The sound of wheels crunching on gravel can be heard above the thunder of a swollen Mossom Creek as the yellow school bus makes its way up a hill, through a kilometre of forest, to a little clearing in the trees above Ioco Road in Port Moody.
Jim Mattson checks on the students' progress, his red jacket a bright patch of colour against the pale autumn sky. The retired Centennial secondary chemistry teacher greets the first couple of high school students who first trickle, then stream into the classroom, wearing sneakers and hoodies, light protection against the chill.
Melanie Mattson, his daughter and a Centennial teacher, is one of the last to enter the room, having driven the school bus from Coquitlam to the Mossom Creek hatchery. She makes the introductions while the older man takes a seat.
The kids of the Centennial Salmon Project are Melanie's responsibility now. Twenty years ago, they were his.
GROWING KIDS
With two thick binders of newspaper clippings and photographs, Ruth Foster is the repository of Centennial Salmon Project history. She recalls all the details of how she and Rod MacVicar, both Centennial biology teachers, teamed up to teach kids about the environment and re-stock Mossom Creek 35 years ago this fall. The club's origins are as sharply etched in her mind as they are vague to MacVicar. Still, he speaks with the elegance of a born orator about the audacity of the endeavour in 1976 when long hair and Elton John were in vogue and environmental clubs were typically just litter clean-up crews.
"Both of us are experiential educators and we believe that getting out there, smelling the forest, hearing the sea, it has more impact for students," MacVicar explained
It was a new idea, though, to get students to help set up a fish hatchery on a fished-out creek.
"We were the first. There were no public hatcheries," MacVicar says. "Now, every creek has one."
With the help of their students, they set up an incubation box for salmon eggs at the bottom of the creek. But it filled up with fine silt from a construction site up the road, giving the students first-hand experience - years ahead of the general public - about how development can affect the natural environment.
Undaunted, the two young biologists moved the box higher up the creek the following year and added another one. They were trespassing, really. "We didn't even ask whose land it was," Foster says.
And the students continued to learn what conditions salmon need to survive and how to collect eggs while watching for returning chum.
The club became a popular alternative to other group activities at Centennial and every Wednesday after school - sometimes on weekends, too - the teenagers would be driven up a gravel road owned, it turned out by Imperial Oil, to a clearing owned, it turns out, by the city of Port Moody, to take care of the fish. It was a full-time job, especially when coho were introduced to the creek, and some students stayed on to help look after the fish during the summer.
MacVicar and Foster developed a suite of courses and were joined by Jim Mattson. The trio taught Fisheries Ecology 12, Wildlife of B.C. 11 and Fisheries Ecology Career Preparation 12.
More importantly, they inspired students to become stewards of the environment and many graduates went on to jobs in the field. "The kids who have strong environmental experiences, it changes them," Foster explains.
Both retired, they keep in touch with many of the students, including Roy Argue, who was a club member and is now a community advisor for Fisheries and Oceans Canada working on the upper Fraser River out of Williams Lake.
"When Igraduated, in 1981," he wrote in an email, "it was the positive energy and support of both Ruth Foster and Rod MacVicar which instilled in me the desire to work for DFO upon completion of my post secondary education."
Chris Tulloch, who attended Centennial between 1985 and 1987 and still lives in Coquitlam, says the outdoor experience inspired him to get involved in the eco-tourism business. He now skippers a 71-foot passenger sailboat for Ocean Light II Adventures, which takes adventure-seekers on trips along B.C.'s coast to explore wildlife, scenery and the province's cultural history.
"I am so fortunate to have a career that I love and is so rewarding," Tulloch emailed, "and there is no doubt in my mind that Rod and Ruth were instrumental in leading me down that path."
While MacVicar and Foster were working with kids and the kids with the salmon, eventually, the salmon came back to Mossom Creek.
The salmon returns fluctuate depending on the year and may have declined in the past 15 years, for reasons largely unknown but that may have to do with ocean conditions. This year, a healthy 400 chum were spotted and so far 35 coho have been counted.
But MacVicar and Foster say the numbers are not the point.
"It's about growing kids, not growing salmon," he says. "We have to be reminded of that."
PART OF HISTORY
A pale sun peers through the cedars and the denuded branches of vine maples as a group of students rakes up leaves on the gravel parking lot. In the incubation room, two teens clean the sludge from filters. It rains a lot on this forested hill and there is always mud, leaves and sludge to clean out from the gravity-fed filters that drain water from the creek into the hatchery tanks.
The kids don't seem to mind. In fact, members of the club executive say they enjoy the weekly field trip to the hatchery.
"You learn something different every time" says club president Ryan Fagrie. "You feel: 'I'm part of this history.'"
Club vice-president Kaylee Nichols says she loves the outdoors and has fished for years with her dad, so it made sense to get involved because "I like doing my part to restore the creek." When she graduates from Centennial, she plans to go into marine biology and credits the club, and the Fisheries Ecology 12 course, for helping her choose her career.
The students are knowledgeable about how the operation works and are confident as they tour the hatchery which has become both classroom and job site. They've cut trails, pulled out countless branches of scotch broom and invasive blackberry, collected and cared for fish eggs - and now they're passing on the skills to younger students.
"When you go, you think: 'I helped raise this generation of salmon,'" says club second vice-president Connor Smith.
MATTSON, MACVICAR AND FOSTER
The Mossom Creek Hatchery is no longer a rudimentary incubation box sitting at the edge of a creek. It's now a compound that includes an incubation room, an education centre, rearing ponds and over-wintering tanks. It is managed by the Burrard Inlet Marine Enhancement Society, a group of club alumni and supporters, that was started in 1992 to give some year-round structure to the project.
After 35 years, the Centennial Salmon Project has not lost the essential enthusiasm and commitment that spawned it even though Mattson retired in 1994 and MacVicar and Foster followed in 2001 and 2005 respectively.
The three are still involved. Foster was called at 5 a.m. recently to deal with a power outage, she phoned MacVicar to chop up a fallen tree and Mattson is hatchery engineer.
But new blood has reinvigorated the club. With Melanie Mattson at the wheel (literally and figuratively because she had to get her Class 2 driver's licence to be able to drive the school bus) the Centennial Salmon Project just keeps rolling along.
Mattson, a Centennial grad who has been a hatchery volunteer since 1988, now runs the club and teaches the Fisheries Ecology 12 course but at first she had to call her dad out of retirement in 2006 to help her teach it.
"It was a miracle that Melanie took over," says her dad. "We raise fish but we also mentor young people to think about conservation and making sustainable choices."
COMING BACK
The afternoon is almost done and the students are finishing their appointed tasks.
"It's a work party but they keep coming back," says the younger Mattson as she directs students to the jobs that still need to be done.
Scooping out a frisky coho smolt from the murky waters of the over-wintering tanks, she shows it to students to remind them about what the work is all about.
Then, as the late afternoon sun casts a pearlescent glow on the inlet, she piles the students back onto bus, takes hold of the wheel and drives it once more back down the gravel road.
