SoCal to Jasper and back

[W. Larrison]

Sun sets very late, and it comes up very early – the night was very short. And it hadn’t helped that it had rained pretty hard from about 11 pm until about 4 am. Oh well – the tent had kept us dry, and we had put everything away in the car the night before. So everything was dry the next morning when we got up, except the outside of the tent and the tarp under it. We made a sketchy breakfast (oatmeal, instant coffee & chocolate, and fruit) and packed up the wet tent and tarp in a big trash bag and hit the road.
Gas prices, even here, hadn’t changed much since we had crossed the border. Even in Jasper, prices were only about a penny a liter higher than we had found on the Trans-Canadian outside of Vancouver.

From Jasper we headed west, and then turned south again at Tete Jaune Cache, back on 5 – the Yellowknife highway. Just outside Jasper we found a large 7-point male elk, with his antlers still covered in fur, cropping his breakfast along side the road. And of course we stopped and filled a memory card with pictures of him.

The road down from Tete Jaune Cache is a very nice road – and if it wasn’t near the Ice Fields Parkway it would be listed as a scenic drive. The vistas aren’t quite as wide, nor the views quite as spectacular – but it’s a nice drive. There aren’t many stops along the way – a few rest areas and small towns. There was a “Safari Jet Boat Tour” operator on the Blue River which looked interesting, but it was pouring rain when we drove by and the boats had open cockpits. The area is isolate enough that unless you have satellite radio there’s nothing to listen to except CDs or Books on Tape. Since we didn’t have audio books or satellite radio, I think we listened to the 3 CDs we found in the storage compartment 3 or 4 times each day on this trip..... Haven’t listened to them since we returned either....

We did see a black bear which had ambled out into the middle of the road and had stopped to look at us. But while we pulled over and were scrambling to find a camera a truck came down the road in the other direction and blared his horn at the bear. The bear looked at him, and ambled on into the underbrush along the highway and disappeared before we could get a picture. .

Instead of continuing down to Kamloops, we turned west at the small cross roads town of Little Fort on 24. Again, the road was a good quality 2 lane which climbed back up into the Fraser plateau and wound its way through the trees and dales past multiple lakes over to 97. From here it was a quick dash south to Cache Creek.

Cache Creek was notable for a couple of reasons. One, was the area was much more arid and closer to the high desert plains than the usual heavy forests of British Columbia. This was a bit surprising. The second was there was a winery in town, the Bonaparte Bend Winery named for the local Bonaparte River. The winery doesn’t make grape wines, but specializes in fruit wines made from locally grown fruit, including Apricot, Boysenberry, Apple, Rhubarb, and Blueberry