With travel dollar reductions I decided to leave dollars on the table for the rest of my team and swap the flight and daily per diems for a government vehicle and groceries. Yes, it meant 13 hours in the car, but it was a nice chunk of time to spend thinking and enjoying the BC landscapes.
I have driven the road between Vancouver and Williams Lake more times than I can count, but Highway 20, from William’s Lake out to the Central Coast is not one that I have fully driven. I’ve driven between William’s Lake to Alexis Creek, and I’ve been on a little bus between the airport at Hagensborg and the Anamin Lake airport far too many times because of poor visibility for landings in the Valley.
But I’ve only driven The Hill once, in 2008, when I came in on contract to do some work with the hatchery. And even then I didn’t do the drive all the way to Anaheim Lake. I’d flown in, had a vehicle booked through the lodge I was staying at, and signed a document that said I’d not take it out of the Valley or off the pavement.
So I immediately drove up The Hill.
That was at the height of the beetle kill. The following year everything burned. And the two years after that saw back to back 200 year flood events. I started coming in annually the year after the second flood events nd I’ve only missed one year since, because of COVID.
Will travel dollars so drastically cut and my feeling overwhelming guilt if I use any at the expense of those I work with, I gratefully borrowed a vehicle from the hatchery I work out of and drove 1000km instead. I figured on 12 hours, give or take, and intended to stop as frequently as there were interesting things to stop for. I’m guilty of driving A to B and not pausing as often as I should. So the camera was on the seat next to me to try to encourage pauses.
I wanted to navigate The Hill in the daylight, and not knowing how frequently I’d stop in between, I opted to get out of Vancouver as early as possible. I intended on 4:30am, but it ended up being 5am. Traffic was moderate on. the freeway, and everything was fine until the 264th exit near Langley, where red and blue lights blocked the highway and were diverting traffic onto the offramp. The onramp was blocked with police tape, and another police vehicle sat at the entrance. Four other police vehicles were stopped in one of the eastbound freeway lanes, pointing the wrong way, and a large cube van was behind them. With that many vehicles and a total freeway blockage, it had to have been bad. Turns out that there was a fatal accident late int he evening the night before; the highway didn’t reopen until some time after 9am, so I was glad to have been through there at around 6am when traffic was light in the area and the backup was minimal. But it did divert me onto the Fraser Highway, which was then blocked off at Aldergrove because of a car show (I came to that conclusion given the vintage trucks ahead and behind me that peeled off on a side street. When I took a corner and looked back into the town centre I could see cars settling in in the darkness of the early morning.
Eventually I made it back to the freeway, which was much emptier the further I left the Lower Mainland behind. But it’s still construction season, and the highway is still being rebuilt in places after the insane damage sustained in the insanely devastating event in 2021. The highway along the Fraser River near Spences Bridge still has single lane alternating traffic and complete 15-20 closures as they repair, rebuild, and reinforce.
I pulled to the side of the road by an old building that holds some memories of road trips between Prince George and summers in Salmon Arm. Between Cache Creek and Clinton is a crumbling building (51.063026, -121.566544) that housed a strange museum that had a terrible statue of a sidehill gouger out front next to a big waterwheel, and contained odd things like a stuffed two headed calf and a two headed snake. I have an old black and white photo of myself, about four years old, standing next to the sidehill gouger. It was one of those places that were holdovers from the weird roadside attractions of the 50’s-70’s that have disappeared from the landscape.
An early lunch, or perhaps a late breakfast, warranted a sunny stop at the Big Bar rest area above Clinton. I always seem able to grab a picnic table and enjoy some sunshine for a look out across the landscape. From here the world feels flatter because the road is on a plateau.
Lac la Hache is a surprisingly big lake and I have another vague memory of camping here…or at least swimming at a beach. My family was not one for private campgrounds, opting instead for free forestry campgrounds or inexpensive provincial ones. I’d always blown through the area, but always also taking a sideways glance at a provincial park sign and wondering if that was the place. Today I decided to stop for a stretch and made the turn off the highway. On the right is the campground, to the left, not eh lake, is the beach, boat launch, and day use area. There was a little swimming area, and it had a familiar feel to it. So perhaps. Did we camp there? Seems unlikely we’d camp when Salmon Arm isn’t that far, and Dad wasn’t really known for not going as far as possible in a day, so maybe we’d just stopped for a break at Mom’s insistence?
I love all the old buildings along the highway, but there are fewer standing every year. A couple I’d remembered are missing. Subject to weather, time, or perhaps fires. They have looked tired my whole life driving through the Cariboo…now I’m tired and they look exhausted.
Once through William’s Lake I filled the anxiety inducingly small gas tank in the Outlander and headed West and up into the Chilcotin. It was hot. The Canyon had been around 14C, the Chilcotin plateau was 30C. The rolling hills parched and dry.
An unexpected couple of traffic jams along the way made me smile. There was evidence on the road ahead of time, so I wasn’t caught off guard. I’d encountered a deer earlier, and the thing I always prefer about encountering cattle not he road is that, though slow, they are predictable. They don’t dart out the way deer do. They just amble along, unconcerned about the world around them. If they even look up from what they are doing at the side of the road, it would often only be if you stopped.
I stopped at a little lake along the way, a rest stop to the side of the road when it turned to gravel at Anahim. I was absolutely astounded to find an EV charging station between Anaheim Lake and Atnarko, at the edge of a little tiny lake. As I stood there enjoying the silence, the silence was broken by a rustle in the little copse of poplar trees between me and the road. I turned to see one of the trees bend and decided getting back into he car was a good idea. I couldn’t see into the hollow around the tree, but I was very much alone out here and there wasn’t a lot of traffic. As I drove out I tried to peer into the trees but I couldn’t see an animal. What I did see was quite a number of trees fallen….neatly chewed off at the base. Seems a beaver being busy was what had startled me.
The colours of fall int he Chilcotin are vibrant golds, deep purples, bright greens…..and charred black sticks like hairs standing up on one’s arms. So much of the forest I’ve passed on this drive are blackened by forest fires in recent years.
The road to this point is easy, as easy as a gravel highway ever is. It’s 450km from Williams’ Lake to Bella Coola, about 60km of that is gravel. Some controlled sliding in the corners with loose gravel, some potholes, some washboards. But nothing that isn’t normal if you drive logging roads in BC.
What’s not terribly normal is the 11km section of highway from the top of The Hill down to the valley below. In places it’s a 14% grade with hairpin switchbacks. If you’re afraid of heights, a nervous driver, or both, this really isn’t a road for you. From the viewpoint at the gate you can see part of the road in the distance. That part is no big deal. Someone posted on a blog earlier this year and they found some good shots of the switchbacks from a helicopter or a drone. (https://hikebiketravel.com/surviving-eleven-kilometers-terror/) Personally I don’t find the Hill terrifying, I thought it was a fun and interesting drive.
About 5km down the Hill I encountered a road block. A very little black bear, very little. He didn’t seem too concerned with my presence, acted more like a city bear than a forest bear. When my car slowly rolling towards him eventually edged him off the middle of the road, he studied me as I passed by.
Ahh, but a little further down the road I saw something, briefly, oh so briefly, that I had always wanted to see. Mountain goats. Three of them at the wall side of the road as I came around a corner, another car coming up…we both stopped and they bolted across and over the edge of the cliff in a flash. I barely got my camera up before they were gone and if the lens cap had been on, I wouldn’t have even got this. That was a highlight of the drive in.
I paused at one of the last pullouts before reaching the bottom, I could see the Atnarko River below so I knew it was just another corner or two before I reached the pavement at the spot where the tote road goes into the Upper Atnarko. Looking back, the “highway” amuses me. This crazy track of dirt and gravel, scaling a seemingly insurmountable obstacle connecting the Valley to the rest of the province, in places (like this) only wide enough for one vehicle, in other places with a 14% grade, seemed shorter than I’d expected it to. It only took me about 25 minutes to descend to the bottom and, since I’d dropped the car into a low gear to avoid braking too much, I’d charged the battery on the hybrid up to 22km use during the descent!
And then I was on the pavement and back on familiar ground for the drive tot he hatchery where I unloaded, unpacked, and enjoyed a glass of wine and some dinner. 13 hour total, I’d thought it would take 12 hours, but I’d not counted not eh highway closure and the construction. And I drove a stretch of highway I’d not entirely driven before. And I have a day to chill before a week of work. I’ll call the trip in a win.