Our exit from the Fort Nelson campground is chaotic. An opportunistic window repair guy is seeing
if he can pick up some business, and a number of rigs can’t dump their tanks
because the camp septic lines are plugged. A giant sucking truck is trying to remedy the
latter situation. Rigs are leaving with
pods intermixed and delivery trucks are arriving and blocking alternative
routes out.
Once on the road travel is good then slows to a dusty crawl
because of road reconstruction. We are
now really bunching up.
There is only one spot to eat in today’s 122 mile drive and
it is, again, a cinnamon bun place. We
are looking forward to it but it takes us nearly 10 minutes to find a place to
park because of all the Airstreams.
Visibility isn’t great and for 5 minutes I’m unknowingly in a line
waiting for gas.
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| Marcia, Martha and Mary (Ontario) with their goods. |
We eat our cinnamon buns and get going again, now out of the construction zone
and climbing on a section of good road.
Many of us are bunched together and the CB warnings about approaching or
passing trucks or sections of bad road are getting lost in all the other
chatter. Mike ends one lengthy take on
something I no longer remember and Martha speaks up suggesting we hold down the
chatter so we can exchange important road messages. Almost immediately her husband Larry breaks
in for an interesting dissertation on the area plant life, and the beat goes
on.
We have been told to watch for stone sheep (another name for
big horn sheep, I believe) but see none.
But we do see a good sized black bear foraging at the edge of the
forest, and then our first caribou.
Ever. (Yes, I know you are going
to look at the caribou butt picture and say that it is a deer. Larry and Ted are both fairly expert on this
kind of stuff and insist it was caribou butt.
I agree, at least it certainly wasn’t a deer.)
 |
| Caribou butt. |
We go over a 4000’+ summit that seems much higher and descend
through absolutely beautiful but tough country.
We can’t imagine what it must have been like building this road in
summer or winter in 1942.
After 122 miles, we pull in to Poplars Campground near Toad River, in a
beautiful valley and are very efficiently assisted in by today’s parking
crew. No chaos at all in a potentially
very chaotic situation.
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| Larry, Martha, Brie and Murphy settle in at Poplars. |
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| Happy hour and drivers meeting - Poplars. |
Poplars is beautiful and primitive for an RV campground, and
power is provided by their own generator for minimal services – no microwave,
hotplate, electric heater, A/C. We have
yet to see any photovoltaic in British Columbia, and with these long hours of
sunlight and lack of central power we are puzzled. Possibly it just is not subsidized as in the
US and Europe, and the solar benefit may be minimal with the short summers.
News travels slowly in this big group. Yesterday a second rig also had a blowout,
damaging the belly pan and ripping off the valve for the fresh water tank. I see people working on the tank problem and offer
my spare valve but we all agree if he can just plug his drain he will be fine
for the trip. Somebody finds a bolt of
the right size and some silicone, and a plug is successfully tapped into the
plastic. I now know another trick, and
my spare valve lives to ride again.
The evening ends as if we are a bunch of scouts at a
jamboree – a great pulled-pork communal dinner and a campfire. A group starts singing folk songs and others
join. Others. Mike, Jane, Marcia and I return to the
trailer and play Joker. Mike and I
lose. Damn, should have joined the folk
singing group.
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