A petition aiming to have a road and bridge closure near Mistik Creek looked at and changed has received a groundswell of support, earning hundreds of signatures.
The petition was created to protest a Manitoba government decision to close and block off a remote road and bridge used by residents of a cabin area to access their buildings.
The area in question is Quarry Road, located about 25 kilometres away from Flin Flon just off Manitoba Highway 10. As of last week, berms have been made along the road at different locations, blocking off almost all vehicle traffic to the road.
The road, as the name suggests, shoots off the highway southward toward the location of a former quarry, which has been disused for years. The road is thin, occasionally bumpy and includes a high bridge crossing over Mistik Creek at the mouth of Payuk Lake. The bridge, built from steel girders and timber with no guardrails and officially known in provincial records as the Aberdeen bridge, links two sides of a steep rocky ravine at the creek’s narrowest point - it is a known landmark that is often photographed.
In 2010, the bridge was the site of an accident that claimed the life of a man and was recommended to be closed immediately due to its lack of guardrails and structural issues with the wood and steel. That closure took well over a decade, going into effect for the first time last week once the road was bermed.
While the bridge is officially considered unsafe to pass, for people living in the cabin area of Millwater south of the bridge, the road and bridge is the quickest of few ways to readily access their land during summer months. Leslie Beck, who started the petition and owns a cabin at Millwater, says closing and blocking off the road and bridge is preventing her and other property owners at the site - about 19 in total - from accessing their buildings.
Currently, Beck and others cross the bridge and go up the road near the site of the quarry that it was made to access, located not far from the current Hudbay rail line passing by the area. From there, the cabin owners use a boat launch, located on the road before it reaches the quarry, to get onto Lake Athapapuskow and circle around to their cabins.
“They would have to have a place to get their boats in and out of the water - they wouldn’t be able to go to their cottages any other way than by water,” Beck said.
Beck says there are other boat launches on the lake, but says they are on private campgrounds and not consistently available to use or mean longer treks on the lake. She also says the road and bridge are also used by hunters and fishers seeking to get to different parts of the lake.
Since starting the petition, a total of 545 people as of press time have signed on in support, several of which come from Flin Flon or nearby communities.
“I'm looking to draw attention to an area that a lot of people locally use for recreation and I was disappointed that there was no communication. All governments today now talk about being open for consultation. I don't believe there was a process here that allowed them to really understand the impact of just arbitrarily closing the road without looking at what the options were,” Beck said.
“I’m very overwhelmed and grateful. If you look at the names, these aren’t just random people from across Canada who picked up on a petition. These are local people who have used this road, it has meaning to them, whether they used it before or used it today.”
There are methods for which the road and bridge can be reapproved for use. In 2010, according to Manitoba Conservation documents, recommendations were made to either install new bolts to fix the bridge’s issues and add guardrails (at a cost estimated at around $125,000) or to replace the bridge altogether with a prefabricated one (at a cost of up to one million dollars).
Those recommendations come from well over a decade ago and there is no recent estimate for what would need to be done today. Beck says she has tried contacting provincial representatives to little effect - one of the reasons why she started the petition in the first place.
Beck, a former Flin Flon city councillor and provincial election candidate, said she and others are open to having the road opened and using the bridge only for walking or light vehicle traffic, perhaps bringing with it a lower price tag for repairs while allowing residents to get to their cabins.
“In my conversations with the province right now, they don’t really have a reason why it took 13 years for them to come and berm it, but they’re not totally closed to it being a footbridge if the proper safeguards were put in place,” she said.
“Further down the road, it could be used as what it’s used for now, where people use the road to chicken hunt or trap or go fish or use the road to put kayaks in the lake.”
The Reminder reached out to provincial government media representatives for comment on the matter - they said the rad was closed Dec. 6 and that the road and bridge were never meant to be used as a public right of way.
"This road and bridge are not designated as a public right of way and were originally constructed for access to a nearby quarry lease area, but are no longer required by the current owner and were never intended to be used for regular public access," reads a statement from the provincial spokesperson.
"The access road was permanently closed on Dec. 6, 2023, and signage indicating the road closure has been installed. The Department of Municipal Relations and Northern Affairs intends to permanently decommission the bridge later this year. Following a fatal motor vehicle accident, a professional engineer’s inspection found the bridge to have significant structural deficiencies."
The spokesperson also said the cottage lots accessible down the road are not zoned provincially for either road access or wastewater.
"Cottage lots located within the Athapapuskow Cottage Subdivision are not zoned for road access or wastewater services and therefore do not require bridge access," said the spokesperson.
"Cottage owners and Aberdeen Lodge guests have an option to access their lots and the lodge from a public boat launch at Paradise Lodge, or boat launch at Bakers Narrows Provincial Park."
