August 17 & 18 - Quesnel & Skihist Provincial Park

We left Smithers the morning of the 17th after discovering that the bakery in the Safeway store wouldn’t have any donuts until after 10 a.m.  Most of the day was spent traveling through rolling hills with pastures interspersed with stands of birch or evergreen trees.

Lots of places had the hay baled but still in the fields. Some farms were storing the bales in long tubes of vinyl, while others were stacking it.

There were quite a few places with large herds of beef cattle although we didn’t get a picture of the cattle as we sped. Weather was varied all day, sometimes bright sun, occasionally hard rain.

We intended to overnight in Prince George but got there early and weren’t impressed with the crowds of RVs at the Walmart so we turned and continued south.

Over the past couple days we’ve seen lots of vehicles with canoes, generally very nice, light weight canoes. When I spotted this sign, it all went together. Bowren Lakes is a famous canoe circuit attracting paddlers from all over the world.

Quesnal claims to have the world’s largest gold pan as does Burwash Landing in the Yukon. There is no question that Quesnal has much nicer flowers around theirs!  Quesnal is also home to large fleets of logging trucks and several large saw mills.

Home for the night was the Wallyworld in South Quesnal. Nice.

Between Quesnal and Cache Creek we saw lots of old log cabins and barns as well as relatively new log homes – way too large to be termed a “cabin” in my mind. We’ve run further than originally planned on several days and today was the same. We’re nicely positioned for a border crossing tomorrow in Sumas.

We stopped for our last Canadian gas in 100 Mile House and started hitting a headwind shortly thereafter. Once we got into the Cache Creek area, we started seeing sagebrush on the hills.

We stopped in Spences Bridge where the Thompson and the Fraser Rivers join, just to get a picture of the sign. It’s too bad they didn’t spell it correctly! Just one letter off.

Home for the night is the Skihist Provincial Park in the Fraser River canyon about 50 miles south of Cache Creek. The sites are in a Ponderosa pine forest on the hillside above the Fraser river and the highway. If we’re quiet we can just hear the trains down in the canyon.

This post made possible by the public wi-fi at the Visitor Centre in Lytton.