Alaska-Canada Adventure Ride

Day 22 - Dease Lake, British Columbia to Stewart, British Columbia (305 miles)

Alaska-Canada route map With the rain still coming down in the morning, we broke camp and pressed on heading further south on the Cassiar Highway and back to one of our favorite towns, Stewart. The couple on the Goldwing from Wisconsin were already packed up and gone by the time we started making breakfast.

Stopping at the native run town of Iskut to take a break from the rain, get some more coffee, and top off the bikes again, we had to wait outside the local store for about 5 minutes before they opened for the morning. While waiting, I noticed a couple of other unkempt guys in their twenties also hanging out that I assumed to be hitchhikers. They tried to make eye contact, but I ignored them as they seemed to be looking for someone they could get a ride or bum some money from. I didn't think much more of it, and after finishing the coffee we moved on down the road...

Later that afternoon, past Meziadin Junction on the way into Stewart, I noticed a couple of RCMP vehicles race by with their lights on up the road toward the direction we came. It turns out that after reading the news a couple of days later, that a man in his camper was found murdered south of Dease Lake on this day. Apparently it was the second killing within a few days in the area, with reported killers being two younger men. Putting two and two together, perhaps there is a connection with the two potential hitchhikers I saw at the Iskut gas station and store earlier that morning? Following the news after I got back, these two killers were chased by the RCMP all the way to the Yellow Knife area, where they finally succumbed to exposure while trying to evade the law.

After stopping at the Bear Glacier again for some better pictures (no smoke this time), some guy who looked like he was napping in his car at the same pullout, got out and struck up a conversation with me. He said he was a local logging truck driver on his day off. He mentioned that a few of decades ago that the glacier reached all the way to the road, covering where the lake now is. The transportation department had to spray coal dust on the edge of the glacier to keep it from encroaching on the road. Currently the glacier is about one mile back from the road. When he mused out loud how surprising that it is that it has receded so much, I couldn't help myself and blurted out: "well I think it is pretty obvious: climate change", causing him to reel back as if I just insulted his mother. I then went on to say that all the glaciers I have visited on my last three trips through Alaska show signs of recession, and that this is just yet another. I didn't mean to be preachy, but he just kind of walked into it. The rest of the conversation was kind of awkward after that point, when he suggested that the climate is always changing, and this is just an ordinary course of nature, and I refuted: but not at the pace we have been seeing and that there is pretty clear evidence that the rate of change is accelerating as correlated with the increase in CO2 levels.

On this second pass through Stewart we hoped to see bears at the Wildlife Observatory outside of Hyder that we had visited earlier on the way up. Although the salmon were now starting to run with some visible from the viewing platforms, the bears had not yet got the word, and were still nowhere to be seen in the creeks by the observatory boardwalks. So next time, it would be best to plan a visit here at the end of July or early August when the bears should be more prevalent.

As a consolation, we stopped at "The Bus" restaurant in Hyder for one of their renowned fish and chips for dinner. It was good, and had a nice chat with the woman proprietor running this business out of an old bus, who apparently was also from Northern California, following her husband up here some decades earlier. Many Canadians along this trip also told us to be sure to stop at the local bar to get "Hyderized" and the supporting T-shirt, but with none of us being serious drinkers of the hard stuff, we passed.

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