It was a rainy day today. We left Prophet River and headed north on the Alaska Highway. The first stop was at the Fort Nelson, B. C. Heritage Museum. It is a very unique place. The entrance gives you an idea of what is to come. The door mat is all colors of pansies planted under the grate.
Inside there a myriad of items. There are things from the beginnings of Fort Nelson, when it was a fur trapper village and trading post, to the present time, including when the torch was carried for the 2010. Olympics in Vancouver, B. C..
Something that is very unique is a stuffed female albino moose. It was caught in 1990 and mounted, then presented to the museum.
They historical society had set up a telephone office with allsorts of telephone and radio equipment. There were old buildings that were moved to the property and refurbished and filled with period items.
There is another cabin that is being built by college students in the style of early trapper times. The burl posts are very common around here.
Outside, there was a whole other collection of machines and parts and pieces of things on display. The first thing is a wood fired oven. The oven sits on the firebox with the hot air vented between the walls of a double walled oven with a glass door. The second picture is of the stuff that we parked next to. Drilling equipment, airplane parts and engine pieces are among the collection.
There were old cars, collections of bottles and containers. stuffed animals from the area and countless other treasures. Just so interesting! You learn how old you have become, when you walk through a place like this and start seeing things that you actually used or had seen being used as everyday articles of the time and then, people refer to them as antiques! That gives you an idea of what took us a couple of hours to see. It helped to have our own private docent showing us around. You could get lost trying to see every thing that was there.
Back on the road, the terrain started out about the same as yesterday, but then it started to be much more windy and hilly, then it became mountainous.
There goes our road in the first picture. These are called folded mountains. You can see why, especially in the middle picture. It looks like they were just shoved and wrinkled up like a rug does sometimes.
As we continued on our way to Liard River, we began seeing animals. Here are some of the animals that were grazing along the roadside. Some of the pictures were taken through the windshield, so have some bright spots on them because of the reflections and smashed bugs. We saw Stone sheep (in the second picture, you can see what I think is a female and two babies one of which is on the hillside in front of the male). This moose was grazing along the roadside and appears to be growing a new set of antlers. To me they look like giraffe horns. The male moose shed their antlers every fall and grow new ones in the spring. Female moose sometimes have very tiny antlers, so I am not sure which one this animal is.
There was a herd of buffalo/bison crossing the road right as we came up to them. There was a baby (reflection on the glass), that looks similar to a calf, in fact, I believe that they are called buffalo/bison calves. They are reddish colored. The next guy was sitting right next to the pavement. He is still shedding his winter coat and looks kind of mangy..
There were more signs to show you, too. The first one means that the bridge freezes first, at 32F and is slippery. The second one is a trash can and means that there is a rest stop coming up. Rest stops may or may not have restrooms They also may or may not have something of interest to see. The gravel hauling one is just added on to this one, it had nothing to do with the rest stop, as far as we could see.
We could not figure out the first one of these. Maybe we are supposed to watch for Trojan horses. Then, of course, there is the watch for buffalo/bison.
We have signs, in the U.S.A., that let you know that there is a flag person ahead in the construction zone. They just don’t look quite like this. There are some that have to do with falling rocks, depending on which side of the road the rocks are falling onto.
Tonight after we were settled into our campsite, we went out to get something out of the truck and Earl said, “Look!”. There was a moose in the campground. I went into the trailer to get the camera, but, by then the moose had walked through, so I missed it.
Tomorrow we will be moving on again. We will fill you in on our adventure again then.
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