For all of the teachers Cariboo is not a misspelling of Caribou, it is a region in the interior of British Colombia that experienced a gold rush in the late 1860’s. Highway 97 follows the route of the prospectors into the interior of the province.
Wednesday, May 6
The temperature when we left Kelowna this morning was about 13C. by time we climbed over the Pennask Summit we saw the temperature drop to 2C and we had some snow flurries. (Really should have gone south!) There is still considerable snow in the forests.
BC road engineers are a practical group, rather than build a road through a mountain pass they go over the summit. I suppose they figure the shortest distance between two points is a straight road vertically up a mountain.
We came over the summit and into Merritt, BC where we took a back road, Hwy 8, that followed the Nicola River. Scenic but a little rough, we only averaged about 50 Km/hour.
We joined into Hwy 97 North at a place called Spence's Bridge. The road was much better as the southern portion is part of the Trans Canada highway up to Cache Creek. We passed through a number of old stage coach stations referred to as “Houses” and designated with the mileage i.e.. 70 Mile House, 100 Mile House, etc. This is mostly an arid, irrigated farming area with rolling hills. There was a minor forest fire around 70 Mile House that had just been extinguished the day before we arrived; we could still smell the odour of smoke as we drove through the area. We stopped at the Williams Lake Visitor Centre, a huge wood timber structure, that is just beautiful. It was getting late in the day so we decided to stay here for the night.
No comments:
Post a Comment