I could have cheated and gone 4 kms down the road to Hyder and crossed the border into Alaska, and then gone home, but I thought that was not in the spirit of the expedition !! So after a hearty “Miner’s breakfast”, and packing up the car in the rain (never fun), I filled up with 92 octane fuel (all that was available) ad headed out of town. Luckily I had my camera on and at the ready, because not 10 minutes up the road I saw my first black bear. And then 1 minute and 54 seconds later (I can tell from the data on my camera !!) I saw my second !! After that, I was searching everywhere, but that was my fill for today. Made me happy to see them, although they looked very bedraggled ! Although I guess if I had been asleep in a cave for 6 months, I would look pretty bedraggled too !!
I have included some pics of things I referred to in my blog
yesterday – Pics of the road bridge that was washed away last year, the debris
in the river bed from that flood, pics of trees snapped off by the high winds from
avalanches, and some more pics of the Bear Glacier. So I won’t mention them again here.
You can see from the pics of the main street of Stewart that
it is an action packed town. If you look
carefully at photos 2 and 3 you will see the bus has moved – Amazing as, based
on the amount of smoke it was belching out for about half an hour, I think it
had been buried under snow the whole winter !
I actually took the second photo to show how the cloud had suddenly
lifted off the nearby mountain !
And you will notice that in many of the first 60 or so
photos – If you look carefully at some of them you can see how tall (and steep)
some of these mountains are that are right beside the road – And I never got to
see the top of one !! They are SO close
to the road on both sides – It is just a shame that we didn’t even get 5
minutes where the cloud lifted to show them in their full glory. Nothing for it – Will have to come back again
one day !!
Met a number of people at the King Edward hotel in Stewart
where I stayed last nght, the last of which was a guy and his wife who were
driving down from Alaska and had to detour 60 odd kms off the main road to Stewart
last night because they were about to run out of fuel since 2 gas stations they
had passed yesterday (a Sunday) were closed !!
So a lesson to be learned – Fill up when you can on these roads, because
you never know whether the next station will be open or even have any fuel !!
I took a photo of my Tom Tom showing its next instruction as
“Turn Left in 561 kms”. There aren’t too
many countries where you would see that on your GPS !!!
Once I got out on the Cassiar highway, the mountains
flattened out considerably (or I think they did – Still couldn’t see much !!),
and the temp dropped down to about 3.8 deg C.
I tried to get a photo, but just as I took it, it went back to 4.0 deg
!! Honest !! As you can see from the
other reading on the gauge, it was snuggly warm inside the car !! Lots of frozen lakes along the way – I
believe it is called the Kinaskan Lake Provincial Park. My map I am using isn’t big enough scale to
tell me their names, but there were probably 15 or 20 of them along the way,
some stretching for miles beside the road. The fact that they are still frozen (and birds
and geese walking on the ice) just goes to show how cold it is in winter here,
and also how early in the season it still is, that they have not yet
thawed. Apparently in summer all the
lakes are different colours which makes them quite dramatic. At the first one
there were a couple of geese there (Snow geese ?) – Probably headed north for
the summer ?
As I motored on up the highway, the rain was becoming less intense, and the mountains becoming more visible, and then we got into heavily forested areas where logging was very evident with huge piles (and I mean HUGE piles) of logs in cleared areas off to the side of the road, waiting for the trucks to cart them away to the mills. At one stage they were burning smaller scrub trees that they were clearing from beside the road, and as I drove past I lowered my window and got a lovely blast of hot air from the fire !! Nearly stopped to warm up for a minute !
After that, we climbed from about 400 metres up over a pass
that was 1250 metres, and the rain continued to subside until as one point I
was almost thinking of taking the roof off !
But every so often the rain gave me just enough of a warning not to do
it ! We went over a number of river
bridges which have a mesh bottom for the road – The mesh is probably about 4
inches square. Makes an interesting
noise when you go over it , but is probably there so snow doesn’t settle on the
bridge in winter, thus reducing its weight and making it less slippery. I took a photo out of the car window looking
down and you can clearly see the river below – You wouldn’t want to drop your
keys down THAT grating !! There were
also a couple of wooden bridges on the road, and they were VERY slippery in the
wet. You really needed to hit them with
your wheels straight, and not accelerating or braking at all but on an even
throttle – I played on one of them (as you do !!) and very quickly got sideways
!! Decided I didn’t need a splinter in
my tyre, thank you !!
As we got within about 150 kms of Dease Lake, we went
through the Spatsiki Plateau Wilderness Provincial Park, and the Stikine River
Provincial Park, and it was quite wide open country. I thought it was ideal Moose country, but didn’t
see any at all – until coming down a hill there were 3 on the road ahead of
me. Got the camera out and was all ready
– When a bloody great truck came around a corner down nearer them and coming
towards me, and as soon as they saw the truck, they took off into the scrub
!!! Bummer…………….Never mind – Bagged my
bears for the day !! Maybe moose
tomorrow !!
Dease Lake ? Well, if
I though Stewart was small, compared to Dease Lake it was enormous !! Two motels, gas station and store (all one)
and a couple of restaurants. Oh, and a
pub !!! Yup, we are right here in the
centre of the world !! No wonder
Canadians say “eh” all the time – It helps to pass the time of day when
everyone is so far apart !!!
Tomorrow, if I wake up early and can get on the road, I
might go for a big bite and see if I can get to Whitehorse. Its about 700 kms, but the alternative is
just to get to Upper Liard, and that is only 255 kms, which isn’t really far
enough !! But will take it one km at a
time and see what happens.
And if anyone thinks I am flipping between mph and kmh (Why isn’t
it “kPh” ?), well I am, because the maps do the same along the border of the US
and Canada so you never know whether they mean miles or kilometres !!
Pics for the day here :- https://picasaweb.google.com/117739775480775657932/StewartToDeaseLake?authkey=Gv1sRgCPGFlYGr0OHGXA#