Sunday, August 21, 2005
07/23/05- Dawson Creek to Ft. Nelson
07/23/05 Saturday
We left Dawson Creek this morning in the rain. Our first day was 276 miles to Fort Nelson. Our travel buddies were Ma
rv and Doris Cundiff from Louisville, KY. They are living now in Sarasota, FL and own a Real Estate business, which their Son is now running. Marv is a real estate auctioneer. They recently lost their daughter and their son is their only remaining child. They led and we followed and we were in radio contact, as we needed to be. Marv had a sharp eye and he found a lot of wild life for Mary to take pictures of.
We saw a lot of the history of the Alaska Highway and will continue as we go. The highway runs from Dawson Creek, BC to Delta Junction, AK, and the distance is 1390 miles. The time of construction was about nine months and later it was declared the 16th most impressive engineering feat in history. It was built by Canada and the US as a means of moving the military to defend Canada and Alaska after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the
n occupied one of the Aleutian Islands. The military also strung phone lines along the highway and to areas that paralleled it. They named it Cantel and in all it consisted of 2850 miles of open telephone line, one of the longest open circuit systems in the world. It served 1600 army telephones and teletypes and required a series of “repeater stations” which boosted to signal and kept the messages moving along. We saw a sign for the first of these repeater stations north of Dawson Creek. We also saw a sign for, but did not go to see the last timber bridge in existence on the road. It spans the Kiskatiinaw River and is 162 Meters long. The road has been re-routed in many places during improvement and it left the bridge in an unused loop of gravel road.
One of the interesting towns, which we went through, was Taylor. Duke Energy Inc. has a natural gas processing plant there. One of the major by products of gas processing is sulfur. They pipe the sulfur in gas form across the road to another plant that converts it to pellet form for commercial distribution. They also have a natural gas pipeline that we saw and have a picture of, which goes to Vancouver and Western Washington. Taylor also has a saw mill and pulp mill.
We had lunch at the Shepherd’s Inn and it was full of people from our caravan. We ate at a long table and must have had 10 or 12 people. The only unusual food I saw was something called Trapper’s Bannock. It was a fried
biscuit about three inches thick and the size of a plate. The served it with all the jam you wanted. Several of us sampled it.
We saw a lot of really neat signs. They had caution signs of all the animals with the shape of the animal built into it. We saw sign for a sawmill that was a lumberjack about 30 feet tall. We saw beautiful forests with large stands of white Birch trees. They are so tall and straight.
The kind of wild life that we saw was deer, caribou and black bear. We had never seen a caribou or bear in the wild. Mary got pictures of both, but she got buck fever on the
bear. She grabbed her camera and shot three pictures before she realized that she had not zoomed up for the closest picture. He kind of looks like a black speck in the high green grass.
After we got to Fort Nelson and were in our campground, Mary walked down the street to a place called Trapper’s Den. She had a great visit with the lady there who owned it with her family. She got a lot of history of the area and the type of hunting and trapping they did. She did not buy anything because even though the crafts were excellent they were very expensive.
We left Dawson Creek this morning in the rain. Our first day was 276 miles to Fort Nelson. Our travel buddies were Ma
rv and Doris Cundiff from Louisville, KY. They are living now in Sarasota, FL and own a Real Estate business, which their Son is now running. Marv is a real estate auctioneer. They recently lost their daughter and their son is their only remaining child. They led and we followed and we were in radio contact, as we needed to be. Marv had a sharp eye and he found a lot of wild life for Mary to take pictures of.We saw a lot of the history of the Alaska Highway and will continue as we go. The highway runs from Dawson Creek, BC to Delta Junction, AK, and the distance is 1390 miles. The time of construction was about nine months and later it was declared the 16th most impressive engineering feat in history. It was built by Canada and the US as a means of moving the military to defend Canada and Alaska after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the
n occupied one of the Aleutian Islands. The military also strung phone lines along the highway and to areas that paralleled it. They named it Cantel and in all it consisted of 2850 miles of open telephone line, one of the longest open circuit systems in the world. It served 1600 army telephones and teletypes and required a series of “repeater stations” which boosted to signal and kept the messages moving along. We saw a sign for the first of these repeater stations north of Dawson Creek. We also saw a sign for, but did not go to see the last timber bridge in existence on the road. It spans the Kiskatiinaw River and is 162 Meters long. The road has been re-routed in many places during improvement and it left the bridge in an unused loop of gravel road.One of the interesting towns, which we went through, was Taylor. Duke Energy Inc. has a natural gas processing plant there. One of the major by products of gas processing is sulfur. They pipe the sulfur in gas form across the road to another plant that converts it to pellet form for commercial distribution. They also have a natural gas pipeline that we saw and have a picture of, which goes to Vancouver and Western Washington. Taylor also has a saw mill and pulp mill.
We had lunch at the Shepherd’s Inn and it was full of people from our caravan. We ate at a long table and must have had 10 or 12 people. The only unusual food I saw was something called Trapper’s Bannock. It was a fried
biscuit about three inches thick and the size of a plate. The served it with all the jam you wanted. Several of us sampled it.We saw a lot of really neat signs. They had caution signs of all the animals with the shape of the animal built into it. We saw sign for a sawmill that was a lumberjack about 30 feet tall. We saw beautiful forests with large stands of white Birch trees. They are so tall and straight.
The kind of wild life that we saw was deer, caribou and black bear. We had never seen a caribou or bear in the wild. Mary got pictures of both, but she got buck fever on the
bear. She grabbed her camera and shot three pictures before she realized that she had not zoomed up for the closest picture. He kind of looks like a black speck in the high green grass.After we got to Fort Nelson and were in our campground, Mary walked down the street to a place called Trapper’s Den. She had a great visit with the lady there who owned it with her family. She got a lot of history of the area and the type of hunting and trapping they did. She did not buy anything because even though the crafts were excellent they were very expensive.
