The Okanagan Valley and Route 99

When Gareth had visited Canada with his family back in 2003, they had stayed with a very lovely family, “The Young Ones”, who had been friends of Gareth’s parents when they came over to teach in Canada for a year in the mid-80s. So it was only fitting for us to pop in and say hello. Jim and Erica Young live just outside a town called Vernon in the Okanagan Valley (a wine growing region of Canada) in a lovely Swiss chalet style house, which brought back a lot of memories for Gareth.

Jim had got a photo album out of the time that the Thomas’ came to visit and showed Claire all that they got up to. There was lots to talk about and the time passed very quickly, but not so quickly that we didn’t have enough time for Erica’s delicious Egg Pie – yum yum!

On the road again, heading west. It turns out central BC is absolutely beautiful! We couldn’t resist a photo stop at the picturesque Kamloops Lake, before entering the microclimate of the Fraser river area, a semi arid old Gold Rush country which has over 300 days without rain per year. We left the Trans Canada Highway and pulled onto Route 99 towards Whistler. It was an fantastic drive past mountains, lakes, Indian reserves and the impressive canyons of the Fraser river valley.

Our overnight stop was at Lilooet which sits on a shelf above the Fraser River canyon and is accessed from the East by a massive bridge spanning the river. It is a hot dry gold mining boom town, which also forms the headquarters for the St’at’imc (Lillooet Nation) and is one of the longest continuously inhabited settlements in North America (over 1000 years). That evening we decided to take a walk into town from our campsite on the Lower Shelf along the river. After walking along the river for a few hundred meters and coming across a few disturbed bushes and several piles of berry seed filled faeces, Gareth spotted what he though might have been a bear’s head poking out of a bush in the distance and got spooked. He got Claire’s attention and we reversed back down the path as quickly as we could! Potential bear attack averted! We then drove back up to the top part of town and Gareth consoled himself with and A & W Teen Burger and a root beer as he wondered whether he had just been seeing things.

We got up early the next morning and headed further along route 99 and back into the more temperate, wet climate that the rest of BC is known for. We stopped just outside of town to have a look out over Seton Lake, which was pretty in the early morning light and a good place to wake up with a coffee.

If it hadn’t been for the coffees we might have thought that we were seeing things, as down by the lake we heard and then saw a truck travelling along the railway tracks, attached to the rails with train wheels! Not sure how these work, but must be “a thing” in Canada.

Our first walk of the day was Joffre Lakes Provincial Park, a set of three lakes leading to a glacier that had been recommended to us by several people on our trip and was supposed to be a good place to stop and stretch the legs. We only had time to visit the first of the three lakes, but the colours of the lake were fantastic, even on the misty morning.

Our next stop was Whistler. As we were outside of the snowboarding season and Claire had been here before, we had not planned to stop for long before we had to leave to catch our ferry to Vancouver Island. That meant that we opted for two walks in the valley rather than heading up the gondolas (especially as the mountain tops were all covered in cloud). First up – a woodland walk to Rainbow Falls, a pretty little waterfall in a some hillside woods surrounded by mountain biking trails. We were very jealous of the biker that past us as it would have been an excellent place to play if we had a bit more time!

Our second walk was to a suspension bridge and train wreck site. In 1956 a speeding freight train came off the tracks, causing a delay of 3 days to one of the main routes through Canada (puts East Coast trainline delays into perspective!). The unsalvageable train carriages were cleared from the track, left scattered across a wood between the track and the river and have since become graffiti works of art and temporarily part of a mountain biking course.

We had a little bit too much fun exploring the colourful carriages and wandering around the wood, and after a brief drive though the Olympic village we were a little tight for time to get to our reserved Ferry crossing. It turns out that the Vancouver Island Ferry is very strict on time, and when they say be there 30 minutes to an hour before, they mean that if you arrive 25 minutes before they will have already given your space away to someone else! On the downside this meant a 2 hour 15 minute wait till the next Ferry. On the upside, this meant Fish and Chips!