Photo: Freight on the Fraser

Back in Ontario, the rivers tend to be piddly little things; useful for generating hydroelectricity, but unless you're a seventeenth-century voyageur with a canoe they're not going to make your trip much faster. Out here, it's different. The Fraser River isn't the widest river around but it's still plenty big, big enough to serve as a natural highway for the industries and resource collection operations that have grown up around its shores. Here, a tugboat pulls a barge loaded down with cut lumber and a couple of trucks along the river, past the bee-youtiful north Surrey waterfront.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).