“Eek,” said the Pika
Our trip is approaching its end. I suspect this will be the penultimate post, but we shall see. I guess it depends if we get an encore!
After Smithers, we pulled on our driving caps and traversed across mid B.C. past Prince George to Purden Lake (a full days drive and our gateway into the Rocky Mountains once again). We opted to head east and into the Rockies as opposed to south from Prince George to try and squeeze in a few more views from this trip. Along the way we hit some torrential rain (the RV needed a wash) and overcast clouds.
Although the south of B.C. is on fire, much of the rest of B.C. (at least where we have been) is wet and feeling a lot more like fall than summer. To quote our Park Operator at Purden Lake “what else can you expect in autumn.” I guess the coast has spoiled me into thinking autumn does not come round till the end of September… That said, wet forests mean campfires are a-okay. We enjoyed our last campfire of the trip here.
Purden Lake, though very nice, was really just a layover on this portion of the trip. After a rainy night, we headed south down Highway 16 to Mt. Robson. Along the way we stopped at the Ancient Forest/Chun T’oh Whudujut Provincial Park. This is a unique forest for many reasons.
- Despite being over 800 km inland, it is a temperate rainforest, presumably made possible by the ‘Interior Wetbelt’ from the Rockies. This is actually the furthest inland temperate forest in the world, according to the sign (below).
- There are some very old-growth red cedar trees residing here.
- The park was essentially started by a graduate student. Said student came to this region to study the trees, realized how unique this area is, was horrified to see it was scheduled to be logged, and rallied community members and various organizations to stop the logging.
Unfortunately no Strava hike link here. It was around 3 km in total but we were too far off the grid to record this hike. We followed a boardwalk through, as you might expect, a forest of old silent trees.
There were several information panels along the hike. See below for the panel on Gold Dust Lichen and a photo of said Lichen in the wild. One particularly cool fact about this Lichen is that it only abundantly on trees over 250 years old. “Scientists” actually use this fact to try and gauge the age of a forest.
This forest boasts some very old trees. This tree below is 5 metres (16 feet) in diameter and is estimated to be between 1000 and 2000 years old.
After this hike/walk, we continued to head south. This area was beautiful but, due to the many clouds, we often only saw the bases of the mountains and were fortunate enough to see the peaks only on occasion.
We took a rest stop along the Fraser River (seen in the left photo above) in McBride. Along a wet sandy riverbank we found an awfully large set of bird prints. Boot print for reference is a women’s size 9.5.
We arrived at our campsite at the base of Mt. Robson near 4 pm. See below for a photo of the majesty of this mountain shrouded in some inconvenient clouds.
Tired at the end of a long drive? Very. Some rainy and questionable weather coming in? Yes. Last minute 9 km hike to the base of Mt. Robson? Yes, and very glad we did.
This hike up along the Robson River to Kinney Lake was (thankfully) very well groomed
and had some cools rocks underneath its surface.
Earlier I mentioned that the hike was well worth it. Why? Take a look at them views.
Fun Fact: This lake is made possible by the partial dam formed by a build-up of sand and gravel along the valley floor deposited by annual snowmelts (alluvial fan). In this sense, Kinney Lake is not actually a closed lake and slowly runs into the Robson River.
Amid the piled rocks near Kinney Lake, if you are silent enough, you may hear the nasal ‘eek’ of a pika (pie-kuh). The pika is a small mammal (some might even say cute) that looks like something between a rabbit and a mouse (it is actually closely related to rabbits).
Due to my prodigious recording skills, I actually caught one of the ‘eeks’ of a pika. Depending on your browser, you should be able to play said ‘eek’ via the below SoundCloud recording. Enjoy. You will need to turn your volume up quite a bit to hear it over the river.
After the hike to Kinney Lake, we setup camp in the provincial park near the base of Mt. Robson. In the morning we were blessed with clear skies and this fantastic view of the elusive rocky peaks.
This brings us pretty much to the end of the trip. From here we headed down to Kamloops to see some of Maddy’s family for a night. No photos or news from this portion of the trip, just a long drive down the Thompson River and some good food. That said, for those of you still with us, stay tuned because we are working on another post (or two) which will wrap up this blog. Said post(s) might include some photos of our food throughout the trip, some final thoughts, and some thank yous.
— Aaron
