2018/07 Arctic Part 3 - Mount Robson |
|||||
Wednesday July 18th
We came to Tete Jaune Cache and the reason for the Yellowhead’s name. Tete Jaune was the nickname of a yellow haired Trapper who had a base in the area. 
We crossed into Mount Robson provincial park and had a distant view of Mount Terry Fox, named after the young man who’d lost his leg to cancer and attempted to run a marathon a day across Canada to raise money for research. (Cancer attacked his other leg and he had to give up his Marathon of Hope near Thunder Bay, in Ontario. He died the following year.)
We stopped at Rearguard Falls on the Fraser River, a waterfall that looks very different depending on your point of view. Up close the water 
seems to bend around the rocks, and sometimes in late summer you can see salmon jumping just a few feet away.
The staggering statistic here is that Chinook salmon travel up the Fraser for 800 miles, past our house in Hope and Hell’s Gate, to climb this waterfall and spawn in the shallows above.
That’s as far as they get as the next waterfall, Overlander Falls, is about thirty feet high, impassable to salmon.
Mount Robson is one of Canada’s highest mountains and it towers over the valley and its surrounding peaks, a magnificent sight, viewable from the park’s visitors’ center balcony. The snag is that it makes its own weather and its top is usually hidden by
clouds. Visitors waste hours looking for a clear spot between the clouds scudding across the sky only to find that Robson has its own sneaky cloud that doesn’t move!
I’ve been lucky enough to see it all a couple of times in five visits, but not this time. Even so, it was worth a livelier picture than one from the balcony. There’s just enough room to park by the bridge over the roaring Robson River and climb down for a view of the mountain rising from the river.
We returned to Tete Jaune Cache and took the road south, down the North Thompson River valley. Both this road (the 5) and the 16 are referred to as the Yellowhead, really confusing for visitors. We were headed for Wells Gray provincial park, a couple of hours away.
We stopped at the Thunder Creek rest area, which turned out to be a delightful spot, with a beach along the creek. I got talking to an English couple who were currently renting a motorhome and dying to swap it for something that would take them into the backcountry. I think they found our layers of mud appealing.