A Day Trip to Othello Tunnels

A couple of weekends ago, Curtis and I (with Piper!) hit the road to Othello Tunnels. These old railway tunnels are just outside of Hope, which is located two hours from Vancouver. It’s a nice day trip from the city that includes a beautiful walk along historic trails.
In the early 1900s, the Canadian Pacific Railway decided a route was necessary to link the Kootenay Region with the BC coast by rail. The railway goes through over three mountain ranges.

In the Coquihalla Gorge, the river cut a 300 foot deep channel of solid granite. A straight line of five tunnels were built through it which are known now as the Othello Tunnels.

These tunnels are stunning, you really cannot appreciate it until you are there in person. You look up the mountains and then look down below to the river. Nature at it’s finest, something I would not imagine in Hope. You generally pass through Hope to either the interior or return to the Lower Mainland. Yet, it seems like you are somewhere else walking this trail.

There is of course, Hell’s Gate, a popular tourist attraction nearby. Another one I have yet to do in my life so far. I’m terribly afraid of heights, so I may just send Curtis along with the camera for that adventure.

But, Othello Tunnels was an adventure I really enjoyed and the bonus was that we could bring Piper along. He ended up being carried around for most of the walk, which I’m pretty sure he didn’t mind.

Anyways, back to some background of the tunnels. The section of the Kettle Valley Railway between Hope and Coquihalla is the Coquihalla Subdivision. It was built between 1913 and 1916.

As a result because of the location, it was an expensive project. The most expensive mile (the one near the summit) cost $300,000, triple the average cost for railways at the time which was $136,000 per mile.

Another interesting tidbit is that the railway section had 43 bridges requiring 22 million board feet of lumber, 13 tunnels and 16 snowsheds totaling 2 miles in length.


(Thanks to the kind man who took our family photos!)


Also noteworthy, the engineer Andrew McCullough was an avid reader of Shakespearean literature and used characters such as Lear, Jessica, Portia, Iago, Romeo & Juliet to name stations of the Coquihalla subdivision.

You could easily stop here too on your way to the interior. It’s about a 10 minute drive off of the Coquihalla Highway. The Othello Tunnels trail is a short, easy 3.5km return trail that passes through several tunnels over the rushing river below. Beautiful to look at, I wouldn’t want to fall in though…
The tunnels are dark and a little eerie if you were walking alone. Water is dripping off the ceilings, sounds are echoing, it’s really quite something else. We used our phone flashlight to see where we were stepping. Some people brought flashlights, and some well, some were clinging to the walls haha. I don’t know what they were thinking, there isn’t a drop off or much to trip on.

Once you have walked through the final tunnel, the trail continues for quite a distance towards the town of Hope. However very few people continue along the trail as the point of interest is really the tunnels. We would have walked on if Piper wasn’t with us that day. It was the perfect weather to do so!