Three More Bears (ok, one was a Glacier) – Cassiar Highway (day 2, pt. 2)

    

We met up this guy at the Meziadin Junction.  He seemed to be playing “hide and seek” with vehicles which passed by…but by the time we got up to him he was in definite “hiding mode” because he turned around and off he went.

This is “Bear Glacier” (above and left), which is right along the road to Stewart/Hyder.  Look at those various colors of blue in glacier…we had not seen that much blue in a glacier before.  The picture to the left is a close up of the middle section.  Not really sure where the blue comes from, but the “dirt” comes off the walls around the glacier during rain storms.

This big guy was not too far from Stewart, our destination for the next three nights.  He let me drive right by him…but I did not dare stop next to him.  Why?  See those teeth??  That’s why.  But again I have jumped way to far into our trip…let’s go back to where we saw the mama bear stand up to protect her cubs…

After we saw mama bear and cubs, we continued along the Cassiar Highway.  I got to hand it to Marcia, despite her right shoulder hurting, she continued to take lots of wonderful shots during the two days from Watson Lake to Stewart/Hyder.  Remember, Stewart is in British Columbia, Hyder is in Alaska.  This little lake is just north of what they call “Bell 2”, a resort, right near where the Bell Irving River crosses under the Cassiar Highway.

Note:  Our destination is Stewart/Hyder. The bigger town is Stewart, and it has the better RV Park.  These two towns, though accessible by car, are way out in the nowhere land.  Verizon Cell Coverage is ZIP.  Most Internet is by satellite and is slow, and cost the user (RV park) lots of $$$, so they restrict usage to 2 hours every 24 hours, and limit total use to 40 megs…which means you cannot do anything at all.  Anyway, that is why I had to wait until we got back to a Verizon area where we can use our aircard…so this post (part 2) is being written 150 miles south of Stewart in a small Canadian town called Kitwanga.  The last two post, although they were posted from here, I wrote while we were in Stewart.

Here is the Bell Irving River near Bell 2.  This is in the heart of Skeena Mountains, and it is a very pretty area.  There is a RV park in this area that looked ok as we drove by…but their Internet is pretty much non-existent too.  We have now been on the road for 100 miles since we left Mountain Shadow RV Park.

 

    

 
And now we are at Meziadin Junction where we saw bear #4 for the day, 40 miles from our destination in Stewart.  For these 40 miles we will be on the “Glacier Highway”, officially called Highway 37A.  Should be less than an hour away…but no, it takes us a good 90 minutes to cover these 40 miles…

We drive along Meziadin Lake, although you can’t get a good picture of the lake alongside the road, and come to the eastern portion of the Coast Mountain Range which we will be driving through to get to Stewart/Hyder.  The Coast Mountain Range extends from southwestern Yukon through the Alaska Panhandle and virtually all of the Coast of British Columbia. 

      

We quickly see why the call it the Glacier Highway.

And that’s when we come to Bear Glacier.  This is the Bear Glacier in British Columbia, and not the on in Alaska.  Back in the 1940’s it covered the lake shown in the third picture in the post.  When it did, the lake would dam under the glacier, and eventually burst, pouring water down the Bear River Valley.  In the 1970’s the glacier stopped covering the lake.

 

    

I think they could also have called this highway “Waterfalls Highway”, because there are a bunch of them along the road.  The top picture is near Bear Glacier, the other two are just down the highway.  The one on the right is a closeup of the top of the one on the left.  Although there is a sheet of ice running along the top, two waterfalls are split off from the large rock with a lot of water running down each fall.  This is all from the same snow pack on Otter Mountain, which contains the Bear Glacier.  I assume the ice sheet is part of Bear Glacier.

This glacier may be part of Bear Glacier too…just not sure.  The lack of signs providing information, and the lack of information on the websites just makes it hard to determine.

A few more miles down the road and we cross over Bear River, take a left and pull into Bear River RV Park.  We did not have reservations, but they had a spot for us for three nights.  More about the RV Park and the Stewart/Hyder area in my next post.

It took us two days to get from Watson Lake to Stewart/Hyder area.  It took three posts, of which this is the third posting.  If you missed the first two, you can find them by clicking the below links:

Cassiar Highway is Breathtaking – and a Moose with a Calf

When a Bear says STOP! – Cassiar Highway (day 2, pt. 1)

2.5 KM Away from Alaska Highway – Dawson Creek Walmart

 
Two days of travel has taken us from Banff to the Walmart just shy of Mile Zero of the Alaska Highway…560 miles of driving.  Hinton, AB, was pretty much in the middle of the drive, so that is why we stayed there last night…and I was so tired from driving through the rain, the snow, the mountains…don’t think I could have driven much further.  Above is one of the highlights of the drive in Banff headed for Jasper, Bridal Veil Falls.  To the right is a picture of the upper area of the falls…hidden in the clouds, which is the story of the day, along with the snow.

A mile before Bridal Veil was this series of waterfalls…waterfalls that seem to have no name because they only appear for a short time.

It wasn’t much further away that we hit the snow in force.  Lucky for us, nothing was sticking on the ground…but it still makes for tougher driving conditions, and higher tension on Marcia’s nerves. 

Here you can see what we were dealing with all day long…

Here is our last bear sighting, just as we entering the Jasper (town) area.  And if you thought that sighting was bad…

Here are four of the six Bighorn Sheep we saw as we entered the Columbia Icefield Discovery Centre as we entered Jasper National Park.  Amazingly, people were still taking the Icefield Tour…bet those pictures all turned out well.     

It was such a hard days driving, Skruffy volunteered to take over.






Asked Marcia what she thought of it, and she said, “Couldn’t be any worse than what you have been doing.”  Even Skruffy got a kick out of that one.






Asked Bubba, and he said he could sleep through anything.  Well, I decided to keep driving myself...but thanks for asking Skruffy.

Today was a totally different day…the storm clouds still lingered up in the high mountains of upper Jasper National Park, but we had blue skies.  Went into Hinton to get gas, and sure enough, little to no snow on the ground in Hinton.  Back tracked, which is when we got this picture, to Highway 40, and headed for Dawson Creek.

They advertise this route as the “Scenic Way to Alaska”, which is a bit of hype considering most people just drove from Banff to Jasper…but it did have its scenic areas.

A better advertisement might be, “The road which will prepare you for all the rough patches along the Alaska Highway.”  It sure had its moments today…had to give it a break in Grande Prairie, AB because it was giving Marcia such a headache with all the jolts.  At one point they were working on this bridge, and had created a temporary dirt road which lead down 4 feet and back up 4 feet right next to where the bridge was be built.  With all this rain and snow the past few days, it gives on a moment of “should I”, followed by, “what are my choices”.   We made it through just fine, hope the four RVs going the other way (we just beat them, and it is only one vehicle at a time) made it ok.

Rivers seemed to be the theme of today.  Lots of trees, lots of hills, and lots of river sightings.

   

For about 50 miles before Grande Prairie, and for a good 30 miles, there were lots and lots of Pine Trees, and areas where they had harvested them.  We also saw many what seemed to us as Natural Gas, but possibly oil, holding tanks, and lots of trucks which seemed to be hauling it out of the area.  Saw a few logging trucks, and just before the city saw a huge lumber yard.  With all these heavy trucks along the highway, the roadway was definitely messed up from all of this…and little signs that they (Government) was doing much about repairing it. 

    

Personally I found much of the drive between Hinton and Grande Prairie to be a familiar one…lots of hills similar to the hills along the Sierra Nevada.  Yet these hills have lots of trees, which was refreshing.  However, I love driving Highway 49 in California along the foothills…so rich in California mining history, and well, that area was not far from my native home.

As we headed west from Grande Prairie to Dawson Creek, you quickly see how Grande prairie got its name.

It was refreshing to see a bit of farming of things besides trees.  No problem on my end with trees as a crop, but there is something about man working the ground, planting, harvesting all within the same year…or in some cases, many crops per year.  We had not seen much of this since we left Idaho.

So we are in Dawson Creek.  Tomorrow we will get a RV park for a day or two, and then we will start out on the Alaska Highway.