 🙂
It’s a layover day so we decided to check out the local Heritage Museum. Pretty much what you’d expect for a small town in northwest Canada: a few characters manning the stations and lots of artifacts.
The museum has a large collection of old trucks, cars and other mechanical devices related to hunting, fishing and just plain living is such a harsh environment.
Here’s one of the guys and he’s responsible for keeping everything running. I pointed out what looked like 100 year old contraption and asked ‘what’s that?”.
It’s a small pumpjack but this one’s designed for lifting water out of a well, not oil. Dates from the early 1900’s.
It’s a low speed, single piston engine and he started it up by putting gasoline in the carburetor and spinning the flywheel. It fired right up and the flywheel took off. The wooden piece in the background started moving up and down and it was connected to a diaphragm that sucked the water out of the well. Pretty cool.
They also had a tractor that caught my attention. It wasn’t very old but sure had an interesting name:
DC Airstream 