Calvin's Weblog

Northern Roadtrip part 2

Okay - so where'd I leave off? Soemwhere around Fort St. John, right?
Well, I had mentioned that we wanted to do a big figure eight, but on wrong turn in our first 2 kilometers set us into an entirely different path - oh, we still saw all the places we wanted to see, but the path was more of a big "G" than an "8". From Dawson Creek, we ended up on the Alaska Highway which took us straight to Ft. St. John. That where I got my picture with the big metal bear.
As it turns out, Ft. St. John is the most north I've ever been. It beats Hyder Alaska by about a half hour of driving straight north.

From Ft. St. John we headed out to the south west, next stop Hudson Hope, however, this particular stretch of road through the Peace River Valley was (other than the Rockies trench, of course) the most scenic and amazing landscape of the whole trip - unfortunately, the photos just don't do it justice...
Picture this though... you're sriving through the flat prairies forever, with nothing ahead of you but more flatness. As far as you can see to the Horizon, it's flat. And this is looking WEST mind you. Then, all of a sudden, you come to a Valley - a MASSIVE valley - far below you. You never saw it on the horizon because it's below the grond level, but it's MASSIVE beyond scale - almost like a prairie grand canyon. And down below, as you look down from the plateau, are all the mountains. You slowly wind your way down, down, down, out of the prairies - and find yourself back in what we southerners know as "British Columbia". And as you look around at all of the mountains that now surround you, you recall that at the top of the verry tallest one, is the prairies. Until that day, I never realized how high the prairies were.
There's no way, really to show what I'm talking about in pictures, but I'll try...
Here's the first point where we came to the end, and got the first glimpse of the valley:

This picture is blurry because my digital camera is on maximum zoom... and you STILL can't even grasp how big this valley is...
After driving another 10 minutes down into the valley I stopped to take this next picture, to show that I'm still not even half way, but again, the scale really can't be seen...

Oh well, NEXT time I'm there, I'll bring a really good camera with a telephoto lens.

After winding down into the Peace River Valley, we finally came out at Hudson Hope. Photo Op! There's nothing like a really big tire to make ya wanna have your picture taken...

So now, we're only 33 kilometers from the W.A.C Bennett Dam. How cool is that? I get to see (and drive over) one of the largest dams in the world, which happens to be at the mouth of the largest lake (Wiliston Lake) in British Columbia, and the largest 'man made' lake in Canada.
Here's my brother walking down to get a better view of the dam:

And here's a look fr om the other side of it:

Now this time, I was a little smarter at trying to represent the scale in a picture... to appreciate how huge this damn is, check out the picture below:

Ther eare two things to notice in this picture - the first is the blue-gray stuff in the far background, very middle of the top third of the picture - that's one of the the largest hydro stations in the world. The second thing to look for is the tiny black dot that's JUST to the right of the very middle of the picture. That's a huge tunnell that we saw construction trucks driving into. Ther eare also buildings down there at the mouth of the greet water, and about 30 vehicles parked in the parking lot. Want proof? Check this out... first the blue grey field- see the control tower? It has three levels of offices at the top of it:

And then the tunnel -

See the buildings? They're like airplane hangar size, as you can probably deduce from the comparative size of the dumptruck that's just heading onto the bridge at the right of the photo. Now go back to the first picture and checkout the size of that 'dot' tunnel again... pretty big frikken damn, eh???

Okay - so we're done with the dam and off to Chetwynd, then Tumbler Ridge. But that'll have to be tomorrow...

Posted by Calvin at October 18, 2004 06:35 PM