Lakelse Lake
And some clever quip...
Driftwood
Canyon Provincial Park
Roadtrips generally require a lot of planning - trying to find
roadside attractions that you would be sad if you missed
them. There are lots of tools to help - TripAdvisor, blogs
and so forth, but it's easy to misunderstand the relative value of
one destination over another. The stretch between Beaumont
(West of Prince George) and Terrace was particularly tricky -
there are a lot of attractions, but it's really hard to tell what
is "stop worthy" on your drive through.
We picked Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park because it has a nice
walk to a fossil bed. The fossil bed is scientifically
meaningful - new species have been described from samples in the
rock here so it's a no collecting location, but I figured it was
worth a stop. The trail is flat and smooth and the forest
was worth the walk.
Witset Canyon (once called Moricetown Canyon)
BC's history with the first nations is basically somewhere between
bad and terrible. Much of the population was wiped out in
successive waves of European diseases that the first nations had
no defenses for. Then the missionaries arrived. The
Morice - the missionary here decided to name everything after
himself and only now are the real names for places starting to be
recognized by the wider world. This particular canyon has
probably been fished continuously for 8000 years.
There are some modern improvements - aluminum bridges and roads,
but probably more importantly, anchors and safety harnesses.
The first nations are fishing for their family, but also for
science. Their harvests are timed and recorded so they can
help fill in population data. The gentlemen who is fishing
shows up in photos in tourist brochures and web pages so I assume he
has been doing this many years.
While we were there,
he was able to catch a few fish. This isn't an easy way to
fish and he came up empty handed more than once.
Being next to water fall, the rocks are continuously covered in mist
and some are covered in moss and stonecrop. I really enjoyed
the tiny scenes made by the plants.
Farmers Market in Terrace
We happened to be in Terrace in on Saturday and it was farmers
market day. The choice of farmers market days tells a bit of a
story. The biggest local destination usually get Saturday
morning and then the next largest surrounding town get Sunday and
then the rest get mid week. Terrace is the largest town around
here so it got Saturday morning. That said, there aren't a lot
of farms close to here (we are starting to get North and cold) so
much of the farmers market was artists and baking.
At this point in the summer there still hadn't been a single COVID
case in the North, but the market was taking precautions - limited
admission, one way walk through the vendors and hand sanitizer for
everyone.
We decided to get lunch here and enjoyed a really generous Indian
food lunch.
Nature Walk at Lakelse
Lakelse is a huge
park about 20 minutes south of Terrace - nearly 200 camping pads
and a really nice visitor center. The park has hot showers
and some camp sites have electrical services. We reserved in
advance for two nights.
Lakelse has a grove of old growth forest
with a BC parks nearly flat trail running through it.
Amazingly, the park was still running interpretive events - two
environmental consultants came by to show people the forest.
There was a limit of 4 families so we arrived early.
There is a surprisingly large amount of demand for environment
consultants - logging and development both require assessments to
be done and some of the assessments such as impacts on stream
quality require quite a bit of sampling in not very easy to get to
locations.
We had a walk through the forest on the trail where the guide
pointed out the big three species here - Cedar, Spruce and Douglas
Fir.
I was happy to see two "mature forest"
species -
Spotted
Coralroot (here is the yellow variant) and Ghost
pipes. Both of these plants are treats you see in old
forests - not often seen growing at the side of the road.
We got to the end of the trail and guides had a small aquarium set
up. They had trapped these fingerlings the previous nights
(a trap baited with salmon eggs) and they talked about the Dolly
Varden life cycle here. Dolly Varden require cold water - if
streams get too warm (because the forest cover has been cut), the
fish don't do well and the lake populations of harvest-able sized
fish decline.
This is the only time I've ever seen fish shown on a nature
walk. I was really impressed.
Next:
Prince Rupert
Tags: salmon(2), market(2), fish(1), flowers(1), produce(1), food porn(1)
People: Claira(1), Nara(1)
From: John Harvey Photo > John's Overnight Page > Prince Rupert Road Trip > Lakelse Lake
From: John Harvey Photo > John's Overnight Page > Lakelse Lake
Last Modified Sunday, January 22nd, 2023 at 00:07:38 Edit
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