*This is the story of our journey from Fort St John BC, to Liard Hot Springs BC.*
We woke up around 7; Emmy packed up while I worked for the morning. We ended up leaving Uncle Tim’s place around 11am for Fort Nelson.
This part of the highway was much nicer than that south of Fort St John. It was just a two lane highway amongst the forest and hills. It didn’t hurt that the weather was just perfect hovering around 60 degrees and sunny as could be.
I was enjoying the balmy weather and left my jacket cufflinks open to soak up all that cool air into my jacket. Not 30 minutes later do I feel a bug fly into my right hand jacket arm and then something sting me! I quickly clenched my bicep where I got hit, to try and squish whatever got me, but I could tell whatever was there was still kicking around. I pull over at the next turnout, rip off my jacket like a mad man and sure enough a massive wasp flew out. I learned my lesson and promptly cinched up those cufflinks…. Emmy was trying to figure out what the heck was going on; she thought I was doing my motorcycle rendition of Thriller. Once she found out, she was affectionately concerned which is a nice change from her normal howls of laughter when blight comes my way. Emmy was however, keen on letting me know that no wonder that wasp didn’t die, those weak programmer arms couldn’t hurt a fly, literally!
About 50 miles before Fort Nelson, we came up on this pickup truck driving ahead of us. We were following him for a few miles waiting for a good time to pass. After about 5 minutes of following, he extends his hand out the window with a water bottle?? It was bizarre, but it was clear that he was gesturing for us to take the water bottle from him while going highway speeds.
Being the Garcia that I am, trained at a young age to never pass up free anything, I sped up to drive along side his truck, close enough so that Emmy could grab the water. It was pretty sketchy, but all those years of driving while we surfed bowls paid off. She missed the water bottle on the first pass, so I had to slow down again so she could reach for it. And Success! she grabbed the water, but the moment she grabbed it, the man was gesturing that he had even more stuff! Lo and behold, he extends his hand once more with a bag of biscuits! This guy is like the Canadian Highway Motorcycle Super Saint or something. We grabbed the biscuits and gave him the biggest wave and thumbs up possible as we sped off. All the while, the clench force of my butt cheeks exceeded about 50 lbs.
We arrived at the Tim Hortons in Fort Nelson at 3:57pm, which is timely because I had a meeting at 4pm. We ate the biscuits (which were pretty good!) and drank the water and then Emmy made a ramen noodles outside with the jet boil while I had the meeting. Once I finished my meeting, I ate my half of the noods, filled up with gas across the street. We decided to keep heading for Liard River Hot Springs as it was only 6pm and we had lots of daylight left.
One or two hours later into the drive, we just started seeing so much wildlife. We saw bear after bear after bear. We tried to work out a system where one of us calmly notified the other that we see wildlife, yet we never quite got past the of stage of just frantically yelling and hitting the other when we saw anything that walked on 4 legs. We saw a handful of bears and I think had at least 5 cardiac arrests from Emmy’s alert system.
We drove through more beautiful mountains and beside glacial blue rivers and streams.
And just in case those bears weren’t enough, Beautiful British Columbia decided to show us a huge herd of bison. They lined both sides of the road. It was so amazing. Hard to put into words the feeling of being 10 feet from a bison 5 times your size.
Literally right around the corner from that bison herd was the bridge across the Liard River. I think it was 9:00pm at this point, but the sun was still high enough in the sky to provide us with this amazing view.
We pulled into the hot springs around 9:15pm. There is a long walkway across the swamp to get to the hot springs, and I couldn’t get there fast enough. It didn’t help that Emmy was talking pictures every 5th step, but to her credit, it was absolutely stunning scenery.
I’ve never been in a hot spring before, but supposedly these are world class. And boy…, did they deliver! The water was so stinking hot, but felt so great after a long day of riding.
We stayed in the water for about an hour and then headed back to our bike. It was still light outside, but the sun had set. We were trying to figure what to do for the night since the campground was full. I went over to talk to a ranger to see what our options were while Emmy made another ramen noodles because all that riding sure makes one hungry!
Impatiently waiting on her noodles to cook.
The word from the ranger was that the campground was indeed full, but there was overflow parking across the street we could stay at. So, we’d just go there once we finished dinner.
We used the last of our water in order to boil the ramen for dinner and the campground had no drinking water to boot. After we ate, Emmy couldn’t help but communicate to me exactly how thirsty she was. And being the calm and sensible person she is, you can imagine how calmly and sensibly she conveyed that she was thirsty. It didn’t help any that the people parked right next to us were drinking fresh bottled water out of the 40 pack of water they had in the bed of their pickup. Emmy’s face as she watched these people drink the water reminded me of Steve Martin’s face in Three Amigos as Dusty Longbottom drank his water.
Being the concerned the husband that I am, I started a conversation with them about where they were headed. Turns out he, his wife and son, head up to Alaska every summer from Salem, OR to commercial fish for the summer. After we had talked for about 10 minutes or so, his wife mentions something to him, and the man goes: “Oh, ya, hey do you guys want any water?” I had to play it cool, but then graciously accepted the two bottles of water for Emmy and I… SCORE!
Shortly after, we left for the overflow parking to setup camp. It was about 11:30 by the time we were setting up our tent, and it was still light enough for us to setup without auxiliary light. Pretty incredible.
All in all, a pretty amazing day. If you ever find you way up the Alaskan highway, make sure to stop at the Liard Hot Springs because they are definitely worth the drive.
-RJ