More BC

After we left Prince George we stopped in Wells and Barkerville BC for a couple of days. We just missed their arts festival, which was kind of sad because it looked like it would have been fun. Like so many of the areas we've been to in the North it was a gold rush area and Barkerville is an old-timey gold rush village (which you can visit for an entrance fee).
We did a bike ride on one of the old wagon trails in the area--it was nice to be in the forest but it wasn't very scenic beyond that. The highlight was seeing a ptarmigan and her three adorable babies on the trail. Unfortunately we came upon them right on the trail, so the mom was very stressed trying to figure out what to do to protect her babies. My instinct is to stop and stare adoringly at wildlife, so it's a good thing that Luke's around to remind me that it's stressful for wildlife to have us around and so we moved out as quickly as we could. Just a few minutes later on the trail a different ptarmigan flew out of the trees and dive bombed my head, a different kind of maneuver to protect her young. Can't they tell we're vegetarians? :P

Next we went to Quesnel. It's a nice enough town, but the most memorable part of our stay there was the water ban due to mining tailings being released into the river. The good news (as much as such things have good news) is that the town gets its drinking water from a different river so as long as you drank town water you were fine. However they were evacuating campers to be sure they weren't drinking or entering the polluted water.

I can't help but think often about the environmental price we pay for the quality of life and society we live in, especially here in BC. We saw similar things in the Yukon and Alaska, but up north there is still large areas of untouched land (well...nothing is truly untouched any more). In BC, as soon as we hit the Stikine and Spatsizi parks there has been lots of evidence of resource extraction almost everywhere we've been. There's a whole lot of logging and mining in particular. I understand that people need jobs in our society and that I would be a hypocrite if I pretended like I wasn't part of the problem. Even though we own very little now we still use gas to drive around in our truck, we still buy our food from the grocery stores and I'm writing this using electricity for my laptop. I guess it just saddens me to see such beauty juxtaposed with such abuse of nature. And there are no easy answers.

Anyway, Williams Lake was our next stop. It was often recommended to us by a number of bikers and was even described as the best biking in BC by one fellow. The landscape of the city is pretty fantastic--there's a lake surrounded on every side by hills and mountains. Pretty ideal really.
We did a fun loop at the top of one of the trail areas. I'm finding BC riding pretty challenging for climbing and steeper descents, so I was grateful to find something I could handle.  Then Luke did some of the tougher trails while I did laundry and drank coffee :)
There was a little island that had some wildlife viewing areas, which is where I spotted these fellows:

 Muskrat emerging from the bushes just a couple metres away from where I stood

 Muskrat making waves

Pelicans

Lillooet was next on the list. There's a free BC hydro campsite there, which we very much appreciated (although you had to hear the buzzing of the electricity wires from the nearby dam). There was even a lovely BC hydro worker who came by and welcomed us to the campsite.

The other bonus was there was a beautiful lake across the street where we went swimming (should have taken a photo...) The lake is thin and long with mountains running along both sides as far as you could see.

I did take photos of the area we went to about 45 minutes out of town (on dirt roads that were scary for me at times because they were one lane wide and had a drop off on one side). This areas is in the rain shadow and is pretty much a desert.

Frasier River

There was a downhill trail that Luke wanted to ride, so he did the big long climb to the top of the trail while I walked down to a nearby stream. It was horribly hot--40+ degrees with very little shade. I don't know how Luke rode his bike in that.

I've already mentioned that I do not ride DH (steeper downhill trails) and I can not handle that kind of heat (I'm much better at -40 than +40), however I still hugely regret not going on this bike ride because Luke saw WILD HORSES on the ride up!! I spent pretty much all of Montana trying to see wild horses and it's a dream of mine to see them. There were 8 of them, all dark brown with black manes. And they wouldn't get off the trail for a while, so Luke got to hang out with them for a good long time. Sigh.

At least on the way out we saw three black bears running through a field, came across really good looking chickens wandering on the road and saw a number of ptarmigans.

It's a horribly hot day again today, so I don't think we'll be very ambitious. Stupid heat wave. At least it cools down in the evenings and you can get relief in the shade!