2014/06 Haida Gwaii trip - Fraser/Thompson Rivers |
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We were getting close to the agate bearing rock area again, so once we were back on the Yellowhead highway we began looking for a campsite with rocks. The Chilako River looked promising; a nice spot but there was nowhere to camp. Perhaps the campground had been swallowed up by Prince George’s suburbia.
Instead we headed south on washboarded logging roads to Shesta lake, not much more than a party spot but mostly quiet on a Sunday night. Pickup trucks loaded with Indian teens came in but left when they saw us perched on the lake shore.
The spot proved to have plenty of jasper and agates as well as great swaths of red paintbrush.
The lake was absolutely still, reflecting a gorgeous sky. We had a hope for a spectacular sunset but all those clouds just disappeared as the sun went down.
Monday July 7th 
We awoke to sun and birds and butterflies. There were a half dozen balls of fluff working the shoreline, sandpiper chicks I think.
A gorgeous morning but we needed to be moving on. The good news was that the GPS found us a route south on logging rods down the west side of the Fraser River, so we didn’t need to retrace our steps and go through Prince George.
We were on blacktop until we passed an odd group of unoccupied suburban buildings, a biofuel research station the sign said. Beyond there we were on good gravel and 
passing through heavily logged areas with almost no traffic. We stopped for coffee and tiny alpine strawberries at the bridge over the Blackwater River and had lunch in a 
gravel pit, both locations loaded with agates.
We crossed the Fraser River at Quesnel and joined the main highway heading south through Williams Lake. This was the first day that we’d had to deal with heat and turn on the truck’s air.
Most of the forest campgrounds around this road have become too popular and now have a charge to stop people from living in them all summer. But I’d found Valentine Lake on the map, a bit more remote and still free. We took off towards it just before 100 Mile House, past the place that replaced our trailer’s shackles when we limped home from Alaska in 2005.
Valentine Lake was busy but we found a lakeside spot and cooked salmon over a fire on a warm evening while loons warbled over the lake, a beautiful spot with very few bugs.
Tuesday July 8th
We woke to a perfect morning and the sounds of loons and this mule deer chomping away outside our window. Our GPS found us a short cut that avoided going back to 100 Mile House but it wasn’t much more than a jeep track with oceans of mud and deep ruts so it saved us distance but not much time. It wouldn’t be a road to drive on a rainy day.
We stopped for coffee at Chasm, a great gash in the ground created by the torrent from melting glaciers at the end of the Ice Age. We followed the Thompson River, where we had lunch at Goldpan in ninety degrees. We stopped in Lytton, where it was in the high nineties, to look at the osprey nest, but the chicks, if there were any, were out of sight.