A YEAR ON THE ROAD IN OUR MOTORHOME
BOOK 2/PAGE 10
The Cassier Highway is shown on this map, which is from the THE MILEPOST, the authority on the Alaskan Highway. This book, which is absolutely essential for anyone who wishes to travel the highway, shows just about every thing that is of interest on the route by milepost markers including all gas stations, campgrounds, parks, etc. The red oval shows the gravel portion of the Cassier Highway. I would hope that since we traveled this road in 1991 that portions of it are now paved.
On the way to Prince Ruper, where we plan to catch the ferry to the Queen Charlotte Islands, we took a side trip to Steward, BC and Hyder, Alaska. Just before Stewart, British Columbia, is one of the best glaciers we have seen on the trip, Bear Glacier. Stewart is just west of the Cassier Highway at the junction where the gravel road turns back to pavement. Oh, how nice it was to drive on a flat highway again and up to speeds of 60 MPH!
June, 1991 to June, 1992
Bear Glacier has a nice park with picnic tables and trails around the lake formed by the run off. Steward is a nice small town but the place to be in the late afternoon is Hyder, Alaska, which is just across the border between British Columbia and Alaska. So we drive over to Hyder because just north of town is a great place to see black bears come down to the river to feed on salmon.
Our luck is holding as when we get to the bear feeding area this nice bear walks across the road in front of us heading for the river. People park along the roadside to see the bears. There is a special observation stations but when we go there we really can't see the bears so we head back down towards Hyder several hundred yards to where we saw the bear cross the road. We find them - up close and personal!
There must be six or seven bears around the river, most of whom are on the opposite side from us and a few others watching. You really don't want to get too close as you never know what a wild animal will do. Fortunately, none of the bears have cubs with them.
Well, wouldn't you know it - one of the bears decides that the other side of the river, our side, must be the place to fish and heads across the river directly toward Jeanne and I and another couple. Boy, talk about a mad dash - we all took off back to the road and our RVs. But the bear was only interested in finding a better place to fish so we carefully returned to watch some more.
As we left Hyder and Steward, we came across a roadside park that displayed a large amount of totem poles. We stopped and took some photographs and then continue on back to the Cassier Highway and south to Price Rupert.
One of our prettiest photographs of the entire trip is this one on the left of Gitwangak's St. Pauls Anglican Church. This looks like a professional took the photographs. The old bell tower dates back to 1893.
We did take a small side trip before we got Prince Rupert to see a lava bed. Unfortunately, the road went from good to bad to awful and shown in the photograph on the right. The road was under construction and we finally turned around when there was more road building equipment on the road than normal vehicles. On the way back the RV didn't seem to be riding OK so we stopped and found an inside tire, there are two tires on each side of the rear of the RV, was flat. So we drove very slowly back to a town, found a tire shop and bought a new tire for about $175.
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