Day 9 -- Saturday 7/16/2011

Dawson Creek, BC to Fort Nelson, BC -- 290 miles

It was raining lightly all through the night and continued through the morning as we prepared to get on the road. The temperature was 51 degrees when we got up, and stayed in the 50's most of the day. We drove through light rain and mist most of the morning. It finally stopped around noon.

We hadn't intended to drive all the way to Fort Nelson, but this particular stretch of the highway didn't have much to offer. At first it was typical rolling pastureland with incursions of coniferous forest, but it soon became solid forest. About 20 miles north of Dawson Creek we took a slight detour down the original Alaska Highway to see one of the last remaining original bridges where the highway crosses the Kiskatinaw River. This is a totally wooden bridge, including the heavy timber planking which forms the bridge deck. The bridge is unusual in that as it crosses the river, it curves. The total length of the bridge is 531 feet, and the roadbed sits perhaps a hundred feet above the river. The bridge is still in use for local traffic, although the main highway has been re-routed to the west a half mile or so and has a new steel bridge.

The highway crosses the Peace River 35 miles north of Dawson. The Peace River sits in a 1000-foot deep coulee, and the road drops as steep as ten percent grade on the way down into the gorge. The river itself is quite wide, I'd estimate at least a quarter of a mile, and the bridge itself is twice that long. The town of Taylor sits on the north bank, and seems to be a hub of natural gas processing activities. In fact, a large gas pipeline crosses the river just to the east of the highway bridge, complete with its own suspension structure.

We stopped for gas at the next town, Fort St John, the last major population center before Fort Nelson. After a quick conversion from liters to gallons and Canadian to US dollars, we figured that the gas cost a few pennies over $5 per gallon.

The road north of Fort St John soon became pretty boring as it passed through miles and miles of boreal forest. It was hilly, with elevations ranging from 1600 feet as we crossed the Peace River to close to 3500 at the higher hill tops. From the ridges all you could see was endless forest in all directions. The trees were primarily black spruce, a really scraggly-looking cousin of the alpine spruce we see in the higher elevations west of Denver. Mixed in, particularly at lower elevations, were white birch, a tall, white-barked tree that looks a lot like aspen, only generally much taller. Along the roadside there are many wildflowers, particularly orange paintbrush, bright lavander fireweed, cow parsnip, yarrow, goldenrod, and yellow and white clover. Settlements are few and far between along this stretch of the road, and most seem to be related to or dependent upon the gas industry. There were a couple of small communities made up entirely of pre-fab workers dormitories that looked almost like army barracks or perhaps minimum-security prisons. Not a pleasant place to live, but the guys who live there are probably making really big bucks in gas exploration, drilling, and processing.

We finally reached Fort Nelson, a town of 5000 or so in the far north region of British Columbia, at about 4:15 pm and checked into a rather dismal looking RV park behind a motel. After a quick supper, we will attend 7:30 pm Mass at the local Catholic Church. Tomorrow we head head west into what is described in the the guidebooks as the most scenic part of the Alaska Highway. It may be a couple of days before we have wi-fi again, so when we do, we'll report back as to whether this description is true.

Meantime, we enjoy hearing from our friends who are following along our journey.