Northern Exposure II
^{Towards Alaska, 2005}

Thursday 29 September 2005 - CLOSING THE LOOP!
_{Francois Lake west back to Burns Lake BC}

MORNING: Just a couple weeks until Canadian Thanksgiving, 10 October 2005. We can do two THX holidays this year, eh? Maybe with the famous traditional seven-course Canadian Thanksgiving dinner: a turkeyburger and a six-pack of Molson beer. Ha ha. No, that'll have to be a salmonburger. Or mooseburger. Or muskoxburger. Whatever.

The propane is gone so it's back to Burns Lake, for laundry and water and internet and showers and fuel. We're leaking in a couple places inside and out, so we're plotting on which route to take homewards, and we're tending towards a dry alternative. Had about enough of rain forests, we have. Did I mention that it's rained nearly every day we've been in Canada? It has. We're looking forward to Bisbee sunshine.

LATER: We strolled the camp area, past the site of an old trading post with only a concrete chimney remaining. (Someone posted a notice that they're trying to organize a HERITAGE TRAIL designation for the site and its links, but it's dated from three years ago.) So we strolled; then we rolled around the west end of Francois Lake and into a road crew at work smoothing and tamping down ten kilometers of mud.

The flagman was a short fellow, dressed in typical north woods wear: heavy boots, dungarees, a plaid trapper's jacket, safety vest, ballcap, bushy beard, and mud. We chatted a bit.

"Are you hunting or fishing?" he asked. "Most people passing through here are loaded with armaments."

I said, "No, we just shoot cameras."

He said, "The animals probably appreciate that. Me, I take the odd black bear or two, but only those with attitude."

Maureen said, "We always wear our bright coats when we go walking in the woods."

He said, "Good idea, so do I. And then as soon as I get out there the squirrels see me and start yelling at me."

I thought, "It's a good thing the squirrels aren't armed."

And that inspires the scenarios for a series of five- or ten-second movies. First clip: Squirrel sits in tree. Hunter approaches, lifts rifle, aims at the squirrel, fires, misses. Squirrel pulls out a small rifle, shoots the hunter. Second clip: Both hunter and squirrel have guns that fire BANG! flags. Third clip: Both hunter and squirrel have squirt guns, get soaked. Fourth clip: The hunter has the BANG! flag gun, the squirrel has the loaded rifle. Bang. Call the sequence KNOW YOUR PREY.

And then I get an idea for a little animated endless loop. A fish is in the water. Camera moves back, fish gets smaller. A bigger fish comes up, swallows the first fish, smirks. Camera moves back fish gets smaller. A bigger fish comes up and swallows, ad infinitum. Endless loop. But I fear this animation has already been done. I am just so OUT OF TOUCH with modern visual art. Bother.

AFTERNOON: We wind back into Burns Lake, reload with fluids and solids, patronize a HORRIBLY EXPENSIVE laundromat, can't renew the WiFi link, and head back to the free municipal campground. We have to get away from here tomorrow. But now we perch on the lake next to a road bridge, headlights and streetlights reflecting off the shimmering water as darkness falls. The transcontinental rail tracks are off by the highway; a few trains go by, without blowing horns. No airplanes. No spaceships.

Much of the public recreation infrastructure here was provided by the Rotary Club — the park playground and skateboard park, the ballfield, the RV sani facility. We've seen that in other BC towns, support from the nonprofits rather than the rather expensive provincial government. What do taxes pay for here, besides universal healthcare? But I won't dig too far into the political and governmental games here, because I just don't care enough. To afford living in BC, you need a grant.

Friday 30 September 2005 - LAKES AND OUT!
_{Burns Lake to around Bednesti Lake BC}

NOONISH: After dawdling a bit, we finally escape from Burns Lake. We drive through the usual rain and the usual woods and the usual bumpy hills with the usual lakes. After a couple hours, after passing Fraser (Lake and Fort) we drop out of the hills, the terrain flattens, distant mountains go away. Hills are low and rolling, horizons are flatter, the sky has grown; it's almost (but not quite) prairie-ish again. This looks like almost any Eastern North American autumn rural scene with farms, cattle, villages amidst the hardwoods. We do not have much variety of scenery to look forward to for awhile, I fear. But it can't be as bad as crossing Kansas.

LATER: Then around Vanderhoof for lunch and info and misinfo but we head off in the right direction (east) and eventually find a trail leading to an adequate squat-camp site, hidden in the poplars, somewhere above a pond that's for sale. Clouds and rain are thinner, the setting sun turns the forest gold around us, and otherwise there ain't much to say about today. It was short, we didn't see or do much, we didn't go far.

PLANS: We've decided upon a route: south from Prince George to Cache Creek to Hope (east of Vancouver), east to Osoyoos (south of Kamloops and Kelowna), then cross into the US and head for Wenatchee, Wash­ington. That's the current fantasy, assuming the tires hold out. And the reality? We'll see. I've been looking at some journal notes from almost 30 years ago; I sketched out many plans; I observed in 1976 that my plans usually crap out. I guess my planning is flawed, eh?

Saturday 1 October 2005 - CRAWLING BC AGAIN!
_{around Bednesti Lake to around Blue Lake / Soda Creek BC}

MORNING: We escape our claustrophobic squat-camp unscathed. We do not sink into murky mud pits. We do not roll into the hungry hardwoods. Neither forest creatures nor swamp creatures scurry off with us. WE'RE ALIVE! ALIVE, I TELL YOU!

We switch the radio on to CBC, hear an old show about the book THE 100 GREATEST MOVIES YOU'VE NEVER SEEN including GINGERSNAPS (a girl turns into a werewolf) and THE GREAT ROCK'N'ROLL SWINDLE aka WHO KILLED BAMBI? (by Roger Ebert and Russ Meyers et al) and THE TWO-FAMILY HOUSE (a guy wants his own bar-lounge to sing in).

Then we hear of a performance in Halberstadt, Germany that is due to last 640 years, a John Cage piece called AS LONG AS POSSIBLE. Actually it could go on even longer — one of the four movements may be repeated if the organ still works then. Then we hear about Bjork and a cute Inuit throat-singer. And this is how we stay in touch with world culture.

NOONISH: We scoot around Prince George, fifth-largest city in Brutish Columbia, but see only the outskirts. Why roll the RV through the heart of the beast? We head south, bidding farewell to tall mountains for the foreseeable future. Prince George claims to be in the geographic center of the province, as do several towns just north of here, but who cares?

The Cariboo Highway occasionally runs beside the mighty Fraser River, but mostly not. Otherwise the countryside looks about as it has. Zillions of lakes around here and northward, so this is a fine place for fishing (get a license). And most communities boast one or more golf courses. Yes, this is wonderful country for those trying to outsmart fish and golf balls.

We stop at a forest overlook for lunch. A sign informs us of a *massive* infestation of softwood forests, maybe 1/4 of the province (BC is roughly twice the size of California — do the math). Mountain pine beetles, their spread promoted by global warming, are decimating the lodgepole pines and ruining the livelihoods of tens of thousands of humans. See BcForestInformation.Com for more info.

On the radio, a program about language. Hey, THOSE FRENCH HAVE A DIFFERENT WORD FOR EVERYTHING! For surreal poetry, take song lyrics (in English), use Google to translate them into some arbitrary language, then back into English. See CBC: Lost In Translation. And CBC/DNTO. (These are just notes to myself — you can ignore them if you want.)

QUESNEL: In Quesnel (kwa-NELL) we find a free WiFi hotspot next to a Best Western motel — are others so equipped? We spend a couple hours communicating, then leave without even being asked! We're caught in an undesired bridge lane in under construction, swirl about in ravenous traffic, then escape south. The sun is low, still a few hours from setting but casting a golden glow onto the already-golden and mixed-color forest. We have more of the usual pretty countryside, a few taller hills off in the distance but nothing craggy or mountainous or snow-capped. Boring. Nice farms. Nice railroad. Pretty. Yawn.

Quesnel is a moderately largish lumber-mill town with that distinctive lumber-mill odor, somewhat like cat piss. This is the heart of liver or kidney or something of the Cariboo region, its history dominated by one Billy Barker, some lucky bastard of a prospector who made a gold strike. Now fairs, cafes, stores and a casino bear his name. That's one form of immortality. I think Woody Allen said, "I don't want to be immortal by being known for my work. I want to be immortal by not dying."

Back in Houston BC is a statue of the world's largest fishing rod. Quesnel boasts the world's largest gold pan. But nothing quite matches Wawa, Ontario and the world's largest goose. See NorthCariboo.Com for more local boostering.

Seeing the same forest over hundreds of miles and many days becomes tedious. Nice pretty farmland becomes tedious. Perhaps you have some favorite farmscapes upon which you can gaze for extended periods after traveling vast distances to reach. Perhaps. But I find central BC to be not nearly as interesting as, say, the Mexican plantations of maguey agave for pulque and tequila, or the cactus-tree gardens and orchards, or cornfields in Central America that twist up rugged tortured hillsides. Those are interesting, and all this is ho-hum.

EVENING: Available maps are inadequate. There was a detail map of the North Cariboo but it went out of print in 1997, we're told. So we peered at what we could, brailled our way along, and turned off near Soda Creek towards Blue Lake, where two forestry recreation sites could supposedly be found. Ha ha. A scummy little private campground and many miles of cow pastures, the cattle just barely tolerating our bulky presence.

And the hunters. ATVs loaded with guys with guns; shots in the distance; a cold wind coming up. Don't walk around in the woods, and be sure to moo, not snort. But a pickup-load of hunters drove off, leaving us an open space to park for the night. At least we don't have to worry about bears here. Probably.

Oh crap. My camera just died, my beloved Sony DSC-V1 (which cost about US$800 a couple years ago). Despite it's previous injury and factory repair, it just stopped functioning. The other fancy 5 megapixel Sony, the DSC-P10, sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Most of our Sony gear keeps working. This is most distressing. Oh crap.

 Snow on the level, three feet deep,
 Oh, Lord! How the wind is blowing!
 We've eaten our caps and suspender straps,
 And damned if it still ain't snowing.
 -
 We made a mulligan stew today,
 Of a candle, some soap, and a wisp of hay
 Some small pine blocks, a pair of socks,
 A wood rat's nest and a couple of rocks.
 -
 Tomorrow morn at the peep of dawn
 We're going to leave this shack,
 A trail to seek o'er mountain peak,
 Adios! If we don't come back.
 -
 And in the spring when all nature sings,
 Should you chance on this trail to come back
 If you find a couple of skeleton things,
 You'll know it's just me and Jack.

  -- unknown trapper, Canadian Rockies

Sunday 2 October 2005 - INTO THE WILD WEST!
_{from around Soda Creek to past Cache Creek BC}

MORNING: We leave our isolated hunting camp early; it was COLD last night and this morning. We roll beside or beyond the mighty Fraser River (later the mighty Thompson River). Sometimes the canyon is steeper, sometimes shallower, but mainly it looks pretty much the same: rolling hills, colored hardwoods tattered with conifers, scattered farmsteads with buildings painted red or white, etc. It's cold, the hillsides are frosty, and some of the animals out there on the frozen grass don't look too happy. Hey, cheer up! It's not even winter yet!

The Cariboo Highway occasionally runs right through bogs and ponds. It's been foggy and frigid for 100 miles now. Now we are in search of sun. Our journey cycles around, from escaping the heat to escaping the cold -- what can we escape next? Fens, bogs, muskeg, autumnal northwestern forest again, all lost in the mist, not even covered in a tasteful coating of snow. But we do see dirty snow traces by the roadside, at the forest edge. Without CBC to toast our minds, this would be dreadful.

NOONISH: The sun peeps out; we stop in Clinton, stroll around town. There's little to say about Clinton BC, the Gateway to the Cariboo, set up to take some money from tourists but not too much, not too many. The Budget Food store smells suspiciously of leaking propane. We leave quickly and move away, not wanting to be caught in the upcoming explosion. Why does the dispirited-looking Chinese proprietor stay? Maureen suggests he's waiting for it to blow up so he can collect the insurance and move to Vancouver.

There are pottery shops here. The pottery looks like pottery anywhere north of Mexico. There are gift shops here. Ditto. And junque-antique shops. Ditto. All with prices aimed at prosperous Vancouver vacationers. Imagine that.

AFTERNOON: Southwards, we're heading towards Cache Creek BC where the tour guides show that the highway starts to get scenic. We see that the river has carved a steep canyon. Yup, scenery. Ah, the village of Cache Creek has a Wild West look, like High Plains Drifter country, pre-winter. Still pretty chilly here. Hillsides are much denuded; have been for a ways. Sign on an eatery says: PROBABLY THE BEST BREAKFAST. And we wonder how probable that is?

Just beyond Cache Creek we're in black sage country, high-desert habitat — we could be somewhere uphill from Mono Lake. And a few miles further, where the black sage meets the pines, we find a side road crawling up the canyon side to a high overlook with a wide spot and very little traffic. So here we are for the night. No iguanas, no gila monsters, no scorpions, just the wind and the sage and some scattered trees and the fence line. What more could we need?

EVENING: It's drier here. There's less condensation inside the RV. We're starting to get moldy, soggy. Did I mention this already? I think of the RV as being rather like a boat, but drier. Not much drier, not in BC. Glug.

Oh damn, I've written a few more scuzzy Travel Guides: TRAVEL AS PERFORMANCE ART & TRAVEL AS POLITICAL THEATRE & DON'T JUST TRAVEL - MIGRATE! & MEDICAL-SURGICAL VACATIONS & ZEN TRAVEL and DADA TRAVEL & TRAVEL SOUVENIRS & STALKING THE WILD ECO-TOURIST. Will I never stop? And I got a fan letter re: my old THEOPOLY game design, so I tarted that up a bit. Enjoy and learn.

Monday 3 October 2005 - NOT CACHE CREEK BC
_{Somewhere in the Kamloops Desert region}

I apologize for what I said about outsmarting fish. Some fish are very smart, especially the ones that get away. But I stand by my comment about outsmarting golf balls. Most golf balls are no smarter than you.

Meanwhile, it's a lazy day at the edge of the Kamloops Desert. Lay around, walk up the ridge, write a couple more Travel Guides: TRAVEL ATTITUDES: The 7 Deadly Sins In Travel & WHEN & WHERE NOT TO CAMP, not to mention entering all the previous day's writings. Whew.

Tuesday 4 October 2005 - DOWN THE CANYONS!
_{Venables Ridge to Scuzzy Creek BC}

We rolled up out of our layabout-day roadside squat-camp at the cismontane edge of the Kamloops Desert south of Cache Creek. We thought, "Let's drive up this side road, see if any recreation possibilities lie ahead." We went a couple miles through this high desert with wonderful views down the steep Thompson River canyon below us. We reached a fence marked PRIVATE PROPERTY - NO HUNTING OR SHOOTING (but not KEEP OUT) and a big sign announcing Saranâgati Village. It's a Hare Krishna encampment or hamlet.

"You never know what you'll find when you go wandering these side roads, eh?" says Maureen. (Let's be PC and refer to them by their preferred acronym, ISKCON: International Society for Krishna Consciousness.)

If we weren't out of water, potatoes and eggs, we just might hang around in the vicinity another day or two. But the road beckons onwards. Back at the highway we see the street sign: we've been on Venables Road, leading to Venables Lake, so we'll call our campsite Venables Ridge. Logical, eh?

I should note that some little traffic flowed along Venables Road, enough to make us think that 1) one or more residences existed beyond our campsite, as the same (mostly red) cars passed in both directions several times, and 2) one or more recreation sites were also located yonder, as a couple camper-trucks and boat-haulers went by. Were the latter Hare Krishna, er ISKCON vacationers?

Maureen suggests that the recreational vehicles crossed the ISKCON property to get to some further lakeside destination(s) on Crown land. That's possible. I didn't feel like wandering around the property to ask. But who knows, we might have been invited to stay for tofu and brown rice? [Maureen laughs.]

We stop for a few minutes in the village of Lytton, at the confluence of the mighty Thompson and Fraser rivers, where they seethe and mix their different silt loads. We see the turbulence of two waters of very different texture roiling together, looking through the clarity of the Thompson into the dragon-breath murk of the Fraser. Lytton exalts its Gold Rush past, set in a spectacular deep-valley location at the desert's edge with snowy peaks above; but it's right on the old transcontinental highway and rail lines so it's somewhat noisy. Most through road traffic takes a shorter cutoff but all the trains come RIGHT HERE, the CP line on one riverbank, the CN on the other. A great place for trainspotters; we aren't tempted to rent a cabin.

The Lytton InfoCenter gal tells us that residents of the ISKCON village are considered by locals to be good neighbors, participating in canyon-area community events. She says that one member runs a vegetarian (of course) restaurant serving good food in the nearby village of Ashcroft, just below Cache Creek. And I wonder: how many vegetarian eateries around the country and continent and world are ISKCON fronts?

We travel a bit further south through this sheer Fraser River canyon that saw a great gold rush around 1858, stopping at precipices to peer up and down the gorge. And at Boston Bar we see a tempting sign that leads us on a forestry road west into the mountains to a quiet rocky turnoff overlooking Scuzzy Creek. The usual views: big valley, a snowy Matter­horn-type peak, ridges carpeted with tall pines and firs, the road gouged out of the steep slopes, yada yada. The train sounds are muted and occasional. Here we are for the night.

Today I only write one more Travel Guide: TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY — but it's a good one.

Wednesday 5 October 2005 - TOWARDS THE BORDER!
_{Scuzzy Creek to Manning Provincial Park, BC}

NOONISH: We roll down from our aerie overlooking Scuzzy Creek, down precipitous near-suicidal dirt-road grades, somehow safely back to Boston Bar and the old TransCanadian Highway and south along the knife-cut Fraser River canyon to Hell's Gate, a narrow gap, 120 wide, 140 feet high in that bottom block, where a flow greater than Niagara Falls churns and tears and roars, gushing GOOSH!! [I make gushing sound with lips — pretty pathetic.] And there's a little theme-park sort of ride, the AirTram. You get to spend $14 per person to ride 1000 feet down to a viewpoint dominated by cheezy shops. So that's the cost of admission to the shopping area. Right.

The highway cuts through a series of tunnels and passes the ELVIS ROCKS THE CANYON CAFE, with a larger-than-life plastic Elvis out front. Is this sort of thing traditional around here? [Maureen laughs wildly.] The highway roller-coasters up and down the near-vertical canyon wall. My heart's in my throat. GGGRGH!! [I make a throttled gagging-gurgling sound — also pretty pathetic.]

And then we pass beautiful downtown Spuzzum. I ask Maureen if she wanted to get Spuzzomed. She says, "Don't you dare!"

AFTERNOON: A bit further down the canyon, past Yale (the gold-rush jumping-off point and the first incorporated community on the mainland of BC), we finally enter the Hope District. The canyon becomes both deeper and wider. We see some imposing ice-encrusted sawtooth and molar-tooth mountains protruding into the tattered sky. The town of Hope is a nexus of civilization — all roads lead to Hope, from Vancouver and the North and the East. Small and tidy. And a free WifFi hotspot! Time to do some more communication...

You've probably seen Hope and the surrounding mountains and woods and rivers. This is where RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD was filmed, where John Rambo blew up various buildings and crawled cliffs and forests and all like that. The town is still standing. All you Stallone-Rambo freaks need to make a pilgrimage here, right? The local mountains also served as stand-ins for the Himalayas in the film K2 — or was that ANNAPURNA? Whatever. Numerous other rugged productions were made here.

Did I mention that Hope is a chainsaw carving capitol? Well, it is. A real whirlpool of art, here. And that woman at the InfoCenter back in Lytton LIED TO US! Gas IS cheaper here than there! Curses upon her! Five cents a liter, that's about 20 cents a gallon — when taking on 100 liters, it adds up fast.

At the local grocery, I'm reminded that cornmeal (maize flour) is almost unavailable in Canada, at least that we've seen. Many other flours are on the shelves: wheats, barley, rye, rice, oat, potato, all sorts of flour, but no maize. Maureen's going into cornbread withdrawal. Hopefully she can get a fix once we cross the border.

EVENING: East from Hope we climb into the Cascade Mountains. Just across the border is North Cascades National Park, Washington. We pass great rockslides on these unstable slopes. At one point a mountain broke in 1965, casting zillions of tons of rock down, obliterating the highway and some people, filling a valley and lake. The scar is quite visible, as are the huge debris piles. We then enter Manning Park; most of its facilities are closed for the season. We cross autumnal beauteous Allison Pass and find one open campground, on the Similkameen River, and here we give up. We've only come a little over 100 miles in two days -- seems like more. We're not driving far, just deep. The river burbles by below our bumper. Squirrels skitter sinuously in the shadows. I'd better stop now.

But wait, there's more! The forested slopes are visibly devastated by infestation. In the evergreens are swathes of red, signs that pine beetles have killed the lodgepoles. This color ain't pretty, folks. OK, over and out.

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