2005/07 Alaska Trip - North to Alaska - Stewart and Hyder |
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Tuesday July 12th
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Yellowhead Highway ('Ksan, Kispiox, Seven Sisters) |
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We had a sunny start for the beginning of our trip up the Cassiar Highway. We drove back past Hazleton and a 
little way past the junction to the Cassiar as I wanted to take a look at the Seven Sisters, a line of great snow-capped mountains that just peek over the lower mountains. When driving the road you think that you’ll round the bend and see them in their full glory, but a peek is all you get from the road. The viewing spot turned out to a great place for picking raspberries and thimbleberries, and we added those to our lunch. We were told that the “saskatoons” (like large blueberries) were good too, but I think they were a couple of weeks from being ripe enough.
Once we were stuffed we headed back to Kitwanga, famous only as the start of the Cassiar Highway, one of the wildest roads in British Columbia. According to the travel guides, it’s “mainly paved”, but I think “mainly paved once upon a time” would be a more honest description, as in many places the blacktop has been scraped off to fix the frost heaves, and has been replaced by bumpy gravel. It’s quite narrow in places, and most of the bridges have only a single lane. One of the rest areas has a picture of a truck balanced on the side rail of a bridge – presumably by someone who’d thought he could just squeeze past a logging truck.
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Glacier Highway (Stewart,BC and Fish Creek,Alaska) |
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So far, the truck and trailer seemed to be OK for the poor roads, but the rig didn’t stop very well on gravel roads – lots of sliding and wriggling. So we didn’t stop in time to get a look at the bear that John had spotted sitting at the top of a cutting looking down on us.
We turned off the Cassiar Highway at Meziadin Junction for a side trip down to the Stewart and Hyder area. This wasn’t going to get us to the main part of Alaska, but the area has such fantastic scenery that it would be a crime to pass it by. The road to Stewart goes up over the Coast Mountains and then drops down to the sea, or at least to salt water, as it doesn’t look much like the seaside.
As you might imagine, all those clouds rolling in off the sea hit the mountains and dump vast quantities of rain in 
the summer, and even vaster quantities of snow in the winter. The mountains are many shades of green and almost all are crowned with great glaciers. Some of these just hang above the valleys, and others, like the Bear Glacier flow down to road level, creating lakes behind their moraines. There are tall waterfalls everywhere, too many to count, all converging into the Bear River, which almost fills the valley floor, a roiling mass of gritty glacier water, tree stumps, and rocks.
Stewart is a neat little town situated between the river and the harbour, with towering cliffs above the Portland Canal. Despite the name it’s a natural inlet, a fiord some twenty miles long. A mile or so past Stewart the road enters Alaska and the town of Hyder. The road to Stewart is blacktopped, but it turns to mud and gravel as you cross the border and it’s immediately apparent that Hyder is half dead. There are many closed businesses and some that look ready to fall down. It’s an odd little place as the only road winds back into Canada and then dead-ends at an old mine, so there’s no way to drive to any part of the USA without going back through Canada. Most 
of their visitors are Canadian, so they keep BC time not Alaska time, and they price everything in Canadian dollars. Even better, each town in Alaska can choose its own sales tax rate and they’ve declared theirs to be 0%. That’s great news if you can find something you want to buy! There’s no US customs or immigration post going into Hyder, but there is a Canadian post going back into Stewart to make sure that any Canadians have the opportunity to pay GST on their bargains from Hyder.
We were going to spend all our time up the Salmon Glacier Road, so we needed to stay in Hyder’s only campground, Camp Runamuck. This is not much more than a mud-patch at the side of the road, but it has electricity most of the time and a few showers and bathrooms.