2004/08 Yukon trip - The road home - |
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After the hike, we drove about 200 miles, back to the main highway at Chetwynd, where we visited Bob and Pat back in ’86, and then south towards Prince George. This was a very scenic section of road with mountains and lakes, pretty even in the rain. We noticed that we were seeing much more wildlife now we were further south, a black bear, and a few deer, even a dead moose. Whoever hit that one would have a seriously damaged vehicle. Even a cow moose is the size of a horse.
The weather cleared later in the day. We camped in a proper campground for the first time since Inuvik, a rather nice Forest Service site on Summit Lake, just north of Prince George.
Monday 23rd August
I took a morning run on the roads around the lake, and found that this was indeed an active logging area, with laden logging trucks hurtling downhill and enveloping me in dust. I didn’t run very well as I seemed to be the latest victim of the cold.
We crossed the Nechako River into Prince George, “the northern capital of BC”, and quickly we were also crossing the Fraser River, which turns south here and heads towards Vancouver. We followed the Fraser to Quesnel, which always looks beautiful, its streets a mass of flowers, and smells awful on account of its pulp mills. The country started to get drier here as we continued south to Williams Lake, the junction that leads to Anahim Lake where we camped back in 1999. We were stuck just outside town for a couple of hours as a lumber truck had flipped and dropped its cargo of 2 by 10s all over the road. As a result it was almost dark when we pulled in to Lake La Hache and started looking for a campsite. After a couple of false starts and some dodging of cows, we found Greeny Lake, another Forest Service campground. This is on a typical BC lake, with cold green water surrounded by spruce and pines, and populated by a family of noisy loons.
Tuesday 24th August
We had sun and showers as we headed south through 100 Mile House. Despite the name this is a fair sized town. The name comes from when the Cariboo wagon road went from Lillooet to the goldfields at Barkerville. The roadhouses became known as 70 mile house, 150 mile house, etc., and the names have stuck, even though only a few pieces of the original Cariboo Road still exist.
We stopped for lunch at Chasm provincial park, a great canyon carved by meltwaters when the glaciers retreated. Today there is just a tiny stream flowing over the waterfall at the head of the canyon, completely out of scale with Chasm’s mighty cliffs.
We took a shortcut from Clinton over a logging road towards Lillooet. It didn’t end up being much of a short cut. The road was very steep and narrow, and slow going as a lot of rocks had fallen onto it. Then we got to the rockslide. Two very large rocks and a dozen smaller ones had fallen onto the middle of the road. There was about a yard gap between the rocks and the drop into the valley, not enough for a car to get past. The slide must have just happened as there was a pickup truck driver a minute or two ahead of us and he’d gone though.
Another truck driver coming the other way had already started to move the smaller rocks. The two of us tried to roll the two biggest rocks but they were in the half ton class, so all we could do was slide them an inch at a time. After twenty minutes of struggling we moved them far enough that we could squeeze our way between the rocks and the edge.
The rest of the drive was less exciting, but the scenery in this area is magnificent, with great soaring mountains cu
t through by the Fraser River. It’s a mainly dry area, so there are few trees and the colours and shapes and geology of the great rocks are clearly visible.
The highway between Lillooet and Whistler is not much more than a blacktopped logging road, with very steep grades and one-lane bridges. It was nice to drive it this time with just a small camper. Hauling our big trailer around all those hairpin bends back in ’94 was a bit too exciting. We soon found the empty Cimarron forest service campground in the woods, along a cold green stream, Cayoose Creek, and we pulled off there for the night.
This led to a really spooky experience. I was walking along the creek in the twilight and spotted an ancient British-style caravan buried in the forest on the opposite bank. I was wondering how on earth it got across the creek at the foot of the cliff. Then I looked at the tree trunk that was on the ground in front of the caravan. The caravan disappeared. I looked up and the caravan reappeared. It was an illusion created by a bowed branch and some small trees that appeared to be the roof and door and windows. Perhaps there were illusory caravaners who watched me as I walked back to our campsite.