Chapter 59 Skagway and South
September 15, 2000
8/23 After hanging out around the trailer in Fairbanks for a few more mostly cloudy, rainy, days, we packed up and headed south this morning. The Richardson Highway from Fairbanks to Delta Junction was new to us. The highway is along the edge of the very broad valley of the Tanana River, mostly on the side of a ridge somewhat above the valley floor. This provides many attractive views out across the valley. The river is wide, braided from many twisting convoluted channels flowing through vast expanses of gravel, making an interesting and ever-changing vista.
Autumn is here. There are almost no wildflowers left, and the aspen and birch are beginning to change color, adding splashes of yellow to the forest. Daytime temperatures have been in the low fifties, dropping to near freezing at night.
At Delta Junction, we turned easterly on the Alaska Highway, still following the Tanana River. We stopped for the night at a pullout along the highway about 20 miles before the Canadian Border, with a great view southwest across the river valley to the snow-covered high peaks of the Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains.
8/24 Customs inspection going into Canada consisted of a bored agent asking a couple of routine questions. The road continued to parallel a high range of mountains, all day.
A few miles past Haines Junction, we saw Pine Lake, a Yukon government campground, and quit for the night. It's a pleasant place, with large level sites separated by strips of forest. Only a few campers scattered through the campground - the season is obviously over. The lake is close - an easy walk - but not directly visible from any campsites. A range of mountains across the lake provides a scenic backdrop. An interesting interpretive trail follows the lake shore for a boggy few hundred yards, with signs explaining the interesting little sinkholes caused by recent melting of isolated patches of permafrost. Each little pond is bordered by spruce trees which are leaning sharply toward the water, gradually falling in as the ground sinks.
The bogs had some interesting plants. New to us was the pumpkin berry (a bright orange berry on a 6" vertical branch which extends up from a horizontal runner. The leaves had all turned a deep burgundy). We picked a handful of cranberries from bushes only a couple of inches high, and often covering the ground in a dense mat. Strawberry Spinach was a curious plant that was also new to us - dense clusters of tiny dark red segmented berries, held tightly against the stem at each leaf junction. Both the arrow-shaped leaves and the berries are supposed to be good to eat.
All Yukon government campgrounds require a camping permit which must be purchased in advance at Visitor's Centers or certain private businesses. It's a major nuisance for those of us who don't plan our stops. We bought one as we entered the Yukon, not sure whether we'd use it or not. At $8.00 Canadian (about $5.50 U.S.), these well-maintained campgrounds are a bargain. They include free firewood. Based on the prices charged for firewood at many other campsites, we burned more than $5.50 worth of wood during a long pleasant evening during a welcome break from the rain. Mosquitoes were few - the chilly weather does have that advantage.
8/25 The highway from Tetlin Junction, AK, to Whitehorse, Yukon, is new to us, since when we came north, we took the Yukon Highway from Whitehorse to Dawson, and came through Eagle and Chicken and back down to Tetlin Junction.
Today, we turned south a few miles past Whitehorse on the Yukon Highway, headed for Skagway. The road climbs gradually through foothills and then between high rocky mountains. The valleys are often full of water - long narrow lakes, with the road clinging to the cliffs above the water. These lakes are the headwaters of the Yukon River, and formed part of the route to the Klondike gold country. It's hard to visualize the size of the Yukon River. Starting here, barely 50 miles from the Gulf of Alaska (but 3000 feet above it), it makes a huge arc North through the Yukon and then west and south across the center of Alaska, emptying into the Bering Sea after draining a surprisingly large chunk of North America.
Tormented Valley is particularly interesting. The Milepost calls it "a rocky desolate moonscape of stunted trees and small lakes". There is no explanation of why the foliage is so sparse, and there is often a sharp dividing line between this blighted area and more typical alpine foliage a short distance away. We walked out into this area, curious about the mottled color of the rocks, and found the splotchy appearance is due to a mix of half a dozen different kinds of plant life - grey-white reindeer moss, another darker lichen, lycopodium moss, crowberries, and blueberries. None of these were more than about an inch high. We picked handfuls of good-tasting blueberries, and sampled the black crowberries, which were bland and uninteresting.
The descent from White Pass into Skagway could be scary for anyone who doesn't trust their brakes. The downslope is not unusually steep (the slopes aren't specified, but probably never are more than 8% and rarely that). But the slope continues unremittingly, losing 3000 feet in perhaps 10 miles of highway. Our exhaust brake did its job, and we descended comfortably, touching the brakes only occasionally as we entered sharp curves. The road is good - adequately wide and generally with paved shoulders, so that meeting an occasional tour bus caused no undue stress. Frequent pullouts provide great photo opportunities, if the weather cooperates.
One interesting pullout provides a simultaneous view of 4 generations of transport: hints of the original foot and horse-trail, almost at the bottom of the canyon; a portion of a toll road privately built during the gold rush somewhat higher on the slope; cutting across all of these, the narrow gauge railroad, built a year or two later and still in use for tourist trips to White Pass; and the modern highway we're driving today. Standing here looking at the steep slopes, it's easy to imagine the scenes pictured in early photographs - with the bones of hundreds of dead horses, the piles of discarded equipment and supplies, and the lines of exhausted men, many of them dropping along the way.
White Pass was an alternative to the better known Chilkoot Pass. White Pass is 500 feet lower than Chilkoot, but the overall distance is longer and the final climb to the pass, starting near where we are standing, was more treacherous.
We drove by the four RV Parks in Skagway, looking at each and then choosing Pullen Creek RV Park. It's a pleasant, neat, spot right on the harbor front, and the sites are more spacious than in the other campgrounds. From our campsite, we can see out through the harbor, past the cruise ship dock on one side and the state ferry dock on the other, across the bay to steep mountains, with snowfields still visible high on the slopes. The park is modem-friendly, with two dedicated modem ports available 24 hours a day (but they are outside, only partly sheltered from the rain). Water and electric only, and the 30 amp electric plug in our site was erratic - connections corroded by the salt air. We got by with a 20-amp connection, which worked OK.
We're pretty much in the center of tourist activity. A constant stream of cruise ship passengers walk past our site, going back and forth between town and the ship(s). A spur of the narrow-gauge railroad track passes about 75 feet from us, going out onto the cruise ship dock, where people can step off the ship and almost directly onto the train. The trains and ships all love to blow their steam whistles or air horns, and the steep cliffs on both sides of the narrow valley magnify the sound. Once, we heard a cruise ship, a steam locomotive, and a diesel train each sound their distinctively different noisemakers almost simultaneously, creating an incredible cacophony.
The cliffs above us are decorated with multi-colored logos, flags, and messages traditionally painted by the crew of visiting ships. Some are quite elaborate, and most required special equipment to gain access to the sheer cliff face.
On an evening walk out along the docks, I stopped to talk to a cruise ship employee who was standing at the foot of the gangplank waiting for the last few passengers to straggle aboard before departing. He was from Bali, in Indonesia. The ship's home port was listed as London. This ship has 2200 passengers and almost 900 staff - giving it over three times the population of Skagway! The ship does one-week cruises among the ports in the Alaska panhandle. It will do two more after this one, and then head south, cruising the Caribbean for the winter. He confirmed that the weather has been lousy all summer. He said the weather has been bad offshore too, and that seasickness has been a constant problem among the passengers (surprising on a huge ship with lateral stabilizers.)
At one point, there were 4 cruise ships here simultaneously. Two were huge, and the other two were medium-sized. This means that there were probably around 5000 passengers (and a substantial number of crew members as well) unloading into a town with a normal population of 800. Surprisingly, it didn't feel terribly crowded. Many of the passengers got on the White Pass railroad excursion (at least 4 trains departed during the day - one a special steam engine trip). A steady stream of tour busses arrived, taking people to various destinations. Some of the passengers probably didn't bother to get off the ship. The residue, who walked through the many attractive tourist shops along Broadway, did not overwhelm the facilities.
Viewed against this mass of cruise ship people, the RV population in Skagway is negligible. The RV Parks in town (not counting a tent-only campground at Dyea) have a total capacity of perhaps 200 RV's.
Skagway is a harbor town, similar to Valdez and Steward, but is at the end of a long narrow fjord. It feels smaller, more intimate because the high mountains really hem in the town. We enjoyed the feel of Skagway more than the others.
Just north of town, a gravel road branches off and goes 7 miles around the end of the fjord and to Dyea. The drive is spectacular, with great views of the fjord and overlooks of Skagway from a hillside just above the town. Dyea itself is a ghost town at the beginning of the Chilkoot Trail. There's not much of the old town visible from the road, although at the peak of the gold rush, it housed up to 10,000 people. This is part of a National Historical Park, and a ranger-led bushwhack does go to various artifacts in the forest (we didn't do it). The Chilkoot trail is maintained as a modern hiking trail over Chilkoot Pass. From photographs, we understand that there are still many artifacts along the trail (primarily in the steep section just before the pass) from the 1897 Klondike gold rush. But that's a long backpack - well beyond my current level of ambition and physical condition.
8/27 The road back from Skagway was just as interesting as in the opposite directions - a whole new set of vistas when looking North instead of South. The climb up to the pass from Skagway is long, but shouldn't be a problem for any RV as long as the driver isn't in a hurry. Scenic pullouts are frequent - a comfortable place to cool a hot engine while enjoying the view. Our diesel climbed to the pass with aplomb, cool and calm. As we neared the summit, we found ourselves in the clouds, and our speed became limited more by visibility than by the steepness and curves. Fortunately, there was very little traffic.
The descent from White pass Northbound is much more gentle, through the nearly level Tormented Valley and then along the shore of several very long lakes. Even with the misty overcast day, the scenery is spectacular - a drive not to be missed. At Carcross, we turned east on Tagish Road - an alternative and shorter route to the Southbound Alaska Highway. It's about half gravel, and some of it is under construction - but most of the road is in good condition, and only a few short sections were infested with potholes and washboard.
We had intended to drop the trailer somewhere near Jake's Corner and drive down to Atlin for the afternoon. But Helen seems to have suffered a relapse of the cold she just got over, and isn't feeling well. When we stopped to fill up with fuel at the Jake's Corner gas station/motel, we asked about a parking place for the trailer, and were directed up a driveway to a level clearing high above the highway, with a picnic table and a nice view of mountains and lakes down the two valleys which intersect here. It looks like someone started to build an RV Park and never completed it. We were told we were welcome to stay overnight. No charge! Without our asking, the gas station attendant showed me where to get fresh water, and apologized that they couldn't let us dump - their septic system is malfunctioning. Perhaps tomorrow Helen will feel better and we'll do the Atlin drive.
Jake's Corner is worth a stop just to look around. The owner collects antique mechanical gadgets, and the entire property is littered with interesting stuff. There are antique stationary steam engines, a restored model T Ford dump truck, ancient farm tractors, dozens of old outboard motors and chain saws, etc. There is even a pair of burros, with a baby, in a pen behind the gas pumps.
8/28 While eating breakfast this morning, we glanced out the window and saw a coyote trotting through the clearing about 50 feet from the trailer.
The drive to Atlin from Jake's Corners is 60 miles, starting out with 40 miles of gravel - fairly good as gravel roads go, except for a few miles under construction, and another few miles which ought to be under construction. The next 20 miles are good blacktop. Along the way are numerous scenic spots - views out across Atlin Lake to distant mountains. The lake is huge - 85 miles long and 300 square miles in area, the biggest lake in British Columbia. At the southern end, it snuggles up into the coastal mountain range, with a couple of large glaciers visible in the mountains. We were fortunate to get an hour or two of blue sky and sunshine in the afternoon, making the lake sparkle, the glaciers glisten, and creating an overall picture-postcard impression. We used up a lot of film trying to capture the scene. It remains to be seen whether our pictures will measure up to postcard standards.
The village of Atlin is on the lakeshore perhaps 20 miles from the south end of the lake, with really nice views of lake and mountains. It owes its existence to a rich 1898 gold strike nearby. A transportation network of steamboats on these huge lakes, linked to the White Pass Railroad, initially supplied the mines as well as being a link in the transportation routes up the Yukon to the interior of the Yukon Territory and Alaska. In the 1920's, this convenient transportation allowed Atlin to become a popular tourist destination. A large hotel was built (now gone), and tourist-oriented excursion steamers took tourists to the glaciers.
Today, the town gets only a few tourists and is headquarters and supply point for a few resorts and backcountry outfitters. It doesn't live up to the tourist brochures. The "Little Switzerland" descriptions may be somewhat justified by the scenic mountain and lake views, but the decaying ramshackle little town bears no resemblance to the ancient perfectly maintained, neat-as-a-pin stone-built villages in the Swiss Alps. We drove another 20 miles beyond Atlin on a steadily worsening road, but didn't quite make it to the end of the lake before the road disintegrated into a jeep trail.
8/29 A long day! We drove back up from Atlin, hooked up the trailer, and drove along the Alaska Highway to Watson Lake. After stocking up on groceries (grapefruit at $1.59 each), filling up on fuel, and picking up our Email, we backtracked 13 miles and started down the Cassiar Highway. The first several hundred kilometers of the Cassiar are paved - but the pavement isn't much of an improvement over gravel. It's a rough chip-seal surface, with numerous jiggles and jounces, limiting our speed to around 45 mph. The mountain scenery is somewhat subdued compared to other Alaska mountains. The Cassiar mountains, to the west of the highway, are old and rounded. The Horseranch Range, to the east, is even older - Cambrian era - the oldest mountains in Alaska. The day was mostly sunny for a change!
We stopped for the night at Beaver Dam Creek - a large open rest area - hoping for another northern lights show. The clouds stayed away, but the northern lights didn't cooperate. We had to settle for an evening of roasting sausages and trying to keep warm around a campfire. At least there was lots of wood available - this area is sparsely used and I picked up all the firewood I could use within about 50 yards of our campsite. We later read in the Milepost that camping in rest stops along the Cassiar is prohibited. We saw no signs to that effect anywhere, and plenty of evidence that others have camped here.
8/30 The condition of the Cassiar Highway is quite variable. The chipseal occasionally gives way to a few miles of gravel, and some areas are under construction. While climbing a hill through one construction area, sinking into freshly spread wet muddy gravel, trying to avoid ridges of gravel left by the road graders, we heard a "whoosh" sound and immediately noticed a change in the truck handling. There was no place to pull off the road, so we simply stopped in the middle - discovering a very flat tire on the left rear of the truck, already partly off the rim.
Nothing to do but change it, on the hill, in the mud, in the middle of the road. Just as I completed blocking all trailer and truck tires and was assembling the jack, a road grader came roaring up our lane and had to stop and wait for us. The driver didn't seem particularly upset. He walked over to us and offered to help, complimented us on being prepared with all the equipment to do the job right, and then stood around and talked while I changed the tire. He told us about the various options for finding a tire in Dease Lake - the next town down the road. With a rear tire flat and the other tires deep in the loose gravel, I had to jack up the rear of the truck in order to get the spare out from its storage place underneath. (The tongue jack on the trailer did a nice job of this.)
We were soon on our way again, somewhat muddy but otherwise not much inconvenienced. This is the first tire problem we've had on the road, in approximately 10,000 miles of Alaskan and northern Canadian travel this summer. I had brought two extra spare trailer tires, but had assumed that the big rugged 10-ply truck tires would be more durable. This tire had a big gash in the inner sidewall - no idea what we hit. We've got a lot more gravel road ahead of us, and had planned a long side trip to Telegraph Creek on a really poor road, so I'm not willing to go far without a spare - we'll have to hunt one up immediately.
We stopped at the first gas station in Dease Lake and asked about a tire. They sent us to Chico's garage - which was also where the grader operator had suggested we try first. We went there, and found the place very busy. Chico may be the only auto mechanic for a hundred miles in any direction. He had a pile of fairly good-looking used tires in the size I needed, and interrupted what he was doing to pick out a tire and mount it for me, so we weren't delayed for long. He charged me $50 Canadian (about $35 U.S.) for a used tire with lots of tread and his labor. Considering that he was the only game in town, he could have asked a lot more.
We spent the night at Dease Lake RV Park - a gravel parking lot with full hookups (and a free modem connection in the office). The park is for sale, if anyone is interested. After unhooking, I drove a few hundred yards down the road to the local propane supplier, and found the office shack locked up, with a hand-scrawled note on the door saying "I'm at the woodpile". There was no woodpile visible, and no signs of life anywhere. While I was scratching my head, another RVer showed up and was equally clueless. Finally, I became aware of the faint noise of a chainsaw buzzing back in the forest somewhere, and followed my ears along a footpath to the source. It was indeed the propane attendant, and he (somewhat reluctantly, I thought) shut off his chainsaw, and drove his truck out and around a circuitous route to the propane place. It turned out to be by far the most expensive propane we've ever purchased - $35 Canadian for a 30-pound (7 gallon) tank.
8/31 Drove the 150-mile round trip to Telegraph Creek and back (without the trailer). The original settlement here marks the head of navigation of the Stikine River, which provided a route for fairly large boats all the way from here to the ocean.
The value of this trip is in the scenery along the way, not the destination - there's not much of interest at the end. But the scenery along the way is very interesting. The area had active volcanoes at some point in fairly recent history, (since the last ice age), and the river valleys now cut through thick layers of dark lava, and occasionally through layers of partially consolidated volcanic ash - pale grey with hints of other colors. At one point, the confluence of two rivers left a narrow peninsula between the two canyons, and the road goes along the top, with the canyon lips close on both sides. The switchback descent down into the canyon from the end of the peninsula was steep and narrow.
The road sort of petered out along the edge of the river at undeveloped boat landings where local people had their fishing boats pulled up on shore. We stopped at one of these open spots on the river's edge to eat lunch and enjoy the view. While we were sitting in the car eating, a brown bear walked by, about 50 feet from us. A few minutes later, the same bear came back, a few feet in front of the car, oblivious to our presence.
9/1 Got a late start from Dease Lake - almost noon. The road is mostly paved, but with occasional gravel sections, generally in good condition. One stretch was being actively rebuilt, for perhaps 5 miles. We waited for 20 minutes, after which the construction equipment moved off the road and we were led slowly through loose, rutted, gravel by a pilot car. The road follows a series of broad valleys through the mountains, sometimes along the rivers and sometimes up on the slopes, with a long view out across the valley. Occasionally, a mountain presses in close the road. At one point, we were stopped briefly where one-lane traffic was detouring out around a new rockfall which covered the road. Equipment was just arriving to clear the rocks off the road. As the day progressed, the high rugged coastal range came into view to the west.
Sometime in the afternoon, the road abruptly changed character, from rough chipseal to real pavement, with paved shoulders, and edge and center lines. We feel like we're suddenly back in civilization. The forest also changed character at about the same time, with the northern aspen/spruce gradually giving way to hemlock, fir, and cedar.
Late in the afternoon, we arrived at the turnoff to Stewart. After topping off with fuel and asking some questions about the road, we decided to push on to Stewart and Hyder (only another 40 miles). It's a good paved road - no problem taking the trailer on this side excursion.
Fairly quickly, we found ourselves in the coastal mountains, with high rocky cliffs visible all around. In places, the valley narrows until the road is just a narrow strip carved out between river bank and cliffs. Evidence of rockfalls was frequent - scars in the road and piles of rocks pushed off the side. Big bulldozers or front-end loaders are occasionally parked in pullouts along the road - permanently placed near the potential rockfall sites.
The bear population through this entire region must be quite high. We saw three bears at various points along the road.
This detour to Stewart is one of the prettiest drives we've taken. Numerous hanging glaciers are visible, high in the mountains. Uncountable waterfalls tumble down thousands of feet of cliffs. The character of the forest changes again. We begin to see really huge trees, and the undergrowth is dense and lush wherever it can find a little sun. It feels quite similar to the coastal rain forests of Washington and Oregon, although we're not yet near the coast. Stewart and Hyder are at the end of the 60-mile-long Portland Canal - a fjord that averages only a mile wide.
With a deep-water port (Canada's most northerly ice-free port) and a fairly gentle valley leading inland, Stewart aspired early in the century to become a major seaport city. A railroad was built, starting here and running 450 miles east to the Peace River. Mineral exploration along the east side of the coastal range offered good prospects. A huge coal deposit was found.
But somehow, it didn't work out. The railroad was abandoned, the town decayed, and today it is a small village supported mostly by tourism.
We dropped the trailer in the Rainy Creek municipal campground in Stewart, in a pretty campsite in a hemlock grove adjacent to a salmon stream. We immediately headed out to do some sightseeing and have dinner.
Hyder, a couple of miles further along the road, is distinguished only by being in Alaska. It is much smaller and more decayed than Stewart, with a population of around 100. It bills itself as "America's friendliest ghost town". Crossing the International border between Steward and Hyder was a strange experience. We kept looking for the U.S. customs station, uneasy that we had unwittingly driven through it without stopping. But there isn't any customs inspection here! Canada does maintain a customs station on their side of the border, so we got the usual routine questions when returning.
A few miles beyond Hyder, in the Tongass National Forest, is a famous bear-viewing site. Two salmon-spawning streams run near the road, and the Forest Service has built trails and a viewing platform. We were there at the right time - the stream was crowded with spawning chum salmon splashing furiously in the shallows. Many had already completed their spawning and were dead, and the smell of rotting fish should have been strong enough to attract every bear for miles around. But the bears didn't cooperate, and we saw none while we were there. The bald eagles which usually congregate at such places were also missing, and we were told that the local crows had chased the eagles away. Numerous people were sitting comfortably along the stream bank in padded chairs, with huge tripod-mounted lenses, waiting patiently. Our patience was limited and our stomachs were complaining that it was long past suppertime, so we soon gave up and headed back to town
We ate a good meal in pleasant surroundings at the Bitter Creek Café in Stewart. We highly recommend this place - unusually good food for such a small and remote town, and even with a small but carefully chosen list of wines, nearly all from British Columbia's Okanagan Valley.
9/2 The morning drive from Stewart back to the Cassiar Highway was just as spectacular as in the opposite direction, and with somewhat different vistas. Glaciers and waterfalls we hadn't noticed on the way in are prominent in front of us on the way out. We stopped at nearly every pullout to enjoy the view and take pictures.
Shortly after turning South on the Cassiar Highway, we saw a sign for Meziadin Lake Provincial Park. Out of curiosity, we turned in to drive through the park. It turned out to have many campsites right on the shore of this large, beautiful lake. We couldn't resist. We pulled into a nice lakefront site to spend the afternoon and night - only a 50-mile day. Facilities here consist of large, level, gravel campsites, a boat ramp, vault toilets, a hand-operated water pump, and an unlimited supply of free firewood - already split. For C$12 (about US $8.50 -- we can't complain).
This is a long holiday weekend in Canada, and the park is busy, with perhaps 2/3 of the sites occupied. Most of the license plates are from British Columbia, and many of the campers are families with young children.
Dave went for a walk in the woods, up a hill just beyond our campsite, and found a hillside covered with blueberries. After going back to the trailer for a container, he settled in for a long session of berry picking. The blueberries were mixed in with several other kinds of berries, most of which I couldn't identify. Unfortunately, they were also mixed in with thorny things - devil's club, roses, and several members of the raspberry family. I picked a pint or so of a mixture of blueberries, and another closely related berry that was larger, sweeter, and almost black. These blueberries are different than the ones we are used to. These berries occur singly, each hanging from a leaf junction along the branch - fairly slow picking. We're used to berries that occur in clusters, where on good bushes one can pick a handful at once. They tasted good though. We had blueberry pancakes for supper, with enough berries left over for a breakfast treat.
Among the berry bushes, I came across a big Rubbermaid plastic food container which had toothmarks around the rim. I can invent interesting non-improbable stories about that container! Perhaps a berry picker was surprised by a bear and ran, abandoning the container of berries?
9/3 Continuing down the Cassiar Highway. It's now a first-class road - well-paved with paved shoulders. The local mountains become older, rounder. The foliage becomes more varied and verdant, the trees bigger. An occasion farm appears - fenced pastures, hayfields, traditional-looking barns. Occasionally, we get glimpses of the higher, more distant coastal range, snow covered and craggy. The Seven Sisters are especially photogenic - seven close-spaced almost identical craggy peaks, all lined up in a row, all snow-covered.
At the junction with the Yellowhead Highway (PH 16), we had to make a decision -turn East - the only way back to the States by road, or turn West -- a dead-end, but inviting, since the Yellowhead goes through the coastal mountains to Prince Rupert, on the Pacific. We decided to go to Prince Rupert, and enjoyed yet another traverse of the mountains, following the broad valley of the Skeena River - a big river, perhaps up to a mile wide where it spreads out in the valley bottom. This river was a major transportation route a hundred years ago, displaced in 1914 when a railroad was completed down this same valley, connecting Prince Rupert with the trans-continental rail system. Views of high waterfalls and hanging glaciers are frequent. The mountain faces are often sheer cliffs of bare rock - too steep to support any vegetation. A lovely, and easy, drive - we recommend it.
Driving along the Yellowhead, we finally get the feeling that our Alaska trip is ending. We're out of the wilderness. Traffic is heavier, and there are occasional modern, expensive, well-tended homes along the highway. Along the way, we go through Terrace, a town that also looks modern and prosperous.
Prince Rupert is a sizeable and prosperous city. Lots of money has been spent on good streets, extensive landscaping, and modern buildings. In 1972, the entire waterfront area burned. Much of the commercial harbor facilities were rebuilt in a new location a few miles out of town. The bluffs above the water are fully developed, with modern stores and a large shopping Mall. The lower level, along the old waterfront area is largely vacant - perhaps waiting for a sufficiently large influx of tourists to re-create an "old town".
This doesn't seem to be much of a tourist destination. There are very few RV Parks, not many hotels and motels, and we haven't yet found the typical touristy shops full of cheap souvenirs. The municipal campground, half a mile from the ferry terminal, seems to be the only full-services choice. It's pleasant, inexpensive, conveniently close to town, modem friendly, has full hookups, and has a laundry - which we need. It even has a small exchange library, where we found a handful of books that look worth reading, and got rid of a couple of handfuls of our old ones.
9/4 It's raining again, after one really nice day yesterday. Drove around town, looking at interesting old churches. The town is a small version of San Francisco - twisty streets on the side of steep little hills, bare rocks. The few flat areas are muskeg, and modern buildings require pilings up to 70 feet deep to get down to bedrock. The ferry terminal is huge - the Canadian and Alaska ferry system butt together here, making it a major marine crossroads.
The Museum of Northern BC is an interesting log building. The building is worth visiting, but the museum collection is small, and mostly oriented toward the history and culture of the indigenous peoples. Hardly worth the $5.00/person entry fee.
9/5 This morning, on the way back east along the Yellowhead, we detoured 30 miles south to the town of Kitimat, to tour the Alcan aluminum smelter. The site was developed by Alcan, beginning in 1946. A group of interconnected lakes, on a high plateau in the mountains east of the smelter site, was dammed at the original eastern outflow to the Fraser River. A huge tunnel routes the water west, where it drops half a mile to a hydroelectric plant, generating 670 megawatts of power. The smelter, built on a natural harbor at the head of a fjord, uses the entire capacity of this hydro plant, producing 272,000 tons of aluminum per year, operating 24 hours a day, every day of the year. This plant also converts some of this pure aluminum into the specialized aluminum alloys used in extrusion or rolling mills to make a variety of high-volume products. While we were there, they were pouring huge bars of alloy destined to be rolled into aluminum foil in Japan.
Most of the output of this plant is shipped to Pacific Rim countries, with a small amount going to the United States. All the raw materials also come in by ship - the alumina (aluminum oxide from which aluminum is extracted by electrolysis) coming from Australia.
A planned community was built from scratch at this remote site, and now houses 2200 Alcan employees, plus employees of several other companies who have chosen to build nearby, plus a large number of people employed in service and support businesses, schools, medical centers, etc. It adds up to a good sized town, all created since 1954, in an area which 50 years ago had no roads and only a tiny traditional native village on the waterfront.
The aluminum refining plant tour was very interesting and informative. The buildings are so large that our tour bus drove right inside, parking close to the long rows of electrolytic cells in which aluminum was forming. Electricity was flowing to these cells on a scale that is hard to comprehend - millions of direct-current amperes, at low voltage. We had to leave our credit cards, watches, electronic devices, etc, in our cars or in the office safe before boarding the bus, since the magnetic fields created by this huge current flow will erase magnetic storage devices and magnetize watch components. The tour guide handed out handfuls of paper clips, which linked themselves together in long chains, following the magnetic fields inside the bus.
We also drove into another building where we watched molten aluminum being mixed with alloying metals and poured into molds to form huge ingots. These are sawn to sizes specified by customers, and loaded on railroad cars for the short trip to the docks, where they are transferred to ships, making this port rank well up among the large ports of the world, in terms of total tonnage shipped.
This was certainly one of the most interesting factory tours we have taken. Two other interesting businesses in the area also offer factory tours - but only in the summer and we were a few days too late.
Continuing east along the Yellowhead after the tour, we drove for several hours, and stopped in early evening near Smithers, BC. A little roadside RV Park called Glacier View indeed has a nice view of Hudson Glacier, tucked between the peaks of Hudson Bay Mountain.
9/6 I got reminded that we're still in a rather unpopulated area when I was awakened at 6:30 AM by a pack of coyotes howling somewhere nearby. We've also heard quite a few loons flying over - presumably beginning their fall migration
A long day today -- 365 miles. We spent the night at McLeese Lake, in a pleasant campground right on the shores of the lake.
9/7 Drove all day through rolling hills and broad valleys. We're now in farm land - mostly hay fields and cattle. In the afternoon, the native vegetation became sparse and desert-like, and the hay fields sprouted irrigation systems. We decided to go east to the Okanagan Valley, which is reputed to make Canada's best wines, and spend a day wine-tasting and looking over this area. Map'n'Go plotted a fairly direct and reasonable-appearing route, which we followed. It turned out to be very interesting. PH-8, from PH-1 (Trans-Canada Highway) east to PH-5 is a narrow twisty little road that goes up a narrow river valley, paralleling an abandoned railroad track. It's sometimes right beside the river, in the bottom, and sometimes glued to the side of the steep hills, far above the river. We occasionally pass tiny ranches - small herds of cattle wandering through meandering pastures on the narrow flood plain of the river.
Then we continued east on PH-5A, soon turning onto PH 97C. The latter is a fairly new limited-access highway, out here in the middle of nowhere, which took us all the way to Okanagan Lake, ending near the village of Westbank. This is an amazing expressway for a rural area. We hadn't realized that we would be crossing a mountain range, but the expressway climbed steadily - 6% to 8% grades for 20 miles or so. We climbed 4000 feet, to a pass that was 5700 feet high, and descended the same amount going down the east side to the lake. Climbing, the diesel ran at full throttle continuously, for close to half an hour, always in third gear with the torque converter locked about half the time, generally at 45 to 50 mph. Coming down, the exhaust brake did its thing gracefully, again generally in third gear with the converter locked, but at 55-65 mph. We saw almost no other traffic. The temperature dropped from 70 degrees when we started up to 50 degrees at the summit then rose to 70 again as we came down to the lake.
We picked West Bay Beach Resort from among half a dozen RV Parks along the lake, and have been generally pleased. The park is still nearly full in this resort area, and we couldn't get a lake-front site. But the place has lots of well-tended grass, pull-throughs with full hookups, is modem-friendly, and has concrete patio pads. From the front of the trailer, we have views of the lake. From the back, we see a pasture full of llamas and alpacas owned by the RV Park, with the mountains as a backdrop.
This lake reminds us strongly of the Finger Lakes of western New York. The same long narrow shape, with the same steep wooded hillsides. And both are wine-growing regions. Okanagan Lake is, however, almost twice as long as the largest of the Finger Lakes - 65 miles long versus about 35 miles for Cayuga Lake. Both of these lakes are only 1 to 2 miles wide along most of their length.
The valley also produces excellent fruits. The tomatoes and peaches we bought at one of the many roadside stands were marvelous - huge, ripe, juicy, and flavorful. Peach Cobbler, BLT Sandwiches. Yum!
9/8 Clean-up day. We are finally out of the worst of the dirt roads and the permafrost heave road repairs and at a campground that allows us to wash our truck and trailer. It took all morning. The road tar was difficult to remove, but both truck and trailer now look bright and clean.
9/9 Wine tasting day: Rained off and on all day. We chose Naramata as a destination for a day trip. It's a little place at the end of a dead-end road on the east side of Okanagan Lake, with many small family wineries. We tried several red and white wines at two somewhat randomly chosen places, and were not impressed. We've also bought wine from this region in wine stores and restaurants on several occasions. It reminds us of wine from the Finger Lakes region in New York - overpriced, thin, lacking body and complexity. I'm afraid we'll have to stick with California and Australia wines.
Perhaps the most successful wine from this region is "ice wine". Grapes are left on the vine until they freeze, and are then harvested and pressed while still frozen. The partial freezing process extracts relatively pure water (the ice crystals are thrown away with the pulp), leaving a more concentrated, higher sugar content juice. When fermented, this yields a rich, sweet, low alcohol (about 10%) desert wine which is highly prized. It's low-yield and very expensive. We're not fond of sweet wines and didn't try any.
The drive down the west side of the lake, around the end, and back up the other side, was through very attractive country. The road alternately dips down to follow the lake shore through small resort communities, and then climbs to skirt along the top of high cliffs which sometimes drop straight down into the lake. The views out across this large lake are very pretty, even in the rain. We were told that the vineyards and orchards are gradually being divided and sold an acre or two at a time (at $C60,000/acre) to individuals for vacation or retirement homes and hobby vineyards. We indeed saw quite a few expensive homes being built on the hillsides.
We stopped at Pacific Agri-Food Research Centre, near Summerland -- an old estate high on a hill, now owned by the government and used as an experimental agricultural station. The 80-year-old ornamental gardens around the original mansion have been maintained and extended, and allowed us to examine many beds of annuals and the early autumn flowers of this region. It's also a lovely place for a picnic, with expansive views out across the lake.
9/10 Driving south from Okanagan Lake, we passed several other lakes -smaller, but quite similar in character. There are also lakes north of Okanagan - a long narrow chain which almost, but not quite, link into a broad river down this big valley, for about 150 miles. The country continues to be an arid desert. The hills are sparsely covered with sagebrush and tufts of grass. The frequent fruit orchards are irrigated. In occasional patches of flat rich bottomlands, we see truck farming - tomatoes and a variety of vegetables, again with heavy irrigation.
Literature suggests that the Okanagan Valley in Canada is a northern extension of the interior deserts which extend all the way down through Washington, Oregon, Nevada, and California. It surprised us to see it this far north. Its aridity is caused by an almost continuous chain of high mountains to the west (the Cascades up here, the Sierra Nevada further south) wringing the moisture out of the prevailing west winds.
We crossed back into the United States shortly after noon, half way down Osoyoos Lake, the last of this chain of lakes. The border crossing was uneventful, except that we were required to discard a small amount of citrus fruit. We left the lower 48 on May 12, so we've been gone for almost 4 months. It's nice to be back!