Day 8
6/28/26. Sunday
It will be another rainy, cool and cloudy day. Good day to travel and get some miles under our belt. We are planning to camp at Liard Provincial Park Hot Springs tomorrow (Monday night) about 500 miles up the road. So the closer we can get the better… more time to enjoy Liard.
We had a good nights sleep in a big Casino parking lot. This morning it looked like 5 others had joined us to spend the night. It was relatively quiet. The other side of us was a hospital so there was one point in the night I heard sirens. But it makes for a quiet area. Plus it was a brand new hospital and had really nice fresh bathroom to use this morning.
To be clear… we have a nice composting toilet in the van but if I have an option to #2 elsewhere…I will. Plus I could fill up our one gallon water jug we keep handy for drinking water, coffee and cooking. Our van has a 7 gal water tank. We try to be conservative with that water for dishes, etc. From this point north we will be doing much more dry camping so rationing is important.
Back to prairie and farmland today as we drive north. We are out of the solid forest landscape at least until Dawson Creek.
We passed through the town of Beaverlodge. Mandatory tourist stop at “Justin Beaver” giant beaver statue.
British Columbia. New province… new time zone. Pacific Standard Time
Return to hills and forest. Bye-bye prairies.
Dawson Creek. Mile 0 on the AlCan Highway.
Stopped for the iconic photo. Visited the former grain elevator and now a nice art gallery. Some beautiful art work and a great artwork display and narrative of the beautiful things we will encounter along the AlCan Highway to the Alaska border.
of the AlCan Highway in Dawson Creek BC
Crossing the Peace River. A huge 10% long descent to cross the river. Big river… big bridge
St Johns is a big city in this area. About 25,000 people. Needed to hit the Dollarama store. It was a very good Dollar Store. Clean, neat and organized. All Dollar Stores are not equal in my opinion.
Next stop is to be determined. We’re trying to get close to Fort Nelson… looking for a pullout along the roadside. Along the AlCan in BC you can legally “rest” at most highway pullouts for 8 hours. So we’re looking for something suitable. The highway has been good to this point. Rolling hills and wooded. I’m looking for wildlife… who knows? Might get lucky and see a bear or a moose!
Boreal Forest
The look of the forests have changed. It’s a boreal forest with short tight trees. They are dominate white spruce and some other conifers. The forests are a transition from Arctic tundra and more temperate forest climates.
The highway took another big drop down to the Sikanni River. It was a big river running high and fast.
We are needing gasoline and the Sikanni RV park looked like a really OLD gas stop. We’re hoping for a big of an upgrade 25 km further to the Buckinghorse Lodge. We won’t have a choice… it’s our last choice for several miles! Well I have never seen a gas tank quite like this but this is it! You leave your credit card inside at the office. Fill ‘er up and then go get your cc. Easy peasy. Glad it was open😊
No towns for miles.
This lodge has camping but also several man camps. I think they do plenty of gas/diesel business. Expensive gas..$2.30/liter!!
Found our campsite tonight. It used to be a wayside Provincial Park so it has campsites with fire rings just a short way off the highway. Far enough there’s no highway noise (think semis). We found a nice spot…saw one other van parked. When we parked the mosquitos out the windows were thick!
We’ve got mosquito screens for the driver/passenger windows we are going to give a try. Fingers crossed the little bastards can get through. We have a big screen for the sliding door but it doesn’t seal at the bottom. Not sure it can be trusted for “Up North”mosquitoes.
Since we’ve camped we’ve had a little bit of sunshine and a little more rain. The temps are comfortable though.
Dinner is Served.
Dinner tonight was brisket, air fried sweet potatoes and a bag salad. Pretty good.
One of the things I did to prep for this trip was pre-make some main courses, vacuum sealed and froze into 2 person portions. I made a brisket, white chicken chili, bratwurst, frozen chicken and pulled pork.. For salads I find the prepackaged ones work great… they preserve pretty well until you’re ready to eat. We usually get 2 meals from one package of salad.
We have a small refrigerator but we also use a cooler with frozen milk cartons of water. They work really well at keeping the cooler from getting alot of melted water. Once they thaw we use block ice. Because the meals are vacuum sealed they won’t absorb the melted water when it thaws. So far.. so good. But we will have weeks of perfecting our camper van cooking.
This camp tonight is going to be lovely and quiet. If it weren’t for midnight sun it would be a dark sky.
Oddity of the Day.., The Giant Plunger Co van to be dropped at The Car Launch on July 4 in Glacier View, Alaska… 2 hours north of Anchorage. They launch cars off a 300 foot cliff into the valley below. They do this instead of fireworks. There’s a video of the launches it’s hilarious! Google.. ‘car launch on Independence Day’ for a good laugh🤣
July 4 in Glacier View AK. Hilarious🤣
Captain, oh captain.
I am the navigator and Jim is the driver. I’ve got the Milepost bible pretty well figured out. It was a big deal when we reset the odometer at Mile 0 Dawson Creek. It’s much easier to keep track where we are in the book. Learning curve.
Leap Frogging
We seem to be leaping frogging with this big RV dude from Germany. He was at our huge campground in Jasper and then at Dawson Creek today. We saw him again at a pullout later this afternoon. I couldn’t help but notice this RV on a campground walk. Perhaps we will leap frog the Plunger vehicle tomorrow as well. This could happen with other noticeable vehicles headed to Alaska as well. There aren’t a lot of other choices to get to Alaska.
cinnicrew 