The Yellowhead Highway - Prince George to Prince Rupert

 Prince George to Prince Rupert

I love travelling by train. I used to travel on it with my mom and brother to visit family in Saskatchewan but I think I was 4 years old so I don't remember much). The 2 times I have travelled by train as an adult was the Winnipeg-Vancouver route and a few years later the Winnipeg-Churchill route. If you aren’t worried about being somewhere at a specific time (as the VIA trains always seem to run late), then I highly recommend it. During the trip we played cards, read books, hung out in the dome car, had dinner, took naps all while still moving towards our destination (except when we were stopped to let freight trains go by). So why I am telling you all about train travel when I am currently travelling in a van? Because I think the Jasper to Prince Rupert train would be a really beautiful and relaxing way to see this area. And when you get to Prince Rupert, the via station is also the ferry station so you might as well catch a ferry somewhere. Options would be either the 6 hour ferry to Haida Gwaii, the 16 hour ferry to Port Hardy (on Vancouver Island) or a ferry to Alaska (I didn’t look into the Alaska ferry but I think catching one would likely be a budget version of an Alaskan cruise so why not?).

The train trip is now on my bucket list and I think I will take that Alaskan ferry and see where it goes.

But let’s get back into the van and the highway from Prince George to Prince Rupert. If you remember the heat from our travels Saskatchewan and Alberta, well, it’s back. According to the locals, these are not usual temperatures for this part of BC...ever. We are talking 30-32 degrees Celsius for almost a week. And during this heat wave we still don’t have air conditioning in the van. So in a way my experiences in these towns are a bit tainted by being cranky and hot but this is why I can come back in 10 years on my train adventure and see them then.

Burns Lake. Really nice little tourist town. We stayed at a BC rec site (those free sites) with the biking trails literally beside our campsite. We did a few biking trails together and Mike did a shuttle run to the top of the trails for a fun ride down (I likely would have hiked a bike so chose to stay back at the van with the dogs). Burns Lake also had the nicest community gardens we have seen this trip (yes we still try to visit them and empty our compost bag).

Burns Lake Rotary Bike Skills Park

Bike trails next to the campsite

Smithers. A town with a real alpine feel (and yes there is a ski hill close by). Beautifully laid out downtown, nice walking trails around the city and some pretty hikes where there was still snow at the top of the climb in June so you know you are in the mountains. Smithers was day 4, 5 and 6 of the hot weather. We arranged to get the air conditioning fixed on day 6 only to drive an hour to Terrace later that day and have the temperature drop 10 degrees and the clouds move in. That was 2 weeks ago and we haven’t used the air conditioning since.

Terrace. This was a great little town to do all of our errands. Within in 4 blocks, there are 2 groceries stores, a laundromat, pet store, 4 banks and a health food store. Plus if you are there on a Saturday, walk another 2 blocks and go to their farmer’s market to stock up on homemade bread, canned pickles and chutney and listen to live music while you walk around. The mountain biking in this town got steeper and more technical compared to Burns Lake so Mike was on his own.

Prince Rupert. The city where we waited to get on a ferry to Haida Gwaii (see next post). Having come from some serious mountain biking in Burns Lake, Smithers and Terrace we were surprised there was no biking in Prince Rupert. We did do some pretty (and popular) hiking trails through what felt like a rain forest and our first exposure on this trip to those huge sitka spruce and cedar trees but other than that we pretty much just killed time waiting for that ferry…