Being employed as a tug boat captain on the British Columbia coast, I got one day off for every day worked. That gave us six months of every year to travel the country with our truck and camper. We were "rockhounds" at that time and put a lot of miles on the road. Somewhere along the line our interest changed to insulators. We think it must have been 1969 or perhaps a year earlier. We did have a sales table at the Salt Lake City show in 1971. We have a lamp to verify that we won the "distance award" at that show.

We had just bought a pick-up load of insulators from a second-hand store in Nelson, British Columbia, that summer. There were so many insulators that we had to drive home to Maple Ridge and take the camper off the truck. Then we drove the 400 miles back to Nelson to load the insulators. I thought the half ton was going to sink and was very relieved that we got back home with no problems. 

This was an ideal time to collect insulators. All across the prairies the poles were coming down as they went underground with the lines. So our collection grew quite rapidly. At this time the insulator we wanted most for our collection was a McMicking threadless.

The Westward Collector Quarterly was an excellent magazine published in Haniamo, British Columbia. Although it ran into financial problems and was only published four times, we had the following article in the last issue in the fall of 1974.

Discovery made of two rare Walhachin marble pop bottles by Wilf and Margaret Secord. One is for trade f or a McMicking Threadless insulator.

Pictured above are the lucky diggers, Margaret and Wilf.

We got no response on our offer to trade for a McMicking. While attending an antique auction in Cloverdale we met a lady who had one of these gems. She was not really a collector. The McMicking was a gift from her brother-in-law and she would not sell it to us. The brother-in-law is a front end loader operator. She did not know where he found it, only that it was up the North Thompson and there used to be a railroad station there. 

One spot that fit the description was a spot where Wire Cache called Otter Creek Road. A wooden bridge crossed the North Thompson River here which was mainly used by logging trucks. Every time we traveled the Yellowhead we camped and searched this area. Our persistence seemed to be paying off in the late fall of 1974 when we found our first McMicking. It was just about complete but was bashed up terribly. It did tell us that we were looking in the right spot.

In the spring of 1975 we had to make a trip to Prince George on business. Of course we went via the Yellowhead which was 165 miles longer. Not long after our arrival at Wire Cache I walked down to the bridge. When I looked down on the bank I could hardly believe my eyes. The freshet had washed away some of the bank and exposed a half dozen McMickings. I spotted Margaret just leaving the camper and hollered, "Bring the camera, bring the camera." She must have thought I had "lost my marbles." 

The next three days were something else. We forgot about our business in Prince George, that could wait. We did take time to drive the 33 miles to Blue River and beg some boxes from the grocery store. Avola was only 8 miles away but we didn't want to draw attention to our discovery. We were really enjoying ourselves and regretted having to stop for meals. Rather hard to describe our feelings at that time. Don't know if we were on cloud nine or cloud ten, but we were somewhere up there -- perhaps pretty close to heaven.

"The Rainbow Chasers" was written by Ervin Austin MacDonald in 1982. It is the story of a man and his two sons who traveled through Yellowhead in 1907. On page 154 of this book is the following paragraph:

One day in the midst of this mess we came to a tumble down log building that housed a huge cache of wire, glass insulators and equipment that looked as if it had been intended for a telegraph line. We were completely dumbfounded but later we were told it had been brought there in the mid-1860's by the Collins Telegraph Company which had planned to build a telegraph line through Alaska and across the Bering Sea to Asia, beating out the people laying the Atlantic cable. But the cable people won, and the Collins abandoned their project and their wire caches.

The part about the Collins line was completely wrong. The cache was placed there by F.V. Barnard who had a Dominion Government contract to build a line up the North Thompson Valley in 1875.

The 1979 we moved to Valemount where we had built a house on 5 acres covered with lodge pole pine. The soil was very sandy. So every time we drove the 91 miles to Wire Cache we brought home some of the river clay from there. We filled sacks, boxes and five gallon pails with this good soil. I was planting a tree in the front yard and left the pail of soil sitting there. It rained for a day. Then I dumped it out and it came out in a big round blob. We were off to the National in St. Charles, Illinois, the next day. A month later when we got home I was mixing the clay with compost and putting it on the garden. The round blob was baked like a brick by this time. I broke it in half and right in the middle I found a small coin. It was so black that I couldn't read it. I took it in the house and got Margaret to drop it in her jewelry cleaner. I said, "Maybe the McDonalds lost this in 1907." It turned out to be a 1905 nickel.

After our bonanza in 1974 we always stopped and scratched around Wire Cache. (Still do). We found a few strays for the next couple of years. We also noted the signs that other scratchers had been there. Some dug quite extensively. Larrin Wanechek, Adian Mogan, John Werstiuk, Don Logan and even Ray Klingensmith all dug this location. This only makes the sequel all the more amazing.

Margaret in 1975 with "find" of threadless McMickings.

In 1983 we made a trip to Vancouver Island. We always looked down at the river when passing the spot. This time we were very surprised to see that the bridge was gone. A few miles down the highway we had another surprise. A new bridge crossed the river here. There was even a sign which called it Otter Creek Road. We stopped at Wire Cache a week later on our way home. All the timbers from the bridge were in a huge pile. Where the dozer had hauled the timbers up from the river it had chewed up the sod. We found glass chips here. As it was late afternoon and we had driven from Vancouver we decided to go home and come back the next day. There was even a new sign on the road now. It was called "Black Bear Road." So we returned the next morning with all our tools and even a few boxes. We started digging where the most of the chips were and we hit pay dirt right away. This was across the road from our original find. We dug insulators for five days this time. This was the site of the old log cabin. We found a few threadless side blocks that weren't completely rotted away. So eight years later we found the second bonanza.

Wilf Secord digging McMickings in 1983

Our friend and fellow collector, Larry Lundgren, lived in Prince George and worked for the telephone company. Occasionally he was sent on jobs to Valemount. On these occasions he often spent his evening visiting us. So it was no surprise to us that after our second day of digging Larry arrived that evening. He was the surprised one when he spied the boxes of dirty insulators on our basement floor. He soon decided that the telephone company could get along without him for one day. We took him digging with us the next day. We think he enjoyed that a lot more than working. 

Wilf Secord and Larry Lundgren taking a day off from work to dig threadless.

At the Enumclaw Show two years ago, I was very fortunate and happy to find this postcard. If you look closely you can see the McMickings amongst the wire. Our search might have been a lot easier if we had found this postcard 15 years earlier. Then again, the insulators might have been gone if someone else had gotten the postcard.

Over the years, the McMickings of Wire Cache have been extremely good to Margaret and Wilf Secord.