Trees everywhere…

It’s Tuesday the 2^nd of June today. It is a very auspicious day because today is my birthday. Too bad I plain forgot about it. After driving awhile, Annie suddenly remembered it. Anyway, the weather today is great. We woke up with bright sunshine and a 12 deg C temperature. The weather stayed very nice mostly with mostly sunshine and temperatures that reached 23 deg. In the late afternoon we encountered a few brief showers.

We started out from Fort St. John and the scenery is nice but quite monotonous for the next few hours. We can see the Rocky Mountains again in the distance on our left (west). The landscape is quite hilly with gentle rolling good sized hills. On either side of the Alaska Highway the northern boreal forest stretches to the horizon. There are numerous rivers and creeks everywhere. The boreal forest consists mostly of pine (jack pine) and poplars with a sprinkling of birch. If I remember correctly, the mature forest consists of pine which occasionally burns down due to forest fires. The burned areas are then quickly covered with poplars that grow quite fast but don’t usually last more than 10 -15 years. Slowly the jack pine establishes themselves again and crowd out the poplars. Then lightning strikes again and ignites the dry, resinous pine trees and the cycle starts all over again. There were also large areas where the pine trees were dying because of the pine beetle infestation. That was not a pretty sight seeing these large swaths of rust coloured trees everywhere.

Around 9:30 we started to enter the Northern Rocky Mountains. We’re again in the real mountains. The peaks are not quite as high as in Jasper National Park but still impressive. Also the mountain valleys we drive through are much narrower, in other words, the mountains on either side of the highway are much closer than before. The landscape is very rugged with almost vertical mountain sides, steep narrow canyons often carrying fast flowing mountain streams. Along the road usually runs a fast flowing river with many rapids. This stretch of the highway is very picturesque and we’re really enjoying the scenery here.

In Fort Nelson we fuelled up (the gas is now 120.9c/l, ouch!!) and then found the local museum. This was kinda neat. They had a large number of stuff from back to the beginning of 1900. There were all kinds of old machines, tools, pictures, etc. We spent almost an hour just browsing around. It just showed our age because a lot of these items were familiar to us since we used them way, way back in pre-history (at least that’s what our grand kids probably think, i.e. pre-computers, iPods, etc.).

Along the way, we saw quite a bit of wildlife again. Annie saw a mother black bear with two cubs. I was driving and was paying too much attention to the road and missed them. I turned off the road and back-tracked over a side trail but we couldn’t find them again. We did see a bear in a tree however who just ignored us and kept munching on the leaves. We also saw a moose come out of the tree line and cross the road in front of us and disappeared into a field. It was too fast for us to take a picture though. We also saw a herd of bison in a field. I think they were part of a bison farm though and not wild ones. We also saw a Stone Sheep, which is different again than a bighorn sheep. It's horns are curved less as you can see here.

We stopped for the day at Muncho Lake, a tiny community on Lake Muncho (surprise). This is a real jewel of a lake, nestled between the mountains. We stayed at the Northern Rockies Lodge, a really nice and expensive place to stay. Today, being my birthday we’re not counting pennies though, so dang the expensive here we are to stay for tonight. We’re staying in the main lodge, which is a modern log building. There is no city electricity or water or anything here. We’re about 3 hours driving from Fort Nelson, the closest large town. The lodge has its own generators to generate electricity. We’re on lake water I assume and have satellite TV and Internet. However, we decided not to hook up to the internet today because of the costs. I would have cost us $5.00 for the first 10 minutes and $0.50 for each additional minute. Thanks, but no thanks I’m drawing the line here. So, I’m typing my blog for today off-line and will post it with pictures tomorrow, which is now today I guess, hopefully.

All-in-all it’s been a very nice day again. I’m finishing my blog and Annie is watching Chicago-Philadelphia Stanley Cup game right now. It’s still 3-3 in overtime…. Oh…oh… the Flyers just scored the winning goal for this game and win 4-3. Well that’s all folks for today. Keep the emails coming and tell us something about what’s going on at home.