The Yellowhead Highway to Hazelton, Smithers, Fort St. James, Valemount, Kamloops, then on to Revelstoke and Golden
(posted from Safeway supermarket, Cranbrook, BC)
(This post covers 22-26 August, 2008)
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Tuesday, 26 August-
We drove into Revelstoke this morning. I’ve seen ads and hiking articles about Revelstoke in outdoors magazines so wanted to see it. Kamloops had been an interesting town but it’s located way out on the plains compared to Revelstoke. But there are Rocky Mountains everywhere when you reach Revelstoke. If I were a young guy looking to live and work in an outdoors-oriented town, I think it would make my final-five list. It just had the right look and feel and the ‘right’ combination of services, shops and restaurants.
After walking around the core of Revelstoke we drove up the Trans-Canada 1 a bit to Revelstoke National Park. Its claim to fame is the Summit Parkway, which climbs to spectacular meadows on the top of Mount Revelstoke.
As we neared the top we were stopped by a ranger at the Balsam Cabin parking lot. It seems there are two grizzlies feeding in the meadows between Balsam and the Summit. Normally you can walk to the summit up a road or take a trail. But he said the road was closed today and he suggested we take a shuttle van to the top.
We walked to the other parking lot at Balsam where the shuttle bus stop was but were disappointed to see it just leaving and at least another full van-load of people lined up. We noticed the Summit Trail nearby and decided we’d walk the Summit Trail. But before we started we wanted to double-check with the ranger that it was okay to take the trail; he hadn’t mentioned it.
As we started walking back to the first parking lot, I noticed something moving a hundred yards away. It was the two grizzlies. They had dropped down from the Summit meadows and were feeding between the summit road and the trail. If we had taken the trail we would have run right into them. We spent a few minutes photographing one but the other disappeared into the pines.
As we watched we saw a young woman tourist come down the trail right into the area where the grizzlies were. We could then see her standing still on the trail, partially obscured by trees but it was clear she saw the grizzlies. She slowly took her daypack off and I thought she might be doing that to get her pepper spray but she put the pack down. I could see her hands making a ‘shoo’-ing motion.
All this time we were only 15 yards from the bus-stop and the other people were completely oblivious to it. But someone must have alerted the ranger, perhaps the shuttle bus driver from her high-up viewpoint. He came jogging down the road and I signaled there were two and pointed out where they were, now both in the trees very near the tourist woman.
At that point another ranger truck appeared and they conferred and decided to clear the area around the second parking lot. The tourist now appeared to have gotten by the bears and was walking quickly down the trail toward us.
I hung back while the area was being cleared and talked with the tourist-lady as she walked up. She was amazingly self-composed. I asked if she had just had a big adventure and she said something like “It was no big deal, I had bear spray with me”. When I asked how close the bears had been, she pointed to a bush about ten feet away and said “I just talked to them and they moved away.” Absolutely incredible!
After the bears moved off we walked to the first parking lot—now the new location of the shuttle bus stop. But again there was a crowd so we decided we’d walk the road to the top. With the bears now down by the second parking lot, that seemed safe enough (and yes, I had my trusty can of CounterAssault (“Grizzly-Tough Pepper Spray!” says the can).
As we started the walk up to the summit a light rain started. And ten minutes later—magic!!--- it turned to ice pellets, then snow. I pulled out my camera to try to capture the snow coming down on the wild-flower meadows but the battery was dead.
We walked on with the snow coming down for another 15 minutes but shortly after we topped out the snow stopped and the sun came out. Fantastic!
We walked the Meadows In the Sky Trail, then an out-and-back half-hour of the Jade Lake Trail, then the North Summit Loop, and FireTower Loop, then back down the Summit Road to the van for a total of about four miles.
As we drove back down the Summit Parkway, we noticed the up-lane side was blocked well down the mountain. A ranger was there so I asked what was going on. She said the bear-trapping crew was on the way and they were going to live-trap the bears, collar them, then “hard-release” them. The hard-release means they will use bangers and other loud noises to try to scare the bears away from the immediate areas of the meadows. These two are siblings which they fear are getting too used to humans and may later cause a problem.
We then followed the TransCanada to another park feature, the Ancient Cedars Boardwalk. This was a half-K walk through old-growth red cedar trees approximately 500 years old. As one sign explained, these trees were seedlings at the time Columbus discovered America and still only ‘saplings’ when Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was first produced (in the 1590s).
We then continued east out of Revelstoke National Park and soon entered Glacier National Park of Canada. The latter is probably better known by mountaineers. The mountains are extremely steep and rugged and it has 400 glaciers. The pass through the area is Rogers Pass and the major story about it was the completion of Canada’s Transcontinental Railroad. The road has 30-plus ‘snow-sheds’ or man-made tunnels through avalanche zones.
We checked on camping in the Park but it was ridiculously expensive-- $21.50 for a primitive campsite with no showers and only privy toilets plus they were close to the noisy highway. And on top of the $21.50 we would have had to pay an additional $8.50 for a ‘firewood permit’ if we wanted to have a fire and another $15.60 for a one-day admission fee to the park. (The TransCanada goes through the park and you can drive through for free but you can’t stop at any of the features if you don’t have the pass). We kept driving.
We soon came to the town of Golden and gassed up and decided to have a quick McDonalds burger since it was getting late in the day and we hadn’t figured out where to stay. A BC Camping guide led us to the nearby municipal campground where we paid $17 for a very nice and quiet site near the Kicking Horse River. It was getting a bit late to be trying to find a forest-service campground and the nearest ones would both have involved a few miles of back-tracking in the morning.
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Monday, 25 August-
This morning we drove into Valemount to mail some letters and to look around. We’re amazed how the sleepy little Valemount we visited two summers ago is now a crossroads community abuzz with activity. The town now bills itself in some ads as ‘Midway between Edmonton and Vancouver’ but it doesn’t hurt that Mount Robson and Jasper National Park are nearby.
The last two hours of our drive yesterday were through farming and ranching country but it wasn’t long after leaving Valemount this morning that we were back into steep-sided mountains on both sides and 50 miles between little communities.
We stopped around lunch time at Avola, lured in by a roadside ad for ‘The World-Famous Burgers’ at the Log Cabin Inn. The Inn turned out to be a biker bar--- an upscale one in the world of biker-bars but it did feature a ‘headshop’ selling marijuana pipes, papers (blueberry-flavored was on sale today), and other paraphernalia.
The burgers were supposed to be ‘HUGE’ so we split one and it was about right for the two of us but the burgers in Alaska were about half-again as big. This one was about the size of a Fuddrucker ½ pounder. It was pretty good but I don’t think I’ll be stopping for one on my next trip through.
We continued south for a couple of hours to Kamloops. I had predicted it would be similar to Prince George but it was quite a bit nicer. We had followed the lead of the GPS in to find Starbucks and had to park a few blocks away. As we walked we were pleasantly surprised by the variety of nice restaurants and shops in the mid-town area. We checked out the art gallery store and once we had our drinks we sat on a downtown bench watching people go by.
Kamloops is also interesting from a geographical perspective. A half-hour north of the city we came out of steep, heavily-forested mountainsides but Kamloops sits in a very open (and very dry) valley which looks completely different than the terrain we had been seeing all morning.
After Kamloops we headed east, following the South Thompson River and Shuswap Lake for miles and miles of beautiful views as we went through small town after small town.
Once the main road began cutting its way though very steep-sided mountains we started looking for a forest-service campsite. The roads aren’t signed and there aren’t many distinctive landmarks so we had a bit of an adventure trying to find it. We turned onto a forest road after Three Valleys and it climbed very steeply… so steeply in fact that I was concerned about my how my brakes would do on the way down. After a mile or so we found a bit of a clearing but it was obviously a clear-cutting area and not the forest rec area on the map. We retreated to the main road and took another un-signed forest road. This time we were successful but I really should say we were lucky…the roads don’t match the map. Since the silly BC Atlas doesn’t put the names on sites, we could actually be at another one entirely. But no matter, we like our site. There’s a pretty little salmon stream nearby and we have giant stumps of old-growth cedars among the trees of our campground. They’re easily six feet in diameter and ten feet high.
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Sunday, 24 August-
Today we finally took care of ‘the body’. We’ve been carrying around a large bag of laundry we call ‘the body’. Each night we heave the body into one of the front seats and each morning we heave it back to the back of the van. The visitor’s center directed us to several Spotless Laundromats (“the largest Laundromat chain in BC!” according to our attendant) and the one we tried was a good one. After a couple of hours ‘the body’ was no more and our clothing-packs were replenished.
We also tried to connect to wi-fi today but that was a bust. The visitor’s center had told us we could pick up free wi-fi by parking under the library (in the parking lot under the raised building) and that would work even though the library is closed today. What they failed to mention is you need to a Prince George library card number or to ask for a free one at the front desk. We had a great signal but it’s tough to ask for a number when the library’s closed!
Before heading out to the backcountry we shopped for a few supplies at Wal-mart. I thought I’d ask whether they’d give me a partial credit on the tire I fixed on the McCarthy Road but I learned Wal-mart Canada and Wal-Mart USA are completely different businesses and do not honor each other’s warranties, returns, etc.
By mid-afternoon we were back on the road and headed east on the Yellowhead Highway (TransCanada Highway 16). The road was good but we had a strong headwind. That’s hardly fair. We had a strong headwind while crossing Alberta and BC in the other direction back in July!
By supper time we reached Tete Jaune Cache and the turn south. We recognized the intersection from our Canadian Rockies trip two summers ago. We had been in Jasper and I had wanted to see the lowest pass and the highest mountain in the Canadian Rockies. We had driven the Yellowhead from Jasper to Mount Robson for a long hike and then the next day had taken this turn to go down to a salmon-viewing area at Valemount.
Tonight we stopped at Valemount’s new visitor’s center. Our host was friendly enough but said there was no free or inexpensive camping in the area. But when Labashi asked about forest-service campsites, he directed us to a forest-service site a few miles back a dirt road near Valemount.
We had another of those ‘is this really the way?” experiences. The roads had no signs and kept getting narrower and sandier. But we did indeed find the Upper Canoe Creek Recreation Site, a single picnic table, fire-ring, and privy along Canoe Creek. We spent the rainy evening blogging and reading and enjoying our lonely outpost.
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Saturday, 23 August-
We had rain during the night and this morning was overcast but warm. For most of the summer we’ve been wearing long pants and long sleeves but if this keeps up we’ll have to change.
Today our goal was Fort St. James, a fur-trade fort founded by Simon Fraser for the NorthWest Company in 1806, later taken over by Hudson’s Bay Company when the two merged.
Before going to Fort St. James we stopped at the visitor’s center in Vanderhoof. This area looks quite a lot like home with all its farms but its main industry is forestry. Unfortunately, the forestry industry is in a down-turn at this point. Two of the three mills in Vanderhoof are closed down, putting almost 80 per cent of the work force out of work according to one person we talked with.
We also learned about the mountain pine beetle. We see massive tracts of dead forest, all the work of the mountain pine beetle. And the devastation comes at a bad time. While the lumber can be salvaged if the dead trees are cut down reasonably soon, the lack of a ready market means the forestry-products companies can’t afford to spend the money to send out crews to salvage the timber and to process the wood, only to have it stack up in the yard. The pine-beetle-infested lumber is also ‘marked’ by a blue color. Finished wood from pine-beetle forests has a blue tint to some of the wood and it’s called ‘denim’ wood. It’s unclear (according to our visitor’s center host) whether this wood has a normal life-span of usefulness or is otherwise normal but for the denim coloration.
We very much enjoyed our visit to Fort St. James. The site is a National Parks of Canada site and the work done to re-create the 1896 time-frame is meticulous. All but one of the buildings were still in existence and the plans for that one were followed to re-build it. I love how Canada takes these sites seriously enough to stock them with reproduction goods of the period. The fish-cache building, for example, had hundreds of real dried salmon. The trading post had a very complete stock of trade goods and also an extensive stock of furs--- everything from ermine to silver fox to timber wolf, to grizzly bear.
The buildings were manned by costumed staff and they did a good job of answering our questions.
Last summer we visited the NorthWest Company’s Fort William in Thunder Bay, Ontario. That one represented 1815 so we were very happy to see this one representing the later period. In fact it seemed almost current. The guns, clothing, stoves, tools, etc, all looked very familiar and would have been well-known to our grandparents.
After the Fort we drove on to Prince George, British Columbia’s fourth-largest city. It too is a forest-products town and has mill closures and economic problems but has more diversity.
We first tried the Wal-mart to find our place for the night. Though there were no-overnight-parking signs on the lot I asked at Customer Service desk. Two girls said they just have the signs up so we come in and they can talk with us first and then it’s ok. One said some RVers had had a campfire in the parking lot and they wanted to be sure I didn’t try something like that. When I asked if that had really happened or was a story, another said she had seen it herself. A group of RVers had circled their travel trailers in the parking lot and one had a propane-fired campfire in the center of the circle where they were cooking hot dogs! Holy bratwursts, Batman!
We then drove on the visitor’s center and found it on the property of the Treasure Cove Casino. We asked about overnighting and it was okay there too (and would be much quieter).
We then drove into downtown Prince George to a Blockbuster and rented videos. After parking in the casino’s overflow lot we walked through the gaming area before returning to the van to watch ‘Lions for Lambs’ with Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise, then seven (count ‘em!) episodes of ‘Corner Gas’. Labashi liked the movie and would like to rent it again back home to listen to Redford’s commentary (he directed) and to see the extras. I had jumped at the chance to rent ‘Corner Gas’. I’ve been trying to rent it on Netflix back home but it was always on ‘Long Wait’ status.
We first heard of Corner Gas in Saskatchewan two summers ago. We had noticed Corner Gas-branded merchandise in several stores and learned it’s a popular situation comedy out of Regina but filmed (partially) on location at the little town of Rouleau, south of Moose Jaw, SK. The only place it’s broadcast in the US is in Chicago.
This year we happened to be headed for Saskatoon via Moose Jaw and as we drove along I saw a sign saying ‘Welcome to Dog River’ (the fictitious town in Corner Gas) and shortly thereafter saw a klieg light propped up against the outside wall of a closed gas station. It was the setting for Corner Gas exterior shots. That evening I talked with a fellow overnighter in the Wal-mart parking lot at Moose Jaw. The next day he was headed to Rouleau to see what he could of the station. I told him not to expect much— it just looks like a regular (closed) country gas station but with lots of vehicles parked around it.
I thought Labashi might go for two, maybe even three episodes of Corner Gas but she liked it and we stayed up till midnight finishing off the first disk of Season One.
Recommended!
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Friday, 22 August-
Today was another travel day. We left our campsite at Bonus Lake at 0800 in a very light rain and headed south, still in wilderness. As we came to the junction with the Yellowhead Highway, the weather cleared and we saw a marked change in the ‘feel’ of the area. Where the Cassiar Highway was wilderness, the Yellowhead had the look (and traffic) of the modern highway it is.
We drove for a few hours until reaching the visitor’s center at Hazelton. This small town was at one time a hub of activity for gold mining in that it was the point where men transferred from steamship or rail to horses for their trips to the gold fields. The visitor’s center has photos of strings of pack horses leaving town. The pack-trains reportedly were as long as 250 horses but the early-1900’s photos available ‘only’ show twenty or thirty horses. One of the locals, named ‘Cataline’, was famous for his freighting via pack-horse train.
I also learned of Simon Gun-an-noot, a Kispioux hunter and trapper who was accused of murdering two white men who had claimed to have committed adultery with Simon’s wife. The two were found two miles apart, each with a gun-shot through the heart. Simon disappeared into the bush and avoided capture for 12 years before a white man talked him into surrendering on the promise of providing a good lawyer. Simon said he’d surrender but first needed a year to trap enough furs to pay the lawyer’s bill. In the trial, Simon was declared a free man (in 1919) and returned to Hazelton to live out the rest of his life.
We then drove into Hazelton where Labashi took photos of a very old totem pole at the town landing. Within a few miles are totem poles which we understand are two hundred years old. However, this timeframe does not square with other information we’ve seen which said totem poles did not come into use until about a hundred years ago. Perhaps the truth is somewhere between,
After Hazelton we continued south for another couple of hours to Smithers, a major town. We spent two hours at the Safeway, using its free wi-fi connection to catch up on email and to make Skype calls home. Then we shopped for supplies, amazed at the variety of choices. They even had a Starbucks in the store and of course I took full advantage of that!
We continued driving south out of Smithers, noting a very abrupt change from forest to fields. From Smithers south, the area looks very much like Pennsylvania. The rocky snow-capped mountains give way to more rounded mountains and hills and we started seeing farms and ranches (though with mountains in the distance).
After a few more hours we reached Burns Lake where we found free camping in the municipal campground along the lake. After supper we walked the area and picked up a bottle of Irish cream. We are now officially out of the area covered by our camping book (which included the Cassiar Highway). I REALLY liked that book (‘Alaskan Camping’ by Mike and Terri Church). It not only provided good info on camping (including prices and locations of free campgrounds), it also charted gas prices by showing their percentage above the baseline (gas prices in Anchorage).
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(posted from Safeway supermarket, Cranbrook, BC)
(This post covers 22-26 August, 2008)
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Tuesday, 26 August-
We drove into Revelstoke this morning. I’ve seen ads and hiking articles about Revelstoke in outdoors magazines so wanted to see it. Kamloops had been an interesting town but it’s located way out on the plains compared to Revelstoke. But there are Rocky Mountains everywhere when you reach Revelstoke. If I were a young guy looking to live and work in an outdoors-oriented town, I think it would make my final-five list. It just had the right look and feel and the ‘right’ combination of services, shops and restaurants.
After walking around the core of Revelstoke we drove up the Trans-Canada 1 a bit to Revelstoke National Park. Its claim to fame is the Summit Parkway, which climbs to spectacular meadows on the top of Mount Revelstoke.
As we neared the top we were stopped by a ranger at the Balsam Cabin parking lot. It seems there are two grizzlies feeding in the meadows between Balsam and the Summit. Normally you can walk to the summit up a road or take a trail. But he said the road was closed today and he suggested we take a shuttle van to the top.
We walked to the other parking lot at Balsam where the shuttle bus stop was but were disappointed to see it just leaving and at least another full van-load of people lined up. We noticed the Summit Trail nearby and decided we’d walk the Summit Trail. But before we started we wanted to double-check with the ranger that it was okay to take the trail; he hadn’t mentioned it.
As we started walking back to the first parking lot, I noticed something moving a hundred yards away. It was the two grizzlies. They had dropped down from the Summit meadows and were feeding between the summit road and the trail. If we had taken the trail we would have run right into them. We spent a few minutes photographing one but the other disappeared into the pines.
As we watched we saw a young woman tourist come down the trail right into the area where the grizzlies were. We could then see her standing still on the trail, partially obscured by trees but it was clear she saw the grizzlies. She slowly took her daypack off and I thought she might be doing that to get her pepper spray but she put the pack down. I could see her hands making a ‘shoo’-ing motion.
All this time we were only 15 yards from the bus-stop and the other people were completely oblivious to it. But someone must have alerted the ranger, perhaps the shuttle bus driver from her high-up viewpoint. He came jogging down the road and I signaled there were two and pointed out where they were, now both in the trees very near the tourist woman.
At that point another ranger truck appeared and they conferred and decided to clear the area around the second parking lot. The tourist now appeared to have gotten by the bears and was walking quickly down the trail toward us.
I hung back while the area was being cleared and talked with the tourist-lady as she walked up. She was amazingly self-composed. I asked if she had just had a big adventure and she said something like “It was no big deal, I had bear spray with me”. When I asked how close the bears had been, she pointed to a bush about ten feet away and said “I just talked to them and they moved away.” Absolutely incredible!
After the bears moved off we walked to the first parking lot—now the new location of the shuttle bus stop. But again there was a crowd so we decided we’d walk the road to the top. With the bears now down by the second parking lot, that seemed safe enough (and yes, I had my trusty can of CounterAssault (“Grizzly-Tough Pepper Spray!” says the can).
As we started the walk up to the summit a light rain started. And ten minutes later—magic!!--- it turned to ice pellets, then snow. I pulled out my camera to try to capture the snow coming down on the wild-flower meadows but the battery was dead.
We walked on with the snow coming down for another 15 minutes but shortly after we topped out the snow stopped and the sun came out. Fantastic!
We walked the Meadows In the Sky Trail, then an out-and-back half-hour of the Jade Lake Trail, then the North Summit Loop, and FireTower Loop, then back down the Summit Road to the van for a total of about four miles.
As we drove back down the Summit Parkway, we noticed the up-lane side was blocked well down the mountain. A ranger was there so I asked what was going on. She said the bear-trapping crew was on the way and they were going to live-trap the bears, collar them, then “hard-release” them. The hard-release means they will use bangers and other loud noises to try to scare the bears away from the immediate areas of the meadows. These two are siblings which they fear are getting too used to humans and may later cause a problem.
We then followed the TransCanada to another park feature, the Ancient Cedars Boardwalk. This was a half-K walk through old-growth red cedar trees approximately 500 years old. As one sign explained, these trees were seedlings at the time Columbus discovered America and still only ‘saplings’ when Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was first produced (in the 1590s).
We then continued east out of Revelstoke National Park and soon entered Glacier National Park of Canada. The latter is probably better known by mountaineers. The mountains are extremely steep and rugged and it has 400 glaciers. The pass through the area is Rogers Pass and the major story about it was the completion of Canada’s Transcontinental Railroad. The road has 30-plus ‘snow-sheds’ or man-made tunnels through avalanche zones.
We checked on camping in the Park but it was ridiculously expensive-- $21.50 for a primitive campsite with no showers and only privy toilets plus they were close to the noisy highway. And on top of the $21.50 we would have had to pay an additional $8.50 for a ‘firewood permit’ if we wanted to have a fire and another $15.60 for a one-day admission fee to the park. (The TransCanada goes through the park and you can drive through for free but you can’t stop at any of the features if you don’t have the pass). We kept driving.
We soon came to the town of Golden and gassed up and decided to have a quick McDonalds burger since it was getting late in the day and we hadn’t figured out where to stay. A BC Camping guide led us to the nearby municipal campground where we paid $17 for a very nice and quiet site near the Kicking Horse River. It was getting a bit late to be trying to find a forest-service campground and the nearest ones would both have involved a few miles of back-tracking in the morning.
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Monday, 25 August-
This morning we drove into Valemount to mail some letters and to look around. We’re amazed how the sleepy little Valemount we visited two summers ago is now a crossroads community abuzz with activity. The town now bills itself in some ads as ‘Midway between Edmonton and Vancouver’ but it doesn’t hurt that Mount Robson and Jasper National Park are nearby.
The last two hours of our drive yesterday were through farming and ranching country but it wasn’t long after leaving Valemount this morning that we were back into steep-sided mountains on both sides and 50 miles between little communities.
We stopped around lunch time at Avola, lured in by a roadside ad for ‘The World-Famous Burgers’ at the Log Cabin Inn. The Inn turned out to be a biker bar--- an upscale one in the world of biker-bars but it did feature a ‘headshop’ selling marijuana pipes, papers (blueberry-flavored was on sale today), and other paraphernalia.
The burgers were supposed to be ‘HUGE’ so we split one and it was about right for the two of us but the burgers in Alaska were about half-again as big. This one was about the size of a Fuddrucker ½ pounder. It was pretty good but I don’t think I’ll be stopping for one on my next trip through.
We continued south for a couple of hours to Kamloops. I had predicted it would be similar to Prince George but it was quite a bit nicer. We had followed the lead of the GPS in to find Starbucks and had to park a few blocks away. As we walked we were pleasantly surprised by the variety of nice restaurants and shops in the mid-town area. We checked out the art gallery store and once we had our drinks we sat on a downtown bench watching people go by.
Kamloops is also interesting from a geographical perspective. A half-hour north of the city we came out of steep, heavily-forested mountainsides but Kamloops sits in a very open (and very dry) valley which looks completely different than the terrain we had been seeing all morning.
After Kamloops we headed east, following the South Thompson River and Shuswap Lake for miles and miles of beautiful views as we went through small town after small town.
Once the main road began cutting its way though very steep-sided mountains we started looking for a forest-service campsite. The roads aren’t signed and there aren’t many distinctive landmarks so we had a bit of an adventure trying to find it. We turned onto a forest road after Three Valleys and it climbed very steeply… so steeply in fact that I was concerned about my how my brakes would do on the way down. After a mile or so we found a bit of a clearing but it was obviously a clear-cutting area and not the forest rec area on the map. We retreated to the main road and took another un-signed forest road. This time we were successful but I really should say we were lucky…the roads don’t match the map. Since the silly BC Atlas doesn’t put the names on sites, we could actually be at another one entirely. But no matter, we like our site. There’s a pretty little salmon stream nearby and we have giant stumps of old-growth cedars among the trees of our campground. They’re easily six feet in diameter and ten feet high.
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Sunday, 24 August-
Today we finally took care of ‘the body’. We’ve been carrying around a large bag of laundry we call ‘the body’. Each night we heave the body into one of the front seats and each morning we heave it back to the back of the van. The visitor’s center directed us to several Spotless Laundromats (“the largest Laundromat chain in BC!” according to our attendant) and the one we tried was a good one. After a couple of hours ‘the body’ was no more and our clothing-packs were replenished.
We also tried to connect to wi-fi today but that was a bust. The visitor’s center had told us we could pick up free wi-fi by parking under the library (in the parking lot under the raised building) and that would work even though the library is closed today. What they failed to mention is you need to a Prince George library card number or to ask for a free one at the front desk. We had a great signal but it’s tough to ask for a number when the library’s closed!
Before heading out to the backcountry we shopped for a few supplies at Wal-mart. I thought I’d ask whether they’d give me a partial credit on the tire I fixed on the McCarthy Road but I learned Wal-mart Canada and Wal-Mart USA are completely different businesses and do not honor each other’s warranties, returns, etc.
By mid-afternoon we were back on the road and headed east on the Yellowhead Highway (TransCanada Highway 16). The road was good but we had a strong headwind. That’s hardly fair. We had a strong headwind while crossing Alberta and BC in the other direction back in July!
By supper time we reached Tete Jaune Cache and the turn south. We recognized the intersection from our Canadian Rockies trip two summers ago. We had been in Jasper and I had wanted to see the lowest pass and the highest mountain in the Canadian Rockies. We had driven the Yellowhead from Jasper to Mount Robson for a long hike and then the next day had taken this turn to go down to a salmon-viewing area at Valemount.
Tonight we stopped at Valemount’s new visitor’s center. Our host was friendly enough but said there was no free or inexpensive camping in the area. But when Labashi asked about forest-service campsites, he directed us to a forest-service site a few miles back a dirt road near Valemount.
We had another of those ‘is this really the way?” experiences. The roads had no signs and kept getting narrower and sandier. But we did indeed find the Upper Canoe Creek Recreation Site, a single picnic table, fire-ring, and privy along Canoe Creek. We spent the rainy evening blogging and reading and enjoying our lonely outpost.
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Saturday, 23 August-
We had rain during the night and this morning was overcast but warm. For most of the summer we’ve been wearing long pants and long sleeves but if this keeps up we’ll have to change.
Today our goal was Fort St. James, a fur-trade fort founded by Simon Fraser for the NorthWest Company in 1806, later taken over by Hudson’s Bay Company when the two merged.
Before going to Fort St. James we stopped at the visitor’s center in Vanderhoof. This area looks quite a lot like home with all its farms but its main industry is forestry. Unfortunately, the forestry industry is in a down-turn at this point. Two of the three mills in Vanderhoof are closed down, putting almost 80 per cent of the work force out of work according to one person we talked with.
We also learned about the mountain pine beetle. We see massive tracts of dead forest, all the work of the mountain pine beetle. And the devastation comes at a bad time. While the lumber can be salvaged if the dead trees are cut down reasonably soon, the lack of a ready market means the forestry-products companies can’t afford to spend the money to send out crews to salvage the timber and to process the wood, only to have it stack up in the yard. The pine-beetle-infested lumber is also ‘marked’ by a blue color. Finished wood from pine-beetle forests has a blue tint to some of the wood and it’s called ‘denim’ wood. It’s unclear (according to our visitor’s center host) whether this wood has a normal life-span of usefulness or is otherwise normal but for the denim coloration.
We very much enjoyed our visit to Fort St. James. The site is a National Parks of Canada site and the work done to re-create the 1896 time-frame is meticulous. All but one of the buildings were still in existence and the plans for that one were followed to re-build it. I love how Canada takes these sites seriously enough to stock them with reproduction goods of the period. The fish-cache building, for example, had hundreds of real dried salmon. The trading post had a very complete stock of trade goods and also an extensive stock of furs--- everything from ermine to silver fox to timber wolf, to grizzly bear.
The buildings were manned by costumed staff and they did a good job of answering our questions.
Last summer we visited the NorthWest Company’s Fort William in Thunder Bay, Ontario. That one represented 1815 so we were very happy to see this one representing the later period. In fact it seemed almost current. The guns, clothing, stoves, tools, etc, all looked very familiar and would have been well-known to our grandparents.
After the Fort we drove on to Prince George, British Columbia’s fourth-largest city. It too is a forest-products town and has mill closures and economic problems but has more diversity.
We first tried the Wal-mart to find our place for the night. Though there were no-overnight-parking signs on the lot I asked at Customer Service desk. Two girls said they just have the signs up so we come in and they can talk with us first and then it’s ok. One said some RVers had had a campfire in the parking lot and they wanted to be sure I didn’t try something like that. When I asked if that had really happened or was a story, another said she had seen it herself. A group of RVers had circled their travel trailers in the parking lot and one had a propane-fired campfire in the center of the circle where they were cooking hot dogs! Holy bratwursts, Batman!
We then drove on the visitor’s center and found it on the property of the Treasure Cove Casino. We asked about overnighting and it was okay there too (and would be much quieter).
We then drove into downtown Prince George to a Blockbuster and rented videos. After parking in the casino’s overflow lot we walked through the gaming area before returning to the van to watch ‘Lions for Lambs’ with Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise, then seven (count ‘em!) episodes of ‘Corner Gas’. Labashi liked the movie and would like to rent it again back home to listen to Redford’s commentary (he directed) and to see the extras. I had jumped at the chance to rent ‘Corner Gas’. I’ve been trying to rent it on Netflix back home but it was always on ‘Long Wait’ status.
We first heard of Corner Gas in Saskatchewan two summers ago. We had noticed Corner Gas-branded merchandise in several stores and learned it’s a popular situation comedy out of Regina but filmed (partially) on location at the little town of Rouleau, south of Moose Jaw, SK. The only place it’s broadcast in the US is in Chicago.
This year we happened to be headed for Saskatoon via Moose Jaw and as we drove along I saw a sign saying ‘Welcome to Dog River’ (the fictitious town in Corner Gas) and shortly thereafter saw a klieg light propped up against the outside wall of a closed gas station. It was the setting for Corner Gas exterior shots. That evening I talked with a fellow overnighter in the Wal-mart parking lot at Moose Jaw. The next day he was headed to Rouleau to see what he could of the station. I told him not to expect much— it just looks like a regular (closed) country gas station but with lots of vehicles parked around it.
I thought Labashi might go for two, maybe even three episodes of Corner Gas but she liked it and we stayed up till midnight finishing off the first disk of Season One.
Recommended!
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Friday, 22 August-
Today was another travel day. We left our campsite at Bonus Lake at 0800 in a very light rain and headed south, still in wilderness. As we came to the junction with the Yellowhead Highway, the weather cleared and we saw a marked change in the ‘feel’ of the area. Where the Cassiar Highway was wilderness, the Yellowhead had the look (and traffic) of the modern highway it is.
We drove for a few hours until reaching the visitor’s center at Hazelton. This small town was at one time a hub of activity for gold mining in that it was the point where men transferred from steamship or rail to horses for their trips to the gold fields. The visitor’s center has photos of strings of pack horses leaving town. The pack-trains reportedly were as long as 250 horses but the early-1900’s photos available ‘only’ show twenty or thirty horses. One of the locals, named ‘Cataline’, was famous for his freighting via pack-horse train.
I also learned of Simon Gun-an-noot, a Kispioux hunter and trapper who was accused of murdering two white men who had claimed to have committed adultery with Simon’s wife. The two were found two miles apart, each with a gun-shot through the heart. Simon disappeared into the bush and avoided capture for 12 years before a white man talked him into surrendering on the promise of providing a good lawyer. Simon said he’d surrender but first needed a year to trap enough furs to pay the lawyer’s bill. In the trial, Simon was declared a free man (in 1919) and returned to Hazelton to live out the rest of his life.
We then drove into Hazelton where Labashi took photos of a very old totem pole at the town landing. Within a few miles are totem poles which we understand are two hundred years old. However, this timeframe does not square with other information we’ve seen which said totem poles did not come into use until about a hundred years ago. Perhaps the truth is somewhere between,
After Hazelton we continued south for another couple of hours to Smithers, a major town. We spent two hours at the Safeway, using its free wi-fi connection to catch up on email and to make Skype calls home. Then we shopped for supplies, amazed at the variety of choices. They even had a Starbucks in the store and of course I took full advantage of that!
We continued driving south out of Smithers, noting a very abrupt change from forest to fields. From Smithers south, the area looks very much like Pennsylvania. The rocky snow-capped mountains give way to more rounded mountains and hills and we started seeing farms and ranches (though with mountains in the distance).
After a few more hours we reached Burns Lake where we found free camping in the municipal campground along the lake. After supper we walked the area and picked up a bottle of Irish cream. We are now officially out of the area covered by our camping book (which included the Cassiar Highway). I REALLY liked that book (‘Alaskan Camping’ by Mike and Terri Church). It not only provided good info on camping (including prices and locations of free campgrounds), it also charted gas prices by showing their percentage above the baseline (gas prices in Anchorage).
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posted by Bezabor&Labashi | 23:57
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