A Monk's Home in a Cave

The town of Hedley never ceases to surprise me when it comes to oddities. For example they have an incredible ratio of one-eyed humans vs bi-eyed ballers. To find a cave that a Buddhist monk lived in for a decade or so checks out. 

Much of what I know about this subject comes from the other blogs and videos that I suspect all derive from the same, likely one-eyed source. So take it for what it is.

In the early 1900's when Camp Hedley was thriving and banging out as much as 42,000 tons/year of ore, and some side-product gold bars, additional water was needed to power the steam plant which provided electricity to the thriving Nickle Plate Mine. That water came from Hedley Creek, also known as McNulty Creek on many maps, and previously know as 20 Mile creek, as it's 20 miles from Keremeos, in the good old days, before there were run-on sentences.

Horse teams brought in milled lumber to build the trestles that suported the flume through the narrow walled canyon. I'm guessing that these trestles, were also supporting the stave-pipe or maybe it was the stave-pipe alone that supplied the water? Both the flume and stave pipe remains can easily be seen while walking up the canyon on the old road.

Two major floods took place in 20 Mile creek. in 1948 and 1972. These wreaked havoc on the bridges up the canyon but I'm not clear as to whether they took out the flume or not. The flume bed seems a bit high up on the canyon walls further up the creek to be affected.

At one point a tunnel was cut through a particularily unpleasant steep cliff alongside the creek as the flume maintained it's elevation down into the far more civilized terrain of Hedley. This is where Leon the monk made his home. Some reports say he was there for a decade in the 90's and then left when there was a fire. He may have returned around 2000 which suspiciously is a decade after the 90's.

Stories talk of picking Leon up hitch hiking into Princeton for supplies or seeing him riding his bike. One story says he hitched a ride out of Hedley to get rid of the rat he had with him. He wanted to take it far away from town so that it could survive in the wild and presumably not pester him.

Have a watch of the video to see the rugged, yet beautiful canyon and try to imagine what it would be like living in such an odd place.