amazingmrd

Prince George to South Hazelton, BC

September 10, 2025

After I left Chetwynd I drove between some smaller mountains in the Rockies chain and was then in open land for quite a while until I reached Prince George. I don’t have any photos to post of Prince George. I can tell you it is a much bigger city that some of the small towns I have been in lately (76,000 people) and I spent my time there preparing for my drive to Alaska.

I bought some more bear spray (I had one older can from 2021, and 2 new ones that I bought before I left Durham, but I bought two more cans). It occurred to me that as soon as you use one you will need another, and from what I had been told, once I got on the road to the Alaska Highway I would likely see lots of bears.

I also went to the Visitor Centre as this was the last big town on the route I was going to take. I asked them for maps and any other information I might need about driving up Hwy 37. I also went to the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) station in town. They are the national Canadian police force. I spoke with someone there about my plan to drive the isolated highway north, and who to try and reach in the event of a breakdown or emergency. They assured me that there would be a few places to get gas, though they advised me to have cash on hand because they may not have internet access to process my credit card.

Finally, although I had tried to clean and organize my car while I was in Grande Prairie, I put away my warm weather clothes and got all of my cold weather gear out. I made sure I had layers and a warm blanket in the passenger compartment. I had already stocked up on water and bought some fresh fruit and munchies to have for the ride.

It was a nice morning when I left Prince George to head west to my final overnight stop in British Columbia. It would be about a 5 hour drive.

I drove through lots of open land and went through many small towns:

That sign told me that as much of British Columbia as I had seen between the US border and here, I was only half way north!

I stopped in the small town of Houston for lunch. Right across the highway was the world’s largest fly fishing rod:

This area has lots of waterways which provide copious amounts of trout and salmon.

After driving most of the day in open land I started to see mountains in the distance. Those are coastal mountains which, as that description implies, stretch all the way up the coast and are one of the reasons it is difficult to drive from here to Alaska. You will see tomorrow that I am actually not that far from part of Alaska but there are no roads that go that way.

Those tall mountains are just on the other side of the town of Smithers.

And the mountain on the far right is home to the Hudson Bay glacier:

My Airbnb was in the small town of South Hazelton. They had chickens and goats behind their house and I could watch them from my living room.

And they had a big dog to keep any predators at bay.

I would try and get a full night’s sleep as I will have a 9+ hour drive tomorrow.

Chetwynd, BC – Post 2 of 2

September 8, 2025

Here are more of the chainsaw creations I saw as I passed through Chetwynd on my way to Prince George:

And a closeup of the octopus arms:

The last one I have to post is in three parts, top to bottom. It is called “Peace, Love, Monkeys”

There was one other item in Chetwynd which caught my eye. This large painting was on the side of a recreation center.

It consists of a series of many smaller square panels. I was rather surprised when I saw the sign that appeared next to it:

I find it rather hard to believe but I know the Guinness people are sticklers for authentic claims so it must be true!

I had more driving to do so I got back on the road. Chetwynd is in the foothills east of the Canadian Rockies. It didn’t feel like I was going over major mountains, and I saw some mountains, but it didn’t seem like they were that big. In fact, for much of the drive from Hinton to Grande Prairie to here the tree-covered mountains I saw reminded me of parts of Pennsylvania, Virginia or North Carolina. It was such a beautiful morning east of the mountains I was quite surprised to find myself in a haze when I got to the west side.

Chetwynd, BC – Post 1 of 2

September 8, 2025

I didn’t realize it at the time but the last two nights I spent in Grande Prairie would be my last visit to Alberta province during this trip. My destination today will be Prince George, BC and I will cross the Canadian Rockies for the last time.

The drive to Prince George was to be 6 hours but I encountered an unexpected diversion along the way. Nothing wrong at all, but something that had not popped up on my radar and I found VERY interesting.

Chetwynd, a small town of about 3,000 people, is home to the Chetwynd International Chainsaw Carving Championship. As I was driving in to town I saw lots of these lined up on both sides of the highway, and a concentration of them once I got to Tim Horton’s to stop for coffee. I went back to the “Welcome” sign where the first two I posted were and started taking pictures.

These are all chainsaw carvings, done over a number of years. I will explain shortly.

The competition is held the second week of June and 12 carvers are invited to participate – 4 from Canada, 4 from the United States and 4 from other countries around the world. Each carver is provided with 40-50″ diameter, 8 foot tall piece of western red cedar. They have 35 hours to create their entry.

I don’t know how that 35 hours is spread out, but I would think each artist is probably allowed 10-12 hours per day to work, with meal breaks, and then given time to sleep. The contest runs 4 days, and on the last day there is a 90-minute “quick carve” contest, with those works being put up for auction. The major pieces stay in Chetwynd and are scattered all over town. It seems that the artists have free reign over what they can produce, and there is an amazing variety of works on display.

Here are two shots of the detail on the front of the dragon shown above.

All of this is done with chainsaws, and they are gearing up for the 20th annual competition in June, 2026. I believe technology has improved to the point where woodworkers have smaller, more precise saws for detail work, and some of the pieces I saw had just a stunning amount of fine detail.

I was a little bit challenged with the bright sunshine, and some of my photos didn’t turn out too well because the objects were backlit. I tried to move around to get the best shots.

I will have more photos in the next post. You may also Google the town or contest name to see lots more photos online.

I was really blown away by them, and wished I had more time to spend in town to seek out more of them. Some of the ones I saw were done as far back as 2007 and I didn’t look at all of the signs indicating who the artist was, where then were from and what year the work was produced.

Valemount, BC to Grande Prairie, AB

September 6, 2025

After spending two nights in Valemount I would head back east, through Jasper National Park for the last time – this time going west to east on Hwy 16. I would continue on that road to the town of Hinton where I would turn left and head northwest on Hwy 40 to the town of Grande Prairie, Alberta where I would spend two nights. Total travel time was projected to be about 6 hours, roughly the same amount it took me to get to Valemount from Red Deer.

The reason I had come to Valemount was to see Mount Robson, the tallest mountain in the Canadian Rockies. I knew I wanted to see it the first time I drove up to Jasper but got sidetracked with checking out the wildfire damage, and then had a long drive back to Golden. When I got to Valemount one of the first things I asked my Airbnb host was “Where is Mount Robson?”. He said “You drove right past it on your way here”.

I felt kind of silly driving past the tallest mountain around but to my defense, my sightline was blocked by trees as I drove on the highway very close to the base, and there may very well have been clouds obscuring the top. When I drove in the opposite direction today there was no way I would miss it.

THAT is Mount Robson, with the peak reaching up 12,972 feet. And at that altitude there was most certainly a glacier up near the top.

I continued on towards Jasper National Park. The visibility was not any better at far distances than it was on the way west.

But the further east I went it improved quite a bit.

After passing through the town of Jasper I was now covering new territory. This is a large, shallow lake east of town.

Once I reached the town of Hinton I turned left onto Hwy 40 and crossed a river.

The area near the highway really opened up after that and there were smaller mountains and lots of open spaces. At one point I passed this handmade sign:

And shortly after it there was another. It wasn’t until I stopped at a small Visitor Centre in a town further up the road that I was told those two signs represent caribou, and there is a local herd of about 100 that live roughly between them. Later in my trip I would see the normal metal highway signs in various places warning me of caribou, but I never saw any.

The rest of my trip to Grande Prairie was uneventful and I had a quiet day there doing laundry, visiting several small city parks, and doing a much needed cleaning and rearranging of the interior of my car and the trunk. I would soon be heading to Alaska and figured I was probably running out of nice warm days.

Red Deer, AB to Valemount, BC

September 5, 2025

The wildfire smoke really restricted my activities while I was in Red Deer and my next stop was located well west, of the other side of Jasper National Park, which I hoped would get me out of it. From Red Deer I took Hwy 11 west towards the Park, but to get there I would also have to drive through part of Banff National Park . I could tell it was still smoky when I left Red Deer, and it didn’t improve any as I headed west.

Once I entered Banff National Park I would continue until the road I was on ended at the Icefields Parkway and the Saskatchewan River Crossing. From there I would turn right and continue on up into Jasper National Park and to the town of Jasper, but this time I would turn left instead of right and take Hwy 16W towards Valemount.

(Photo credit: Parks Canada)

I’ve already posted photos from that stretch of road so I won’t post them again.

This was the view as I approached the western entrance to Jasper (as I was going out).

I arrived in Valemount, a village of only about a thousand people, and checked in at my Airbnb. My throat was still sore and I was afraid I might be getting sick so I went to the grocery store in town and bought some cold medicine.

The rest of these photos were taken the next day while I was in Valemount.

It was a nicer day than when I had arrived but I just stayed put since I didn’t feel well. I didn’t think there was much to see here anyway, and I will find the thing I came here to see tomorrow when I head back east.

I will point out that just north of Valemount is Mount Terry Fox. I was happy to see that they named a mountain after him.

Terry Fox was a young man from Winnipeg who lost his right leg to bone cancer. In 1980 he embarked on the “Marathon of Hope” to raise money for cancer research, asking every Canadian to contribute $1. He started in Newfoundland, on the east coast of Canada, and planned to run all the way across the country. He ran for 143 days, averaging around 23 miles per day (a standard marathon is 26 miles) and made it as far as Thunder Bay, Ontario, a distance of 3,338 miles, before illness forced him to stop.

Terry Fox was only 22 when he passed away on June 28, 1981, and he is considered a hero in Canada.

The peak on the right is 8,678 foot tall Mount Terry Fox.

Red Deer, Alberta

September 3, 2025

I drove north from High River, through Calgary, and took the QEII Highway up to Red Deer, which is about halfway between Calgary and Edmonton. When I modified my original schedule I decided to drop several nights in Edmonton after speaking with someone who lives there who was mystified as to why I would possibly want to go there (” Uh… we have a mall…” ) and decided to add three days in Red Deer instead. My research showed me that there were lots of scenic roads near Red Deer, including the “Cowboy Trail” to the west and the “Dinosaur Trail” to the east.

I saw this young buck just off the two lane road I was on as I started to drive the 2 hours it would take me to get to Red Deer..

Well, my plans kind of fell apart as when I approached Red Deer there seemed to be a brown cloud hanging over it. I didn’t think it was big enough to have a smog problem and didn’t even think about the wildfire possibility. I drove around town for a while to get acclimated and then checked in at my Airbnb. I mentioned the “cloud” to my hostess and she said she had heard there was a wildfire up near Edmonton.

I fired up my computer and learned that although there was a small wildfire near Edmonton (a little less than two hours north) it had just been detected the day before and wasn’t very big. When I checked the smoke pattern website I was shocked to learn that what I was experiencing was coming from a large wildfire in the Northwest Territories province, a thousand miles to the north!!

I went out to get something to eat and returned to my Airbnb. By the next day the air quality in Red Deer had changed to unhealthy, and my throat was a little sore from having been outside the day before, so I just stayed put for the day. The next morning I evaluated my options online and decided it should be ok to go back south and east towards the town of Drumheller.

When I started out early in the morning this was the sunrise as seen through the smoke:

I took the QEII south to try and get away from the smoke, then headed east on a series of smaller two-lane roads through farmland. At the lower speeds it would take almost two hours each way.

Once I got closer to Drumheller I would drop down into Horsethief Canyon near the Red Deer River.

This is the small Bleriot ferry which can transport up to 13 cars at a time the short distance across the river, which isn’t very wide at this location. I would traverse it later in the day and it only took about two minutes.

Not quite the shortest ferry ride I have been on (it was on a 3-vehicle ferry in Kentucky) but interesting nonetheless.

I finally arrived in Drumheller.

If you are so inclined you may take the stairs all the way up and look out of the T-Rex’s mouth. I was not so inclined.

There were several “dinosaur” sites around the area but after checking in at the Visitor Centre I learned that there was generally a good bit of hiking involved and so I decided to pass on it. I was hoping to get some photo ops from the road but the staff didn’t think that would work out too well.

Before leaving Drumheller I did find this tiny little church which only has room for 6 parishioners:

Castlegar, BC to High River, AB

August 31, 2025

Today I will head back east to Alberta province and start working my way north. Before I leave Castlegar I want to share something I noticed as I drove into town two days ago. When I had been to town previously I approached from the west and left to the south. This trip I came in from the south and noticed this as I was descending Mount Kelly.

I was looking right down the runway of the West Kootenay Regional Airport, and there was a large mountain on the other side. The mountain in the distance is Sentinel Mountain which, at it’s highest point, is 5,456 feet tall. The mountain I was on when I took this photo is even higher at over 6,400 feet. The mountain in the distance isn’t that far from the end of the runway (looks like about 3 miles on Google Maps).

When I was in town yesterday taking pictures of the sculptures I heard, then saw, this mid-size passenger jet flying parallel to the runway and then bank south to make a turn towards the runway.

You can see it in front of the mountain before it would turn right again to land.

Someone at the Visitor Centre told me that the airport is nicknamed “Cancel-gar” by the locals due to the number of flights that get cancelled due to weather or other issues.

Today I would reverse my route from two days ago and shortly after crossing the Canadian Rockies I will turn left onto smaller roads for the rest of the day. I had a few stops planned in Alberta province and the total drive time was projected to be about 7 1/2 hours without stops.

The town of Creston is about an hour and half east of Castlegar. When I had driven through it previously I stopped to get gas in town and drove past the Kokanee Brewery. They market their product as “Glacier Beer” and, despite being acquired by a much larger brewery, still make their beer here.

That is a statue of Bigfoot making off with a case of Kokanee beer.

I won’t show any more mountain pictures since you just saw them two days ago. Once I got past the Rockies I headed north to the small town of Longview. My plan was to have a fancy steak dinner at a highly rated steakhouse there but that plan fell apart when I tried to make a reservation. The first day I called they had already started serving customers and the recording said to call another time (well excuuuuuse me!). I called back the next day and the recording told me they had shut down for a week so the staff could have their vacation.

So no steak for JohnBoy.

I went to Longview anyway and it was a cute little town:

I didn’t even drive by the steakhouse, which was further up the road, but I did go to an ice cream stand which offered their signature Saskatoon Berry milkshake with fresh, locally grown Saskatoons. Just my luck they were sold out. So no Saskatoon Berries for JohnBoy, either.

I left town and drove east to my next stop. On a very small rural road I stopped to take a photo in each direction. North (left)

East (forward)

South (right)

And west (behind me). You can see the Rockies in the distance.

This is where I was now headed:

If you are familiar with the original Star Trek TV series you know that Mr. Spock is from the planet Vulcan. Welcome to Vulcan, Alberta!

Once fans of the series discovered that there was a town called Vulcan here they started visiting and things kind of took off from there. Now they have festivals here and Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock, attended at least one. It has taken on a life of its own…

You will notice that the large starship shown above is NOT identified as the Enterprise (possibly due to licensing issues).

The flower planter located outside the gift shop is a replica of a Federation shuttlecraft.

I thought the place was closed so I put my phone up to the glass on the entrance and took this photo – and then saw people moving around inside. Turns out I got there just before closing time.

I walked around inside for a short while looking at the merchandise, and there were many items and photos signed by the cast of the show. One of the brochures I had picked up back when I was in Calgary alerted me to this town. There was also a menu for a local pizzeria which, when the festival occurs, makes a pizza with a Federation logo-shaped crust.

When I left Vulcan I headed back northwest to the town of High River, where I had a one-night Airbnb reservation. I picked it because it was the largest town near here and with all my stops I knew it would be getting dark soon. When I got there I discovered it also has a connection to a TV show.

The Canadian drama “Heartland” is currently in it’s 20th season. Parts of the show are filmed in and around High River, including Maggie’s Feed Store and Diner. The actual ranch featured in the show is on private property, in a nearby town, closer to the Rockies.

This is a “set” used for filming and is not an actual restaurant. I only knew about Heartland, and this set location, because a friend of mine used to watch the show.

Castlegar Sculpturewalk

August 30, 2025

When I stopped briefly in Castlegar on my way to Cranbrook earlier in my trip I had picked up a brochure about this activity and after looking through it I decided I wanted to come back and check it out for myself. Fortunately it was a nice day, as the sculptures are scattered all over town, though there is a concentration of them in the downtown shopping district.

The artwork in the photo above was featured on the cover of the brochure I had seen. It is called “Dedngon”. Here is another angle of it:

Most of these sculptures are available for sale or lease. The only deterrent to photographing them was that many were backlit by the sun. There were many more than I am going to show you, but I’ve tried to pick the best ones to post. You can Google the name and see photos of many of the ones that I will post, as well as others that are no longer in circulation, or were in parts of town that I didn’t go to. I tried to find all the ones that were downtown or close to it.

The bench above is supposed to represent a tree trunk, with new growth sprouting from the top.

The artwork in the photo above is called “Just Had To Look” and features a small man crawling on a hand held sphere who is peering down into a hole in the surface.

The artwork in the photo above is called “Living Fossil” and is of a swimming white sturgeon.

The artwork in the photo above is called “Don’t Judge Me by My Cover.”

That one is called “Mask of Ooinn” (the first two letters of the last word have characters above them which I am unable to replicate here). It is one of the few sculptures I saw that was not made out of metal. It depicts the chief Norse deity (as stated in the brochure).

“Egghead” was purchased by a local business and is on display outside the public library.

The next two I found in Millenium Park, a large city park east of town and next to the Columbia River.

And the next one is in several parts. It is metal shaped in the form of a curved maple leaf. It covers a bench near the river and has a nice detailed painting inside.

I’ve saved my favorite for last. It is being leased by the city and currently sits out next to the highway coming in to town.

Lethbridge, AB to Castlegar, BC

August 29, 2025

Today will be another driving day. I will be taking Hwy 3 (the Crowsnest Highway) west and will cross the southern end of the Canadian Rockies from east to west. The first 80 miles will be flat prairie and farmland, which I have grown accustomed to while in most of Alberta province. Google Maps indicated it would take about 6 hours, without stops, to get to my destination. Once I hit the Rockies the road will take me through Cranbrook, where I stayed earlier in my trip, and then beyond it to Castlegar. The portion from Lethbridge to Cranbrook will be new to me.

The first item of interest I encountered was as I was getting into the Rockies.

That is the result of the Frank Slide. At 410am on April 29, 1903, the top of the mountain gave way and wiped out a good portion of the town of Frank, a small coal mining town. 70 people perished, either in their homes or in the mines. As you can see, lots of the rock debris made it to where the highway now runs. The photo above is looking left (south) from the highway.

That is how the highway appears now. They obviously had to clear rocks and boulders out of the way to build the road. And this is how it looks now if you look right from the highway:

You can see that with the momentum of the rockslide the debris traveled a significant distance.

OK – so now I’m back in the Rockies. You know what that means…. more mountains!

I believe the mountains above are part of the range I saw as I approached Cranbrook from the west. And I believe the mountains shown below are a little further north in that same mountain range.

OK, that wasn’t so bad was it?

I drove for about 2 1/2 more hours and then crossed a mountain pass which is about an hour and a half from Castlegar.

I believe that photo is dark because there were clouds right overhead shading the valley. It was a bright, sunny day everywhere else.

When I got to Castlegar I stopped in at the Visitor Centre again (I had stopped in briefly when I was coming east and decided that I liked the town enough to some back for a two-night stay).

That is a large metal sculpture of a hummingbird. It is a set-up for tomorrow’s post which will include lots more sculptures.

I did have time after I arrived in Castlegar to visit the “Brilliant Bridge”. Technically it is called the Doukhobor Suspension Bridge National Heritage Site of Canada, and is located in the neighborhood of Brilliant on the opposite side of the Columbia River from the town of Castlegar.

If you look closely at the original concrete stanchion you will see that the bridge was built in 1913.

The original bridge was abandoned in 1966 when a new highway bridge was built not far away. The bridge was restored in the early 1990’s and is now a pedestrian bridge, and a popular landmark in town.

The bridge spans the Upper Kootenay River shortly before it joins the Columbia River not far from here.

Getting back to the official name, the Doukhobors (the Canadian spelling, adding the letter ‘u’) immigrated from Russia to Canada in the early 1900’s. About 7,500 arrived in Canada over a 30 year period, seeking to escape religious persecution. They originally settled in Saskatchewan but later relocated here to British Columbia. (Source: Wikipedia)

There is a Doukhobor Heritage Centre in Castlegar but I didn’t go to it.

Lethbridge, Alberta

August 28, 2025

After having visited Waterton Lakes National Park yesterday I had returned to my Airbnb in Lethbridge to spend my first night here. Lethbridge is the 4th largest town in Alberta province with a population of just over 100,000. People who live here are called Lethbridgians or, are you ready for this, Lethbians.

Today first place I went was the Paradise Canyon Golf Course, as it was listed on TripAdvisor as being a good place for photo ops. Well, it is in a nice canyon but it is a golf course (duh) so I didn’t spend much time there.

Running alongside it, in this long coulee, is the Oldman River which you will hear more about in a moment.

My next stop was the Nikka Yuko Japanese Garden, which I had passed as I was driving into town yesterday.

No, that’s not a Japanese Darth Vader. It is authentic samurai armor.

After that I drove to the Helen Schuler Nature Centre. I was greeted by this sign:

Oki is an indigenous Blackfoot word meaning hello, or welcome.

Most of the displays in the Centre seemed to be targeted at kids, though there were numerous messages scattered about clearly directed at adults.

The building did have a rooftop deck which was promoted as having a variety of plants, but I can’t say as I was terribly impressed (they weren’t flowers so much as herbs and non-flowering plants). It did, however, give me a great view of another local landmark – the Lethbridge Viaduct, or as is called locally, the High Level Bridge. I had driven under it to get to the Nature Centre.

It was completed in 1909 by the Canada Pacific Railway and is the longest and highest railroad trestle in the world. It spans the Oldman River and reaches a maximum height of 314 feet. At 5,327 feet it is just over a mile long. It is still in use, and I did see a long train traveling over it later in the day.

I drove to a wetlands/nature preserve in another part of the coulee. I walked along a series of paths and on a pier-type walkway, hoping to see some critters but I did not. I then drove downtown as I had picked up a brochure touting a mural contest with some pretty clever entries, but it must have been dated as I only found one – painted on an electrical box in a big city park. The map I had showed lots more…

I got a little uncomfortable as there seemed to be lots of rough looking people hanging out in the park, and there was an obvious police presence, so I decided to go back to my Airbnb and do some trip planning. I had improvised visits to Medicine Hat and Castlegar (my next stop) but needed to look at my maps and plot out some more stops in British Columbia and Alberta and start planning my route to Alaska!