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    Adventure Roads of BC's Northwest Heartland
    Adventure Roads of BC's Northwest Heartland
    Adventure Roads of BC's Northwest Heartland
    Ebook274 pages2 hours

    Adventure Roads of BC's Northwest Heartland

    By Liz Bryan

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    About this ebook

    An off-the-beaten track exploration of Interior BC, full of scenic photography, maps, and fascinating information for tourists and armchair travellers alike.

    From lush forests to majestic mountains, sleepy ghost towns to pastoral farmland, Adventure Roads of BC’s Northwest Heartland captures the beauty, history, and unexpected twists and turns of a region often overlooked by tourists and ideal for would-be road trippers. Fuelled by the philosophy that any road can lead to adventure—not always of the visceral sort, but of the mind and heart—travel writer, historian, and photographer Liz Bryan takes readers on a virtual tour. Taking scenic routes from Merritt to Barkerville, Kamloops to Bella Coola, and into the valleys of the Bulkley and Skeena Rivers, Bryan tells the story of this land, its peoples, and their history. With stunning photography and fascinating prose, this book will compel anyone to follow their own adventure road, wherever it may take them.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHeritage House
    Release dateJun 14, 2022
    ISBN9781772034042
    Adventure Roads of BC's Northwest Heartland
    Author

    Liz Bryan

    Liz Bryan is a journalist with an extensive background in magazine editing and publishing. She is one of British Columbia's premier travel writer/photographers. She and her late husband, Jack, co-founded Western Living magazine. Liz lives in Rock Creek, BC.

    Read more from Liz Bryan

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      Book preview

      Adventure Roads of BC's Northwest Heartland - Liz Bryan

      Cover: Adventure Roads of BC’s Northwest Heartland by Liz Bryan.

      Adventure

      — Roads —

      of BC’s Northwest Heartland

      Liz Bryan

      Logo: Heritage House.

      Contents

      Introduction

      1. Along the Deadman River: Geology in Full Colour

      2. Nisga’a Highway: Across the Fields of Lava

      3. The First Gold Rush Trail: Along the Fraser

      4. Soda Creek: A History Remembered

      5. Lillooet to Pemberton: Lakes and Rivers

      6. Fort St. James: An Adventure into Early History

      7. The Back Road to Barkerville

      8. Heartlands of the Gitxsan: The Totem Villages along the Skeena

      9. Tracking an Old Murder through the Nicola Hills

      10. Chilcotin: The Long and Lonely Road to the Sea

      Recommended Reading

      Index

      Introduction

      A street in the ghost town of Quesnelle Forks.

      The Oxford English Dictionary defines adventure as both a noun—daring enterprise—and a verb—to incur risk. Roget’s Super Thesaurus, far easier to use than his original, suggests escapade as a synonym for adventure. Can it be used to describe a road?

      I think so. Roads can certainly lead to an escapade, not always of the visceral kind, but of the mind and the emotions. Entwined with the history of the land and the stories of the people who have lived here through the decades, the centuries, adventure roads are like books: with every turn of the page or curve in the road they reveal something new and wonderful.

      The journeys in this book traverse only a part of the huge province of British Columbia. They are found in what could be described as the northwestern heartland, stretching north from Merritt to Barkerville, west from Kamloops all the way to Bella Coola, then northwest from Prince George to the ocean.

      bc

      ’s major highways provide links to these remarkable escapades.

      Most of the roads in this book were described in my Country Roads of British Columbia: Exploring the Interior, first published in 2008 and now out of print. It was interesting to see, in 2021, just how much has changed—and also how very much of the land remains as it was then.

      A cowboy at work, gently guiding a string of Herefords across the grasslands. A scene typical of the Cariboo-Chilcotin.

      bc

      is a hard land, a huge land, divided by deeply chiselled mountain ranges, riven by fierce rivers and long lakes, and cloaked in thick forests, with a climate that ranges from near arctic to desert. In this fractured topography extreme weather conditions create havoc—avalanches, rockfalls, landslides, floods, and also drought, high winds, and forest fires. In the summer of 2021, whole villages were almost destroyed by flood or fire, roads and bridges were washed away or blocked by mudslides, a sudden acceleration of disaster that is blamed on global warming.

      An understanding of the province’s landforms is an adventure for the mind. The strong north–south trend of the province’s major features can be explained, in part and very simply, by the way the land was formed—in bits and pieces, like a patchwork quilt. Strings of volcanic islands (geologists call them terranes), formed far out in the Pacific Ocean, drifted eastward, slowly but inexorably toward the granite bones of ancestral North America. On impact, these island continents distorted the land they joined, pushing up great mountain ranges. The seams between each new terrane became valleys, which later filled with ice, rivers, and lakes. Over the millennia, volcanic activity, glaciers, and erosion were catalysts for more change, but the different terranes can usually still be singled out and recognized.

      The Skeetchestn graveyard at Deadman Valley.

      The valley seams of

      bc

      ’s fractured landscapes house most of today’s highways, homesteads, ranches, villages, towns, and cities, all of which can trace their beginnings to the gold rush of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the heyday of British colonial expansionism and pride—and missionary zeal. But we must recognize and acknowledge the truth: that all this marvellous land, now indelibly stamped with nearly two hundred years of European civilization, was taken from its original inhabitants whose own beliefs and ways of life and even languages were harshly repressed, their lives seen as having little value. It is a wonder that the Indigenous peoples are still here, in all their spiritual strength. We who marched into their ancient lands must sincerely apologize for past wrongs and work to ensure full recognition of their rights. As we travel through their sacred world of myths and legends and creativity, we can only treasure the rich history and beauty they bring to the world.

      The Gang Ranch sprawls across river benchland, looking across the deep valley of the Fraser River to the hills above.

      Fiery crags along the Deadman River Valley.

      Note You’ll notice that some places on the routes in this book have two names. The newer ones, given by the first settlers, are likely to be marked on the road maps but many of the signs along the way now also display the original First Nations names. Wherever possible, I provide both names and have used Nation websites for the correct spellings.

      The map in this book is for general reference only. If you set out on a road trip, be sure you also have a good British Columbia road map with you. I also like to have on hand books in the Backroad Mapbooks series. They show all the roads, as well as topography and information on parks, trails, and recreational possibilities. These spiral-bound books are widely available and can also be ordered online at backroadmapbooks.com. And there is, of course, Google Maps, but be aware that there is no internet connection on many stretches of road.

      The Bulkley River, north of Smithers, roars through a tight rock canyon, a traditional hot spot for Indigenous fishermen.

      A ghost ranch in the upper Deadman Valley.

      1. Along the Deadman River

      Geology in Full Colour

      These hoodoos are perhaps the most interesting of all the volcanic formations, but one needs binoculars to see them.

      British Columbia’s South Thompson River, east of Kamloops, runs through some of the driest land in Canada: parched craggy hillsides peppered with sagebrush and cactus, knapweed, thistles—and rattlesnakes. In summer, the land is hot, dusty, and drab. In the late nineteenth century, a group of British immigrants came up with a scheme to turn this desert into apple orchards. Ensconced in the small settlement of Walhachin, beside the river, they brought in irrigation water, not up from the Thompson—at the time there were no suitable pumps—but by gravity feed along huge lengths of wooden troughs and ditches from lakes at the north end of the Deadman Valley, about sixty kilometres distant.

      The road along the Deadman River leads north into an amazing landscape where the Walhachin story began. It leaves behind the dry dust of Thompson River benches and travels deep into the heart of ancient earth history, straddling the seam between two of the separate land masses that fused into what is now British Columbia. Even to a novice geologist, the eastern and western edges of the flamboyant Deadman Valley appear completely different. On the west side, the relatively flat and forested Interior Plateau rises high at the top of sheer basaltic columns, the exposed edge of a thick layer of lava that covers ancient bedrock formed around 5 million years ago during the Miocene-Pliocene era. To the east, deeply fractured and fissured, the land is younger, formed during the Holocene-Pleistocene era, about 1.6 million years ago. Here the slopes are walled with strange, fire-coloured rock formations, mostly formed from solidified volcanic ash. It is an exciting journey, both aesthetically and geologically, following the river from desert through ranchland and forests, to a string of little lakes, an abandoned gold mine, and an astounding sixty-metre-high waterfall.

      At Savona, Highway 1 bridges the Thompson River at the western end of Kamloops Lake and continues west to cross the Deadman River just upstream of its confluence delta. Deadman is a fitting name: it was along the river banks here that a fur trader by the name of Pierre Charette, a clerk at the North West Company’s Fort Kamloops, was knifed to death in 1817.

      Up the hill from the bridge, the Deadman adventure road, signposted Deadman/Vidette, escapes the highway and leads first to the Indigenous village of Skeetchestn. This is a historic spot. Secwepemc peoples from as far away as Pavilion and Kamloops once gathered here to participate in traditional ceremonies and harvest trout from the river. The once bountiful fishery is now in decline, and as part of an ongoing restoration project, the Skeetchestn People operate a hatchery nearby. Historic St. Mary’s Church, built in the village in 1910 on the site of an earlier log structure, has been well looked after, renovated, and is still in use.

      The colourful lesson in earth history is all on the east side of the valley road. At Criss Creek, which enters the Deadman from the northeast about six kilometres beyond the village, spectacular serrated cliffs in hues of deep orange-red provide a dramatic contrast to the green of adjacent irrigated ranch fields. You’ll find parking beside the creek bridge in the shade of cottonwood trees, a good place to study the geology. Beyond, across another bridge, a short leafy track invites a stroll along the river’s edge across from other incredible rock formations, seventy metres high and resplendent in brilliant shades of red, dark purple, and grey-green. The road climbs higher, providing a grandstand view of these spectacular bluffs. Known locally and on some maps as Split Rocks, they are mostly of igneous origin and inter-layered with sedimentary deposits, which accounts for the differential weathering—and the contorted folds, caves, and vertical cracks. A side road heading west just opposite the rocks provides an optional return route to Highway 1 near Cache Creek.

      St. Mary’s Church, Skeetchestn.

      Traces of the old wooden flume that brought water down the valley and across the Thompson River to the ill-fated community of Walhachin.

      Split Rocks, an apt name for such fissured volcanic attractions.

      Green fields of a valley ranch, overlooked by rainbow rocks.

      The valley ranchlands continue, still bordered along their eastern side by volcanic outcrops. Keep watch higher

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