After lunch we were back on the road again, heading northwards….
by now we were getting up into the northern end of the Rocky Mountains…
here’s the crew taking pictures of the scenery. By the time we pulled into the town of Chetwynd it was getting late in the afternoon and had also started to rain.
this sign is at the visitor’s center. From Chetwynd you can either head east to Dawson Creek and mile 0 of the Alaska Highway, or you can take the Hudson Hope loop. We did neither at this point, but headed to Moberly Lake Provincial Park campground to spend the night….unfortunately the road was under construction and the rain was really coming down so the trip was a muddy mess. Moberly Lake seemed to be a nice place, but the only memory I have of it are these
dripping wet ‘Tall Bluebells’. I’d never seen them before, but now know they are one of the most common flowers in the north.
The next morning we were back on the road in slightly better conditions…
The back of the trailer sort of gives an indication of what we had traveled through…I don’t know why but I think we must have doubled back to Chetwynd and then headed to Dawson Creek (it would have been shorter to travel north to Hudson’s Hope but perhaps we wanted the ‘official’ start….regardless, we are now on the Alaska Highway as this is approaching the town of Taylor, B.C.
We’re now in Peace River Country. These overview pictures are taken from a large rest stop at the top of a very long, steep hill that winds down to the Peace River Bridge.
Just before you reach the bridge, there is a large park and campground, called Peace River Park….and since it was lunchtime, we pulled in there for a bit of a break. That is Ernie’s brother stretched out on a picnic table, catching a few ‘rays’.
In keeping with what I said in my initial post on this trip, it had been a very wet spring….and the Peace River was in full flood….this is just one little tributary of it…and a Canada Goose family at the edge.
here is another flooded section….you couldn’t get anywhere near the massive river itself….
This park was a very ‘birdy’ place and it was obviously encouraged as I’ve never seen so many bird houses of so many different designs! This one was certainly unique…
this one more conventional….there were bigger versions of this one as well – for owls I think….
on the way out I spotted this bird that was, at the time, new to me…an Eastern Phoebe…we were to see more of them on this trip and I’ve since seen them in northern Alberta as well.
the rest of that day was uneventful with us ending up at the Rotary RV. Park in Fort St. John, the same one we stayed at on our way home this past June. This is a view of part of the Duck’s Unlimited property between the RV Park and Charlie Lake.
Next morning we were back on the Alaska Highway heading to Fort Nelson. It is a run of about 300 km from Fort St. John to Fort Nelson and since you are still pretty much in the Peace Country, the road is pretty straight and reasonably flat…
this would have been looking back the way we’d come,
this just a general view of the country side…
and this looking at the road ahead from the rest area.
We stopped for lunch at Buckinghorse River, Wayside Park…
Where Ernie and his brother tried some fishing – to no avail….the mosquitoes here must not have been as bad as when Ernie and I stopped there on our way home last June….we didn’t even get out of the truck!
there is a look of the Buckinghorse River…wouldn’t you love to know where that name came from?
We arrived in Fort Nelson fairly early in the afternoon. The turn off from the Alaska Highway to Fort Laird in the N. W.T. is not too far past Fort Nelson so we wanted to start up it fresh, in the morning, so settled into the private RV Park there and watched it fill up with travelers as the afternoon progressed. I remember they had cable internet connections so my sister in law and I packed our lap tops over to the laundry to plug them into the cable….but the mosquitoes in the room were so thick we gave up!
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