North to Alaska: August 4, 2014 Ft. Nelson, British Columbia

This morning we went to the museum to the Alaska Highway in Dawson Creek. It was not as large as I expected it to be but was interesting. When we left the museum, we started driving on the Alaska Highway or Highway 97. About 20km outside Dawson Creek, there is some of the original road which you can drive on. I was driving so I could say I had driven on the road Dad helped construct. This piece of road goes for about 20km (about 15 miles.) The original Kiskatinaw Bridge is part of this section of the Alaska Highway. This bridge curves 9 degrees along its 534 ft length. It is constructed of three spans of timber trusses and is 100 feet above the stream. There are wooden planks forming the road part of the bridge. Some knucklehead has defaced the marker for the bridge by spraying graffiti on it. Why do people feel it necessary to do something like that? In a section of the old road, we could see where the side of the mountain had been blasted away. A video we watched (and I bought) at the museum explained that when the engineers reached a marshy or muskeg area, they simply went around it. That explains a lot of the curves in the road. As we drove on Hwy 97, occasionally pieces of the old road could be seen but that 15 miles section is all that seemed to be left to drive on. I don’t know what I expected but the Alaska Highway is a fairly good, two-lane highway going through miles of forest land. We saw more beautiful wild flowers and lots of trees. Again, in parts of these forests, something seems to be killing the evergreens.

In every city we have been in since we got in Canada, there have been beautiful plantings. Petunias seem to be particularly popular. We have seen some of the most beautiful hanging baskets of petunias I have ever seen. Guess what I will be planting next summer.