2012/07 Western Canada trip - Fraser Canyon |
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Then we were off towards Lillooet, stopping off at a number of places to view the canyon of the Fraser River. This part of the canyon is not as spectacular as the lower reaches, but it’s also very quiet, with little traffic and no trains.
We left Highway 99 at Lillooet and took the somewhat iffy road south along the river to Lytton. I say “iffy” because parts of it have an adverse camber, horrible if you are pulling a big trailer, and other parts occasionally drop into the canyon. This time was no exception. With little warning we found ourselves in a long single track section of rough road, obviously a slide zone partially cleared by a bulldozer. We were very lucky not to 
meet any traffic especially one of the logging trucks that frequent the road.
The road ends at Lytton, where the dark green waters of the Thompson River flow like ink into the murky yellow brown of the Fraser. This is where most of our rafting trips on the Thompson ended, at Kumsheen, the Indian word for the meeting of the waters. The town was renamed after Lord Lytton, Secretary of State at the time British Columbia became a colony. In an odd piece of trivia, he was also a prolific author, and coined a number of the language’s clichés, such as “pursuit of the almighty dollar” and “the pen is mightier than the sword”. He was also responsible for the long and rambling sentence that begins with “It was a dark and stormy night”, arguably the worst opening sentence of any published 
English novel, and the inspiration for an annual fiction contest (to do worse!)
I was surprised to find that the old single-lane bridge had been replaced with a wide piece of concrete. Alongside the bridge, on a platform pole was an osprey on its nest so we parked in Lytton and walked back to find that there were also two chicks in the nest. Despite its location in the mountains, Lytton is often Canada’s hot spot, up in the hundreds, and this was a typical July day.
We moved on down the canyon, now on the TransCanada Highway, for a late lunch at a cooler, but more humid, Boston Bar. This is where we often come to
access the valley of the Nahatlatch River. Today there’s a bridge over the Fraser, but there used to be just a cable car/cage that could carry one car at a time over the river to North Bend. Boston Bar has the cage on show with an outdoor museum of its history.
From there it was an hour’s drive down the canyon through Yale and on to Hope. We had been on the road for ten weeks. The front garden looked great; Sandie had done a great job of felling the weeds and fixing up the climbers and flowers. John and Edna set about cleaning up the truck and camper for us; they did a wonderful job. This was just as well as I wasn’t much use; I usually fall apart on the last day of a long trip and this was one of my longest.
John helped me with the most important repair, the jack post on the trailer. We’d been using a wooden block when camped but I had to get the wheel back on to be able to move the trailer around the garage by hand. We ground off the chamfered end and all was well. The post has a slight lean but not enough to be a problem.
Sandie got me up to speed on what had been happening with the rest of the family. She had been sending me emails while we were traveling but we’d had little Internet access while in the USA and none in Canada, so I was reading them now, weeks after she`d sent them.
Thursday July 26th
The day was mostly spent in more cleaning and packing. We took John and Edna on a rather long walking tour of Hope and its chainsaw carvings, up the Fraser and the Coquihalla Rivers, over the river to Sucker Creek and up to Thacker Marsh, ending the afternoon at the Blue Moose Café. The Fraser was still high but not at flood stage any more. Our Centennial Park, a tiny platform that overlooks the Fraser, was off-limits as the river had destroyed its foundations.
John and Edna took us out to eat at Rolly’s that evening.
Friday July 27th
We took them down to Vancouver to begin their flight home. They had a first leg to San Francisco, then a long overnight one to Sydney and a short hop over to Melbourne, arriving on Sunday.