2012/09 Baker/Kookipi trips - Kookipi Creek |
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The perfect weather was still holding and we just had to take advantage of it and head into the back country. We thought we’d try to drive from the Nahatlatch River valley across the mountains and down to Harrison Hot Springs. This would be slow going and too much for one day so we hitched up the Little Guy behind the Jeep, planning to camp part way.
It was a quick run up the Fraser Canyon, across the river to North Bend, and past Reo Rafting on the Nahatlatch logging road. Our first surprise was that our road back south, the Kookipi Creek road, looked to be much wider than when we last drove it. Was it being actively logged? That could ruin the trip. Shortly afterwards we caught up with a grader and a giant transporter hauling a machine up the road at something less than walking pace. We stopped for lunch as we couldn’t get past it. Eventually they stopped and unloaded the machine, which turned out to be a tree cutter, the kind that picks up a whole tree and cuts it up in seconds. The guys said they were grading the next few miles so they could begin logging but they weren’t going any further than that.
Sure enough, the road soon narrowed down and felt wild again. Someone had even removed the wrecked trailer we’d found up there last time. We came to a 
section where the road arced around an unstable mountain slope with a long drop-off. The road was leaning the wrong way too, not Sandie’s favourite place to be. Round the corner we came to the landslide we’d encountered last year. It wasn’t a surprise, but it was maybe twice as big, with a deep ditch to start with. Beyond there it looked like previous travelers had used logs and boulders to build some sort of road around the giant boulders. Turning around wasn’t possible and backing up around the previous section was just too scary, so I decided to give it a try. 
Sandie got out to guide me through. The ditch turned out to be easy but the boulders were a big problem. The Jeep went through OK but the trailer slid sideways downhill and we were now wrapped around a boulder too big to move. Back and fro a half dozen times just made things worse. The only way out was for us to pile rocks and logs to make a road over the boulder. An hour later we were through.
Well that’s the worst over, I said. Within a mile we’d come to our first washout, where a creek had overflowed the road and destroyed it. Again, someone had 
built a squiggly path across out of bits of tree, but of course the trailer did not precisely follow the Jeep: lots of yelling from Sandie as the wheels came off the path. We had two more washouts to negotiate in quick succession before the road improved. Sandie noticed that trailer’s wheels didn’t look right and sure enough somewhere I’d bent the axle, but not enough to need fixing. We came to the weird waterfall where Shovel Creek flows into Big Silver River and they both rush into a narrow chasm. There was a perfect little campsite on the cliff top, with the sounds of crashing water warning us not to do any sleepwalking.
We were now into the Harrison East logging system and we had a couple of fishermen come up early the next morning. We did a little exploring trying to get a good view of the falls. This is a very damp area; even the sand has moss growing on it!
We followed the logging road down to the lake and gradually civilization intruded: a helicopter parked on the riverside, a drilling crew looking for something, and finally a deserted logging camp.
There are some beautiful beaches and camp sites along the lake at Cogburn Creek, probably busy spots in the summer. This time the view was fuzzy because of all the smoke from the fires down in Washington state. We eventually came off the logging road at Sasquatch Park in Harrison. We’d covered about 70 miles on back roads. Would we do it again? Probably not the middle section with the landslide. The two ends of the route are used by loggers so they are maintained but nobody needs the middle section so it’ll probably just deteriorate further until there’s a reason to reopen it.