Afterword

During the period when I was posting “Beyond the Mirror” on my Yahoo group, I had numerous requests about the ‘actual’ location of ‘Mirror Lake,’ ‘Misery Flats,’ the ‘Hand of Dunn,’ and ‘Bear Creek.’ The truth of the matter is that THEY DO NOT EXIST IN REAL LIFE!

‘Bear Creek’, ‘the Mirror’ (or ‘Bowman Lake’), ‘Bowman’s Bluff,’ ‘the Hand of Dunn,’ ‘Misery Flats,’ and ‘Lonesome Lake’ are not on any map. They exist only in my head, but I have modelled each one after a real place or a location where I have spent some time, which means I can use an actual memory to describe any area I am writing about.

First of all, the ‘Mirror,’ supposedly also known as ‘Bowman Lake,’ is modelled after Hobson Lake in Wells Grey Park. Only I’ve added a road and a small community as the imaginary village of ‘Bowman’s Bluff’ - modelled after a road and a long-gone general store on Cariboo Lake Road. Then if you look closely at a contour map of the area near Hobson Lake, but off to the East-North-East, you’ll see a five-fingered hand in the shape of the valleys there. (And that area is not a place to actually visit - unless you are with a DAMN GOOD woodsman or else have an ancestor who was either a mountain goat or a grizzly bear!) The lake that forms the ‘palm’ of the ‘Hand of Dunn’ (where Harry lands his floatplane) doesn’t exist at all, neither do many of the multiple streams, waterfalls, and small rivers mentioned. The model for one section of those streams and a waterfall mentioned are actually found in Goldstream Park, just west of Victoria. Another section of water falls that I’ve described is similar to one found on the Sooke River, but I’ve ‘imagineered’ it to be higher, faster, and much more dangerous than in reality. A third stream, which will show up in a later chapter, is modelled after the Coquihalla River well upstream from Duncan. The plateau, waterfall, and rock escarpment where Tom has his mine and his cabin actually match descriptions of an area on Mt. Robson, but even that suffered some ‘imagineering’ to be ideal for Tom’s cabin and mine. Of course, the geological descriptions of ‘the wall of gold’ are completely fictional - the combination of minerals laid out in the manner I have described is theoretically possible, but dang near impossible to find in a real-world situation.