I love to photograph derelict and rusty, moss covered old trucks and machines. I tell all of my contacts to be on the look out for gossip or direct leads on new treasures.
A great Coast friend, Egmont resident, Dean Bosch ( Dean Bosch Contracting...excavation and trucking ) told me about a collection of very old trucks that were hidden away at Doriston.
On a fine summer day, we ventured out in Dean's boat for a short ride through the Skookumchuck Rapids to a heavily grown over beach landing spot. Dean guided me in for the short hike to where several abandoned work trucks lay in their final resting spots. ( not so final as we will see )
I spent a few hours at the site grabbing as many images as I could, in as many new angles as I could conjure up.
Dean and I hiked around a bit and found and photographed a few newer ( but still old ) trucks and a jeep. It was truly a phenomenal day, perfect summer weather and a perfect setting to photograph these treasures.
When I figured that I couldn't wrestle another new angle out of the mossy collection, we headed out to continue exploring the coastline in the boat. A short while later we were on another beach, gathering oysters off the rocks not too far away from the Lafarge gravel mine at Earl Creek. Perfect Sunshine Coast day.
So...the next event. About a year later, for some unknown reason...I toasted my laptop computer that held all of my photos. Not too long after that I also fried my portable hard drive that held all the back up files to ....well ...everything. Now some of the photos survived on discs...luckily. this was mostly because I had made discs to share with various friends. Also, in the "luck department" was the extra bonus that I had processed some photos on a friends computer...and those files were safely tucked away there.
At one point I thought that all the Doriston photos were lost completely. The only thing that remained were the tiny files that were on my Flickr account. I had mailed a disc to a friend who belongs to an antique truck club on Vancouver Island...but I had no copies myself. Just a few weeks ago while prowling around the corners of my new hard-drive, I found a whole collection of back-up photos in an unmarked folder. They must have been transferred from one of the other systems, and got tucked away, then forgotten.
So...ta da...I have the photos once more.
Oh...but wait there's more!
Dean phoned me a few months ago with terrible news.
A local guy, somewhat of a local "celebrity", who crewed on a self-powered landing barge..."borrowed" his bosses landing craft ( so the story goes ) and the excavator that was on-board. He used this combination to cruise up and down the coast and pilfer scrap iron from various beaches and old logging areas. This would be all kinds of old machines and trucks, and heavy steels parts. The landing barge would get beached, the excavator rolled off and into the bush to pull scavenged iron back to the waiting barge. I do not know how many landings were made, or how many loads were taken. The fact of the day is...that the Doriston trucks were dragged out of the resting grounds and hurled on to the landing craft, to be later melted down.
I'm thinking that there must have been some serious debts to pay, or maybe the wife needed a new trinket, to cause a guy to go through all that work to grab scrap iron.
So now all that remains of those trucks that sat hidden away for decades, is these images.
And to the guy who took them....what an asshole you are.
NEW NOTE!! ...thanks for all the traffic from "Heavy Equipment Forum"....just so you know...the posts that feature the "Sterloff Property" ended in the same result...50 to 60 yrs of sitting undisturbed, until too many people discovered the machines sitting on a park like setting. ...and away they went...but this time not to the scrap yard!!
The post.... "Infrared Images from the Sterloff Property"....tells a brief story of what happened....other Sterloff images are sprinkled throughout the blog.
Larry Forrester from the P&R Truck Center on Vancouver Island is working quietly to retrieve the Pete and Kenworth trucks...so that they can be lovingly restored.
Thanks again for stopping by.
Mike P
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