Pacific Highway Live Cam

History

Early Origins and Road Construction

Indigenous Trails and Fur Trade Routes

Before European settlement, the route now known as the Pacific Highway in Surrey followed ancient Indigenous portage and trading paths along the Nicomekl and Serpentine River valleys. Coast Salish peoples navigated these lowland corridors in dugout canoes, linking seasonal camps and salmon runs. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as Hudson’s Bay Company brigades and independent fur traders ventured northward from Fort Langley, these trails were gradually widened into packhorse roads. By 1849, small logging camps used segments of this alignment to haul cedar and fir logs to rivers for downstream rafting toward the emerging settlement at New Westminster.