Day 100: Road trip

We just spent three full days in Wells Gray Provincial Park in central British Columbia. I'll get round to putting up photos from the other days soon enough, but for now here's a photo from the early part of the drive. I took it in slow traffic as we crossed the Fraser River on the Alex Fraser (no relation) bridge. From there we headed east through Surrey until we joined the queues on Highway 1. Actually the road wasn't too bad with just a couple of slowdowns near Abbotsford. Our journey was made much easier by the fact the mudslide of the day before had been cleared already (a big thank you to the highway cleanup crews!).

We stopped briefly in Hope before heading up through the Coquihalla region under grey skies. By now the traffic was light and we made good time to our next stop for petrol in Kamloops, about five hours after we'd left Vancouver. However, the weather was beginning to turn against us and we continued north through several heavy showers. The North Thompson River was high, and looked like it was ready to flood the road if any more rain fell. The only upside was that Maria spotted a bedraggled bear wending its way up the hillside.

Another hour-and-a-half later, we reached Clearwater just as night was truly falling. We turned off Highway 5 and headed into the darkness of Wells Gray provincial park (where Maria spotted another bear!). We passed through a few more showers but they eased off by the time we left the tarmac behind, finishing the journey with about 20 km of good dirt road. We startled a third bear at the roadside (this time we all saw it), causing it to lollop into the undergrowth as we sped along a straight section of muddy gravel road. Finally, at 10:30 pm we reached the campground, found our camp site and set about pitching our tents. Within an hour we were all curled up in our sleeping bags.

On the road