2004/06 Yukon trip - Getting there - Stewart, BC |
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Friday 16th July
We had a quiet night on our own. In the morning we finished driving the back road and dropped down into Kitwanga, filled up 
with gas, and headed north on the Stewart-Cassiar highway, which connects with the Alaska Highway, about 500 miles north of us. There are no towns on the road, just a few places with one street, and maybe a gas station. Neither Stewart nor Cassiar are actually on the highway, but accessed by side roads. The town of Cassiar died when its asbestos mine closed down.
The drive north was pleasantly scenic: mountains, forests, lakes and rivers. We stopped off at Meziadin provincial park, not to stay but to check it out for a future trip with the trailer. Then we took a side road 40 miles down to the coast at Stewart, BC and Hyder, Alaska. The scenery became magnificent, with high mountains on both sides, great white hanging glaciers on the tops of the peaks, and waterfalls cascading into the valley.
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Stewart Highway (1.22) |
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The road passes the toe of the Bear Glacier where it drops icebergs into its lake. We could hear the water rushing under the ice, but couldn’t see it. The crevasses 
glowed with blue light. For some reason, Sandie wasn’t too keen on my suggestion that we kayak into the cave at the toe of the glacier.
Further down the valley the Bear River was roaring from all that meltwater, and there were more hanging glaciers
and waterfalls and cascades dropping thousands of feet. I captured some of it on film, but we weren’t allowed to stop in many places because of the avalanche risk. It was also raining most of the time, with a large black cloud anchored just below the pass. At the bottom of the pass, the Bear River almost filled the valley, a mass of tumbling grayish water, loaded with glacial goop.
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Stewart Highway (Kitwanga, Stewart, Hyder, Salmon Glacier) |
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The Canadian road ended at Stewart, a little town at the head of the Portland Canal, not really a canal but a fjord. So we were at the seaside again, though at high tide, the sea looked like just another big lake, ringed by enormous mountains and cliffs. The town of Stewart looks a bit run down with a few closed shops but it is surviving on fishing and tourism.
We considered crossing into Hyder, Alaska, but deferred that for the next day and looked for somewhere to stay. We eventually found the forest service campground at Clement Lake, a few miles out of town. The lake was icy cold, a beautiful glacier green. It has only two campsites. I walked up what looked like a road looking for more, but it turned out to be the Ore Mountain trail, very scenic but not friendly to motor vehicles. Driving up there could have been an expensive mistake. We took the most secluded site, and a German couple arrived in an elderly motorhome and took the other. They’d bought it a couple of years ago and came over from Germany each year to use it for a holiday. They had just seen their first bears and wanted to know all about them, being a bit concerned about camping in bear country. They also recommended that we drive the Salmon Glacier road. They’d had a rough time doing so as their camper was really too old for the job, but they were still raving about the scenery.
In the middle of the night I heard this blood curdling scream, and I thought the Germans were being eaten, but it turned out to be the local teenagers out for a midnight skinny-dip, one of the problems of camping at a lake near town.