Sunday, May 23rd
C’est l’hiver
It’s not just a train
It’s saying goodbye, saying hello
To where we have been, where we might go
It’s what we have passed, what we might see
It’s not just a train, it’s freedom to me— Spirit of the West, It’s Not Just a Train
The new day starts as grey as the old one ended. I take it slow again, big Sunday breakfast, writing notes over coffee. It is well past ten before I get rollin’. I turn west. Slave Lake really must be a successful town, as the commercial strip along the highway is in the process of being extended by another two, three hundred metres.
I pass Eula Creek and spend some time trying to come up with any computer geek in-joke around it, but fail.
A little sign sits by the road, a wooden plank really, with the word ‘smoke’ written on it. Nothing more. There’s a feeling I get when I look to the west. It starts raining again; slow at first then stronger. And my spirit is crying for leaving. A truck is hurling by, dragging a impenetrable cloud of mist along. For a split second, the windscreen is useless. In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees. A sign points to the hamlet of Faust, down by the lake shore. And the voices of those who stand looking. On the left side of the road, hidden from the sun by trees, lies some snow, maybe a centimetre. Oh, it makes me wonder.
High Prairie, another typical northern town, has five motels. There must be a lot going on here in summer, probably hunting and fishing. There also is St. Andrews Catholic School, home of The Saints, and proud owner of an electronic announcement board. The municipal library has a new building, blue metal with round corners. At least it is not made of glass as seems to be the standard design these days. (I image there to be a very popular cheat book for architects, which contains the hint ‘use large glass fronts’ under library. Someone should fix the entry and add a bold ‘Don’t’ to it. As hundreds of tormented librarians will tell you, books and sunlight don’t really go together.) At the west end of town sits a big factory producing wooden boards.
The highway is part of the Northern Woods and Water Route, a series of highways leading from Winnipeg to Dawson Creek in northern British Columbia. The route was established in 1974 to promote tourism in the northern parts of the Prairie provinces. By and large, it follows old fur trader routes. I already used it while travelling north in Manitoba.
A large, hand painted sign by the road claims ‘Independence is the answer’ over a sketch of the three western provinces. The world usually hears about the secession movement in Quebec. But there are more tensions in Canada. Alberta is an oil-rich, highly conservative province (the motel last night was the first place with a religious TV channel available) and often feels misunderstood or just plain ignored by the liberals of the east. Which is another reason, why the issue with Quebec is so important. Many fear that if Quebec breaks away, the entire confederation would come to an end and Canada cease to exist.
Yet another surprise intersection at Triangle, only this time I am awake enough to notice the right turn in time. The now northerly road runs through a forest which appears to be home to a moose population. The Alberta warning sign moose looks like a grandfather with a long, wise beard just standing there.
There is more and more snow, which shouldn’t actually be a surprise as there was reports of heavy snowfall in the area just two days ago.
MacLennon feels more like a real town. The road is lined with residential buildings. The town square sports a red brick church with a wooden spire. There is a golf course and little museum in an old railway car. Next to it starts a board walk and leads off into the swamps. I might actually have gone and checked where it leads, but it still rains rather annoyingly.
Yet another surprise intersection later lurks the town of Falher. It marks the start of a small Francophone pocket in northern Alberta, as its settlers came mostly from Quebec and French-speaking parts of the US. The area also has a longstanding tradition of producing honey, proclaiming Falher the Honey Capital of Canada. This is celebrated in style by the World’s largest bee, a statue of a seven metre long bee on Main Street.
Rather suddenly, the flat prairie ends and falls down into deep river valleys. There are two large, nay, mighty rivers in the area: Smoky River and Peace River. At their confluence lies the town of Peace River. Before the road winds down into the valley, Sagitawa Lookout provides a majestic view: Maybe fifty metres down and a hundred or so wide lies the valley of the two rivers, merging just below. A bit off to the right clutters the town of Peace River, starting with houses and gardens, then some businesses and finally ending with the large bridge over the now joint river. Half-hidden by the trees below, a train noisily fights its way out of the valley and up to the prairies.
Once down, Peace River’s centre turns out to be the usual shoe box town of boring concrete shops. The north side is dominated by the highway and its large, spiralling on-ramps. Across the bridge and up again on the other side lie the town’s malls. A fence on the way out of town carries the neon letter message ‘Merry Christmas.’ Merry Christmas, indeed.
Twenty kilometres west of Peace River lies Grimshaw. Its welcome sign carries the slogan ‘from rail to roadways,’ which, while a sad truth generally, in the case of Grimshaw it is slightly wrong. The town is the starting point both of the Mackenzie Northern Railway and the Mackenzie Highway. Both lead to the Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, the railway to Hay River and the highway to Yellowknife. But the highway is actually older, started before World War II, while the railway only came to be in the 1960s. Yet it is true that nowadays people are far more likely to know the Mackenzie Highway.
While I, too, am tempted to just keep going north, with great discipline I shun Mackenzie Highway and turn west. The GPS reading gives me an altitude of 630 metres. Which bears the question, whether the area is called ‘high prairies’ because of latitude or altitude.
A bit later, I reach the northernmost line of my journey, assuming that I don’t fall victim of some madness and turn north again. I now am at 56° 21′ 50″ North, give or take a couple of seconds. The road is two miles into township 85, which means I am 512 miles or about 820 km north of the US border.
Slowly the area gets less settled. Farm land turns into ranch land and becomes ever so more wet. Cows are stalking through the mud trying to find whatever cows are looking for. An eagle sits on the sign announcing Cleardale. Which isn’t even a village as it consists of a combined petrol station, restaurant, and grocery store with a car wash in a barn next door, and two other houses.
Two ladies in rather old fashioned dress walk along the side of the highway. A bit further on, a dog siestas by the road and is rudely woken up by the noise of my car. Lying there it looks suspiciously like a sheep and only identifies itself when it gets up. Thereafter follows a golf course.
Next the road dives down into the valley of Clear River. It looks rather small and peaceful, yet the valley speaks differently. A truck is slowly creeping up the steep road on its far side. By now, civilization has ceased and we are in lonely wilderness.
Back on top of the plains, the road turns some more and eventually reaches the border to British Columbia. And thus I enter the tenth and final province of my journey. There is a lot of snow left on the fields here, but the road is clear and dry. Pretty much right after the border the weather changes. The cloud cover lightens up and there even is a hint of sunshine.
It is a mystery how the weather often follows border lines. When I travelled by train to Norway for the very first time, en route to a job interview, it was a rather dark, rainy day. Yet as the train crossed the border to Norway, the weather turned around completely; the sun came out and it was warm and beautiful. Makes it somewhat hard to put it all down to coincidence.
British Columbia, or B.C. as it is more easily referred to, adheres to Pacific Time. Except for a little pocket up here, which follows Mountain Time like Alberta. Or so I thought. What I missed is that, while they indeed use Mountain Standard Time, they don’t do daylight saving and thus are on equal terms with the rest of B.C. during summer.
After the tiny hamlet of Goodlow, some deer is grazing by the road. Two of them race away rather hurriedly, while the third watches me approaching for a bit, only leaving in the last instant. At Cecil Lake, the snow finally disappears.
The road climbs down dramatically into the valley of Beatton River. It follows the river for a bit but then decides that this is going nowhere and climbs out again. A hiking track runs by the road and some people spend their Sunday afternoon running along the track. As it goes uphill rather steeply, this can’t be much fun.
Fort St. John, the last of the towns dedicated to Saint John (well, not quite. There is a Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu south of Montreal which I missed), calls itself the Energetic City. Given the amount of people that I see having a walk or run, this may even be true. It starts with residencies beside the road. However, I am coming in from the side. The closer you get to the centre, the more it becomes your garden variety shoe box town. Eventually, I reach the commercial part and highway 97, Alaska Highway. There are quite a few motels along the highway and the business strip seems to go on forever.
While Fort St. John lies on the top of the prairie flats, the highway has to cross the Peace River valley on its way south. It slowly climbs down through the town of Taylor. In the opposite direction, a bicyclist climbs up. His bike has many bags, he may very well be on his way to Alaska, an altogether more brave undertaking.
Taylor is dominated by a huge factory processing natural gas. At its end lies the bridge across the mighty, mighty Peace River. It is decked with a metal grid, probably to avoid freezing over in winter. On the other side, the road climbs steeply out of the valley. A battalion of warning signs tries to prepare drivers.
Back up on the plains, the first B.C. moose warning sign presents itself for inspection. The B.C. moose has a goatee and looks a bit bored, confused and possibly stupid. We are up to seven hundred metres now and the snow is back.
A sign announces a ten kilometre detour along the historic routing of the Alaska highway over Kiskatinaw bridge, one of the last operational wooden road bridges, which I take and have a look at.
Soon thereafter we enter Dawson Creek, designated overnight destination for today. This, of course, has nothing to do whatsoever with the turn-of-the-century TV show of a rather similar name. The town starts out with a large steaming factory storing massive amounts of wood. A bit further on is a large collection of aluminium cones that turns out to be a grain storage facility of sorts. Across the street is the Dawson Creek Golf & Country Club.
There is a small town centre with one or two historic buildings. At the main intersection stands proudly the post of mile zero of the Alaska Highway. Build as a war effort during the early forties, it now is one of the most legendary roads of the world. Its other end is at mile post 1422 at Delta Junction, about a hundred miles south of Fairbanks, Alaska. Just the first section, from Dawson Creek to Whitehorse is a whopping fourteen hundred kilometres, roughly two day’s travel.
I check into an inn at the southern end of the city. Then I go and celebrate my arrival in British Columbia at what for me constitutes a B.C. institution, the local White Spot restaurant. This chain of restaurants can be found all over B.C. I first went there more than seven years ago on my first trip to Canada (good grief, where did all the time go?). Seems a worthwhile exercise in nostalgia to repeat the experience. Plus:
Beer of the day: Nat Bailey Pale Ale (a smooth ale brewed for White Spot by Granville Island Brewing, Canada’s oldest microbrewery).