Heading South on the Cassiar Highway

It was still snowing when we awoke for our third day outside Watson Lake.  It was the Monday we were to start heading due south off the ALCAN on the Cassiar Highway. We dumped the tanks and filled up with fresh water as we would be dry camping for the next 17 days at British Columbia Provincial Parks along the Cassiar. We also topped off the fuel to make sure we would still be above the 1/4 mark on the tank when we get back to civilization. Below 1/4 tank the generator will not have fuel to run as the designers don’t want someone to run the fuel tank dry running the generator, hence, no fuel left to run the engine to leave.
We made the right turn onto the highway and immediately noticed the pavement was pretty rough chip seal. Quite a bit rougher than the ALCAN’s chip-sealed roadway. And as we climbed into BC mountains, the road narrowed considerably and all the trees became covered in snow similar to the road shoulders.
Then it started snowing a bit harder, and I wondered if there was a steep mountain pass to go thru soon. I realized I hadn’t really researched this road much as I figured I still had a lot of time to do it, but now I was on it and totally in the dark about what was to come…  There isn’t any cell signal for the next three weeks. Yikes.. I will be testing out “The Spot” I purchased for this part of the trip.

Boya Lake was only about 50 miles south of the ALCAN, so even at 35-45 mph,  we were there pretty quickly.
Susan and Larry had made reservations there, but when I attempted, they were all taken. Luckily for us about 1/2 the sites are not reservable, but are first come-first served sites. (FCFS) We had gotten to the park fairly early in the afternoon and it was almost deserted. We had our choice of beautiful site 15  right on the light blue/green lake front.  I was amazed the campground was almost empty. But that soon changed, by 6pm it was full. And by 1pm the next day it was empty again. .

The day after arriving, we were thinking about taking one of the trails up the river, but it was less than 40 degrees and raining; so instead we opted to drive to Jade City about 25 miles south of the park. Turns out Jade City was mostly just a store that sells lots of things made of jade. But the place did have fast WiFi they allowed folks to use. So we got caught up on email and iMessages, but no SMS texts or phone calls.

Kathy and Sue bought rocks so they would have more things to dust when they get home. 🙂

It will be interesting to find places to dump along this highway. From what I can tell, none of the provincial parks have dumps. Hopefully there are other places or this will be a much shorter stay on this part of the journey.

But it turned out propane was the real issue.  That’s a story for another post…