Day 58: Boya Lake to Stewart

Today was a good day, although it involved a lot of driving.  We continued along the Cassiar Highway, with the first part of the day through the Cassiar Mountains on fair, but occasionally rough, road.  It continued to be narrow, without lane lines for about half the way. (We had been told that the road improved as one travels south, and so it did, so that by the time we turned onto the road to Stewart, it was a normal, two-lane paved road with shoulders.)  We stopped for diesel in Dease Lake, where there was a notice on the door that the next diesel stop about 150 miles down the road had a broken pump, so one could not refill there.  That left us in a dilemma: we had not planned to take the forty-mile side trip to Stewart, but we probably did not have enough diesel to get us to the gas station at the end of the Cassiar.  So we decided that the trip to Stewart was in order, partly as a fuel stop and partly so that we could stay at an RV park with electricity, Wi-fi and showers. 

As it turned out, we were able to top off the tank at the place that was supposed to have the broken pump, but by then we were sold on the idea of a hot shower.  So we are now at Bear River RV Park in Stewart.  Stewart is right on the border, with Stewart in British Columbia while neighboring town Hyder, just two miles farther down the road, is in the US.  It is on the Portland Canal, a body of water that connects ultimately into the Gulf of Alaska.  Both towns are very small, Stewart about 700 and Hyder about 100, and neither looks to be very prosperous. 

One tourist attraction here is the USFS Fish Creek Wildlife Observation Site, a sort of walled boardwalk in which people watch bears fish for salmon.  The couple we met at the last campground from Alabama, Molly and Larry, happened to be at this campground as well, and they invited us to ride up with them this evening to look for bears.  For the first 20 or 30 minutes, we saw hundreds of salmon swimming upstream, but no bears.  Then finally-----a grizzly bear!  We were able to watch him work his way up toward the observation deck, try to get a fish, eat part of an already-dead one, and munch on vegetation along the creek.   Although we had seen several black bears along the way, including one today along the highway, we had not seen any grizzlies, so this was a real treat. 

Between morning and late afternoon, we passed into a different zone for vegetation, and this part of the BC is considerably prettier and lusher.  The guide said that we passed from a northern boreal zone with many black spruce (which we’d been driving past for weeks) into a cedar-hemlock forest, with dry summers and cool wet winters, a bit like northern California.  It is a welcome change.

The weather is also changing----today felt almost hot---as well as the season.  The fireweed along the road are almost done blooming, and there are patches of yellow leaves on a number of the deciduous trees.  Autumn is definitely on its way.  (A tour guide at Denali said that up there, once the fireweed are done, they count forward six weeks until the first expected snow!)  We will be working our way south through the rest of British Columbia in the next week or so, on our way to Washington.