2018/07 Arctic Part 3 - Holmes River |
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Tuesday July 17th
It was another beautiful day. We returned to the logging main, one of the best gravel roads I’ve ever driven. The area was being actively logged so we shared the road with empty logging trucks roaring up for a load.
We rejoined Highway 16 heading east through Vanderhoof towards Prince George. We stopped for coffee at Burman Regional Park. The park includes a mid-sized lake with a convoluted shoreline, great for canoeing, and a large area of rocks including a few agates.
We made it through the big city of Prince George OK, despite our GPS’s insistence that we go into a warren of narrow streets all signed as “No Exit”. Probably ten yards shorter, so should we ignore the signs? No.
We could have turned south at Prince George and headed for home via Cache Creek, but that road is not very interesting. Instead we were going to stay on the Yellowhead and follow it to Mount Robson park. We had driven that part of the road just once, thirty years ago, in the other direction. I had forgotten how empty the road is, so it was a surprise to see the “No fuel for over 200K” sign. We turned around and filled up.
It is indeed empty country, just miles of forest with increasingly large mountains looming on the horizon. We stopped for lunch at Purden Lake, a very large lake, more suited to power boats than canoes. It had some nice beaches though and it was very hot there in the sunshine.
Back on the road it was 29C (84F), our warmest reading of the trip so far. The radio, when we briefly got a signal in Prince George, was talking about fires in the Kamloops area. There were heat advisories for southwestern BC and campfire bans. This was all stuff we’d have to come back to, but for now we were enjoying the heat and sunshine.
The first town on the road was McBride, where we crossed the Fraser, already a large river in a wide valley backed by mountains. McBride looks to be a community based on logging and.farming, the first farms we’d seen since those in the Peace River valley on our way north.
We camped at a recreation site on the Holmes River, about a mile from the road. The campground was nearly full and we took the last large site. Even so, campers kept arriving in motorhomes and on bikes and motorcycles and somehow everyone fit. Free places are never full.
The campground was next to the river, wide and fast, with big gravel beds. The bank had been reinforced with what looked like enormous boulders of petrified wood. As we hadn’t brought a crane or fork lift we had to leave them behind.
We enjoyed what might be our last campfire before heading south into zones with campfire bans. We had to scramble to put our stuff away when a thunderstorm rolled in, but the rain didn’t last long.