2012/07 Western Canada trip - Mount Robson |
|||||
Sunday July 22nd
We’d had a sunny evening, followed by a cold night and a bright morning. We were leaving Jasper and moving on about an hour’s drive to Mount Robson. We soon crossed into British Columbia and I now had health insurance again. We buy a whole year’s worth of travel insurance at a time but any one trip can only be sixty days and we were a week past that!
The objective of the day was to find a moose, so we stopped for lunch at Moose Lake but they were all on their hols.
Mount Robson is a massive mountain, highest in the Canadian Rockies and towering over the Fraser River valley. It’s tall enough to make its own weather and it’s rarely fully visible even on an otherwise cloudless day. This time we could see all but the top quarter or so. We camped at Robson Meadows; its name suggests a grassy plain studded with wildflowers but the reality is dense woodland with plentiful (and unneeded) shade.
We drove to the Fraser’s Rearguard Falls, the first waterfall on the river and the only one that the salmon can climb. Salmon that get this far up the river have traveled 850 miles from the sea and are past their best. Later in the season I’ve photographed them jumping here but this time we were too early. The falls can be viewed from just a few feet away and the water seems to bend around the rocks. The new barriers have made it much safer but not as friendly to photographers.
There is a Terry Fox memorial nearby with telescopes pointed at Terry Fox mountain. He was the young athlete who lost a leg to cancer and then set off from Newfoundland, aiming to run a marathon every day until he had crossed Canada. He managed to travel over 3000 miles to near Thunder Bay before cancer in the other leg forced him to give up. There are still annual Terry Fox Day runs all over Canada.
We visited Overlander Falls, the last on the Fraser. This was named after the prospectors who traveled overland on this route from the 
Winnipeg area to the goldfields at Barkerville. They arrived too late; all the good stuff had been claimed.
We’d seen all the obvious sights so we drove back up the road, heading for some of the lakes we’d passed on the way in. A trail along
the Moose River looked promising and had some interesting flowers, but we soon ran into a dense thicket of alder and had to turn around. We found that the road had been closed because of an accident, so we did a U-ey back towards Mount Robson.
We walked a little way up the Robson River trail, along a very steep stretch of water. The trail goes all the way to Berg Lake, too far for us on an evening hike. We could now see most of the mountain, .including the peak with these strange pyramids of ice adorning its ridge.
At the bottom of the trail we had this rare perfect view of the whole mountain.
To our surprise the campground had hot showers, a rare luxury on this part of the trip.