Jeff and I parted ways this a.m. in British Columbia as he headed south and I headed north. British Columbia is endless lakes and rivers – no doubt a boater’s and fisherman’s paradise. Tonight I’m camping at Ten Mile Lake Provincial Park, and was quickly reminded of what goes really well with lots of water – MOSQUITOS! I haven’t slathered on this much bug spray since I spent a week in high school canoeing in the Boundary Waters area on the Minnesota-Canadian border (but that mosquito mass eclipsed this one).
Today I left the mountains behind for now and rolled pretty consistently through pine-forested hills and occasional ranch lands. Definitely rural Canada. I forgot to mention the other day the tourist mix up here – right now I feel like one of the very few if any Americans. There are LOTS of British tourists in the national parks, not surprisingly, and many Germans. Now that I’ve left the national parks behind, I seem to be one of very few tourists at all.
A few things I have noted about BC:
· LOTS of lumber mills, one just south of here which was unbelievable – thousands and thousands of logs on one side of a huge complex, and seemingly endless stacks of rectangular bundles of lumber on the other. It is all forest up here.
· BC doesn’t seem to allow those little catches on the gas nozzles, so you have to hold it the whole time you fill up. And as I travel north, “pay-at-the-pump” has disappeared completely – one time I came REALLY close to just driving away after pumping my gas then washing my windshield because I’m so used to paying first by swiping at the pump!!!
· I have never seen such pine beetle devastation as I have seen in southern BC. I saw it in Colorado, but at least in my experience not to this extent. A lot of areas look at a glance like fall colors, then you remember that it’s not fall, and pine trees don’t turn reddish brown – unless of course they are dead. The extent of it is disconcerting.
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