Prophet River, B. C. to Liard River, B. C. 6/20/14

Friday, Day 49 of our summer trip.

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.

Dawson Creek, B. C. to Prophet River, B. C. 6/19/14

Thursday, Day 48 of our summer trip.  Beginning the Alaska Highway

Today was the first day of travel on the Alaska Highway.  We have been seeing lots of huge trucks and big equipment traversing the roads with us.  The big industries seem to be oil/petroleum based and logging and agriculture, in this part of the country.  These are some of the trucks we saw today.  The first one is massive crane.  It is so big that the working part has to be rested on a trailer behind it.  No, that is not our truck in the foreground.  The second picture is of two trucks beside each other, each hauling several large items.  Next is a logging truck.  These usually have three trailers with each trailer carrying logs sorted by size and length.  Then, there are two trucks in the last photo.  One is a freight carrying truck like we usually see and the other is carrying a caterpillar earth mover of some sort.

 



I said that there is a lot of oil industry here.  There is a pipeline being built that will carry oil from Alberta to the Pacific coast of British Columbia.  There is much controversy, that is surrounding it, being shown on local TV , just as we have in the U.S.A. surrounding the Keystone pipeline.  None the less, it is big business here.  We drove through an area that was being developed with oil wells and refineries, day before yesterday , in search of a campground that we thought we might want to stay at.  We ended up going elsewhere.  Here are a couple pictures of an oil refining operation that we passed.  Places like this can be seen all over, although sometimes they are behind groves of trees along the highway.


The road has been quite good so far despite having all of that heavy equipment being transported on it daily.  We did come to a curvy, steep grade down hill on the way into one of the towns.  The view was beautiful going to the town of Taylor, B.C.


Another town was Fort St. John, B.C.  It is called the Energetic City.  Guess what their main industry is, oil.  I like their town sign.


Like I said, the road has not been bad so far.  This is what it looks like most of the time.  The second picture is of some people riding an ATV along the side of the road in the grassy area.  We often see tracks along that grassy area, where there seems to be a trail that has been worn into the ground.  I tried taking a photo of it, but it just didn’t come out right.


As you know, I like taking pictures of what we think of as unusual signs along the road.  They are ones that are similar to ours, but different.  Many, we would not see in our area of the country.  Here is another one.  Can you figure out what it means?  We have some that mean the same thing, only they are displayed differently.


We are camping at the Prophet River Airstrip Camping Area.  It is  an airstrip that is used by forest fire fighters, if there is a fire.  It used to be a Provincial Park, but has been dropped from that system and is no longer maintained on a regular basis,  It is a fine place and it is free and we are the only ones here tonight.  There is evidence that others have been here recently, though.  Here is our campsite for tonight., both close up and from a distance.  The mosquitos are out in force.  I guess they are trying to get us used to what we hear it is like in Alaska.



There are beautiful wild flowers here.  These are just a few.  Don’t ask me what they are, except for the wild roses, pink and dark pink.  I just think they are beautiful.  There are also a lot of dandelions all over both Alberta and British Columbia.  You can see some sticking up in the second picture above.   The last picture  is bunch of cotton, from a cottonwood tree, that has collected in this spot after being blown by the wind.

That is all for today.  I will try to get some more posts ready to be uploaded to catch up with everything we have been doing.

Southwest Alberta, Canada 6/5/14

THURSDAY, DAY 34 OF OUR SUMMER TRIP

This morning, we woke to an outside temp of 38 degrees and rain.  There was fog on the lake behind our trailer.  The rain stopped and it warmed up some, but the clouds hung low over the mountains.  These photos were taken on the way to Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, Canada.


We went there to purchase a Parks Canada Senior Pass which would get us into all of the National Parks, National Historic Sites and National Marine Conservation Sites for one year.  We had lunch at a picnic area just inside the park.  This picnic shelter had a wood stove.  I guess you could cook on it or use it to take the chill off the air.  Here is the view from one of the picnic tables outside of the shelter.  As you can see, the tops of the mountains were missing, so we decided to wait until another day to do the drive through the park.


Prior to coming to Canada, we had purchased some apps for the phone called GyPSy Guides for various regions of Alberta.  They are GPS based tourist information directed to your exact location along the route.  It gives you options for what you want to see and tells you how to get there.  The one we are using for this southwest region told us about a buffalo paddock that we drove through.  We knew that the buffalo were there recently because there were these bare dirt areas where the buffalo wallow sort of making an area to take a dirt bath.


There weren’t many buffalo there, but the adults were shedding their winter coats and there were some babies in the group (to the left of the one on the top right, it is light reddish brown).


As we continued further from the park, this scenic view was pointed out to us by the “tour guide” in our app.  It shows how the plains and mountains meet.


There were some other interesting sites along our drive today.  The cowboy and calves were cut-outs, but they sure look real from a distance. 


There is a lot of wind in this area so it is put to use generating power. 


This rock is called “The Rock that Ran”.  It is quartzite that was scraped from the mountains north of here, in Jasper National Park, and deposited by the melting glaciers long ago. Rocks like this can be seen scattered around the plains in this area and stand out because they are so different from the surrounding dirt.


On the way to Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump, we saw this kinetic sculpture or weather vane.  We aren’t sure which it is, but it definitely moved with the wind.


We just made it to the buffalo jump in time to see the informative movie and zip through the displays.   Even the carpet in the elevator had the theme.


These are our bracelets that allowed us entry into the displays.  They are printed in English and Black Foot Tribal language.  That is some long word to say “We Welcome You”!!!


Inside the Interpretive Centre was a diorama showing the buffalo being driven over the cliff.  Archeologist determined that this was a prime location for the buffalo jump when they excavated the area below the cliff and found these skulls in a similar fashion.  After the Indians ran the buffalo off the cliff, almost every bit of them was put to use in some way or another for food, clothing, shelter, utensils, etc.  Here is a winter coat made from buffalo hide.
 

Outside, the actual cliff that was named Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump is next to the Interpretive Centre.  The white line near the top of the cliff had been determined to be the primary point where the Indians drove the buffalo to stampede and fall over the edge to their death.


The designers of the Interpretive Centre at Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump wanted to have the building blend into the surrounding terrain, so they built it in steps up the side of the cliff.  Here are the entrance and a side views of the building.  They did a pretty good job of making something that looks like it is just part of the landscape from a distance.


Our next and last stop,for today’s tour, was Fort MacLeod, Alberta.  It is where the North West Mounted Police had built a fort.  It was closed when we arrived, but we drove through town and saw some of the original sandstone buildings.



That is all for today.  I am trying to write this using Windows Live Writer so I can write off line and then transfer it to my real blog whenever I get a Wi Fi connection.  If I can make it work, I will try catching up on our travels over the past couple weeks when I have been too busy to write.  More later and keep an eye out for back dated posts.