Rocky Mountain High: Thru Canada's Northern Rockies

When you last heard from us we were in Fort Nelson, B.C. ready to leap off on our next leg of the Alaskan Highway.  We had no idea how different the next 600 miles would be from our first 2500. Picture driving into Yellowstone and the Tetons and finding they are now the size of several states and the tourists stayed home.  That what the Great Northern sector of British Columbia and the lower Yukon seem like. Spectacular, pristine and mostly devoid of people.

I’m behind, so now that we finally have wifi (an hour a day) I'm going to post my account of the leg from Fort Nelson to Whitehorse a couple of days at a time.  Here are Friday and Saturday:

Friday:

As I write this Friday night, we are sitting at a rest stop at Mile 461 of the Alcan Highway next to a big sign that says “Wildlife Viewing Area.” It has an arrow pointing up towards the mountains.  That arrow is misdirected.  Not twenty feet in front of our motor home are a pair of big horn sheep, grazing on bare dirt.  Four more sheep are doing the same right behind us. Technically they are Stone’s Sheep, a brown version of the white Dall sheep found further north.  But these rams do have big horns.  They nibble the ground to get the remains of the salt the Province put on the turnout last winter.  Then they spit out the gravel.

 

Just across the road is a beautiful blue lake.  The color is a deep blue-green even though the sun has been hiding most of the day and there is no blue sky for it to mirror.  It doesn’t need it. 

The guidebook says the color comes from copper oxide that has leached into the water.  It is Muncho Lake, named for an Indian word meaning “big lake.”  So those of us from the southwest can think of Muncho as Mucho Lake.

This was one heck of a day.  We only made it about 135 miles from Fort Nelson, and drove those miles at about 40 mph because the road twisted and turned, then went uphill and downhill.  But the real reason we went slowly was that the scenery is so spectacular.  This looks like a bigger version of our Glacier National Park.  We are in the Canadian Northern Rockies, with snow capped mountains on all sides; rivers at the bottom of deep canyons filled with dark green conifer forests.  Yellow flowers everywhere. Wow.  And animals wherever you look.  We saw two black bears, dozens of sheep, two mule deer, quite a few small caribou (we first thought they were young moose), at least one elk, plus a motorcyclist and a flock of seagulls here by the lake.

We pulled over to check out the Wildlife Viewing Area and found a couple from New Hampshire/Yuma (summer/winter) sitting here in their trailer.  They said they had been hiking the trail that leads out of the pullout and had seen lots of bears and other animals. They decided they were going to stay the night.  We decided to stay here too, so we can drive the length of the lake in sunshine tomorrow (we hope). Marsha says the lake goes another 50 miles from this point, or maybe seven, she isn’t sure.  We think we are about 50 miles from the Muncho Lake campgrounds.  So maybe the campgrounds are named for a lake they aren’t near.  Inquiring minds want to know. Stay tuned.

Tomorrow will be exciting. 

Saturday:

Well, we got all packed up, pulled the slides in and drove less than a mile before arriving at the first Mucho Lake campground.  But we are hardy travelers, so we journeyed on another full mile to the MacDonald Provincial Campground right smack on the lake. We had heard the Provincial campgrounds are small, and built for tents.  But the dozen or so spaces here would all accommodate the motor home.  So we picked a site and settled in for the night.  The only thing between the lake and us is one tree. It’s incredibly beautiful.

This was about 10:00 am, so we had a ways to go before dark.  More than 12 hours, actually, since sunset occurs about 10:30 pm in these latitudes. So we decided to go to the Northern Rockies Lodge for lunch.

I had to start by checking out the really beautiful floatplane at their dock, hovering majestically on the surface of the blue lake.  It was a really ancient, but brand new looking DeHaviland Otter that someone had totally rebuilt with a Pratt & Whiney jet-prop engine.  

Its young pilot told me it hauled nine passengers and climbed like a scalded angel. They use it to take fishermen and women into distant lakes where they offer one log cabin per lake, huge fish and lots of privacy. They had a wooden map showing the cabin locations in the lodge.

The menu in the lobby of the lodge showed a luncheon hamburger for $12, but we figured it would be worth it to use their Wi-Fi.  We ordered the Bush Pilot Burger, which the cook apparently thought meant post-crash because it arrived heavily charred, on a burned bun, and with overdone fries. The actual price of the burger turned out to be $20 (each). I’d apparently seen the kid’s menu earlier.  Naturally, their Wi-Fi didn’t work. We passed on their $8-a-gallon gas, which had to be hauled up by truck from Edmonton.

After that treat, we got in the Jeep and drove down the highway 50 miles to preview tomorrow’s drive and poke around more than we could do with the motor home.  More spectacular scenery!  We went down the Trout River to the Liard River and found the Liard River Hot Springs, located at another nice Province-run campground.  You walk out to the hot springs on a boardwalk and see a bunch of old folks getting themselves into hot water.  It was a very nice facility with a terraced deck system that takes you right into the hot springs.  We hadn’t come prepared to swim.

Back at the campground we spent the afternoon sitting in the front seats reading and looking out at the lake.  When it got chilly, the mosquitoes vanished and we went for a walk.  What an incredible place to visit.

Tomorrow on into the Yukon Territory and the town of Watson Lake, for the laying of the 3 ½ Happy Barbers sign.