October 16, 2009 by Rae

Plans Undone and a Chasm Respite

I had a pretty good night at the turnout even though I practically woke to a gale, with Miranda rocking back and forth. I had coffee and the rest of the bannock, then set off under a clear a sky at about 10.

My first stop of the day was Kitwanga where there is a side road that goes through ‘town’ and loops back to the Cassiar. I took this loop road because it announced a nearby Parks Canada site of a First Nations battleground. I enjoyed the walk down to and up the hill.

Lunch was had at a pull-out just before Smithers and then I headed to my destination for the night, an RV park just east of Houston, 300km shy of Prince George. I followed the signs for the park, all of which proclaimed it was open… except for the one after the last turn that ended in a shut gate.

I found myself in a situation not unlike that back in Manitoba, caught in a turn where I couldn’t unhook. This time, backing up with the toad and doing a million point turn wasn’t even an option seeing as the road was very narrow and bordered by ditches. The only possibility I could see was to cross a culvert and turn around in a big field. I got out and checked the culvert, finding it sturdy. The field was pot holey and definitely not a place I would have voluntarily taken Miranada and the toad into, but I felt confident that I could get turned around without doing any damage or having to unhook. I was right. Whew!!!

With all of that, I forgot that I was low on fuel and left civilization without gassing up. 50km from Houston, I woke up in that regard and realised that I was staring at a bunch of long uphill stretches with no gas in sight and a gas gauge needle dipping deeply into the red. This was the first time I have ever come close to running out of gas and I figured I’d used up all my luck for the day. Both the GPS and the Milepost were in agreement that the nearest gas station in either direction was too far away.

So, you can imagine that when I saw a sign in the distance announcing gas, I thought it was a mirage. 😀

As it turns out, it was a pump on a native reserve, not a proper gas station. But there was a sign announcing prices for status and non-status folks, so I figured I could gas up there. The pump was in the middle of a perfectly-sized roundabout, full-serviced, and offered the cheapest gas I’d seen since Whitehorse (1.03).

I wound up being there almost an hour seeing as my credit card would not go through after several attempts. I called the company to see if there was a security hold on the card, but no. The very helpful person I spoke to suggested that the problem might be with the POS terminal, not my card. The attendant was a young gal fairly new on the job and I coached her on how to call for POS support. Sure enough, there was a glitch with their system and she was walked through the process of resetting the terminal. My card went through fine after. Had the problem been on my end, I would have used an alternate method of payment, but since the problem was theirs and it was more convenient to pay with my credit card than with another method I had no problem with the time the transaction took. Moreover, I think I did the girl a favour showing her what I knew about POS machines.

Like the day before, I pushed on in search of a non-advertised RV park or other legal overnighting option, but found none. I reached the end of the Cassiar and turned east onto Yellowhead highway 16, which also does not permit boondocking. Here, the reason is obvious with frequent billboards reminding people, especially women, that the road is nicknamed ‘The Highway of Tears’ because many young women have disappeared on it. There is a strong possibility that a serial killer is stalking this desolate stretch of highway.

The sun was very low in the sky by the time I passed Vanderhoof, so I decided to just take the plunge and limped all the way to the Walmart in Prince George, covering in total that day more than seven hundred kilometres!

There were signs at the Walmart that overnight parking is not permitted, but there were so many RVs parked that I just ignored the signs. I’m such a rebel!!!

It was COLD in Prince George and I turned on the furnace for the first time. It would have been nice the other nights, but this night it was no luxury.

I didn’t sleep at all; it was just too light, noisy, and COLD. I was cranky and just wanted to get out of civilization. Last time I was in Prince George I stayed for a few days at Les Doll’s place, but that detour didn’t fit in with my itinerary this time around. I instead decided to go back to the Chasm and spend two nights there.

The morning was spent running errands, including a quick run into Canadian Tire where I actually ran into Les. What are the odds?!

It was sooo good to be back on the road, even with the construction coming out of Prince George. It was nice in a way to be back in familiar territory, especially since I was out of fresh water and driving with full black and grey tanks. My first stop of the day was going to be Quesnel, which has some of the best RV facilities in the west; a large day parking area, dump station, and potable water pump, all free. Taking on water was fine, but my holding tanks were frozen solid!

From Quesnel, I drove straight back to the Chasm, knowing I was racing the light. I pulled into the turnoff at bang on six. The turnoff was in worse shape than it was in the spring, very muddy and without a single level spot. I unhooked and drove Miranda into an area below the turnoff with a couple of fairly level places to park if you don’t mind doing a bit of a dance with your RV to get into the right position. I didn’t mind the work, finding this spot more suitable for a long stay than is the turnoff.

I spent a quiet evening reading and watching a movie. I had a rare good night’s sleep.

The next morning was bright and cold… and my fresh water tank was frozen solid. I had to laugh. I grabbed a bucket and made a couple of trips down to the creek to get some slush to melt for washing purposes and as well as some drinking water from the spring to boil for drinking. Life without amenities suits me, I’ve discovered. Had I not needed to haul water I would have probably not had any exercise that morning.

It was a quiet, homey day, where I got caught up on my sewing (!) and cleaning. Some people walked past Miranda a few times to take in the view of the Chasm, but no one bothered me. I was relaxed and pleased that I was only a day away from the ferry terminal, two days from Croft’s. My journey was practically over and I could relax…

This impressive toadstool was by the side of the Cassiar turnoff

I would not want to run into that guy in the mask in a dark alley…

reaching the end of the Cassiar highway

Moricetown Canyon

lunch stop in Smithers

break at a rest area

in case that’s not clear, the monument to which this plaque is attached features a stone from an English castle reputed to be the birthplace of King Arthur!

Miranda and the toad at the Chasm

the Chasm

truck’s still there from last time…

I love this view…

not a bad spot, really

dawn of one of the worst days of my life

October 16, 2009 by Rae

Somewhere on the Stewart-Cassiar

The night on the Tanzilla River was chilly, but I’d bundled up and was quite comfortable. It’s amazing how being just 200km due south of somewhere brings you into a new climate. The morning was overcast, damp, and snowy, but warm. I puttered around outside for a bit and then came in to make bannock and a pot of coffee, relishing the fact that I could leave as late as I wanted. I read for a couple of hours and headed out shortly before noon.

I thought it would be an uneventful exit from the campground. I just had to back the toad onto the laneway, drive Miranda carefully around the trees, hook up, and go. The first part of that plan ended with a thud as I backed the toad right smack into a tree. Why, praytell, can I back up a 31′ motorhome with blind spots the size of New Jersey and never hit anything, but backing up a small car ends up with damage more often than not?! Oh, the toad was just fine, not even a scratch or dent on it, but that poor tree. :LOL:

The next town was Iskut, where I gassed up at a station that was super easy to get in and out of. Like at all BC gas stations, there was a sign indicating that I needed to prepay, so I went in and asked to be charged for 150$ worth of fuel. The lady would not run my card through, disbelieving that I could take on that much. She told me to go fill up as much as I could while she held on to my card. Of course, I was able to take on that much fuel. 😀

The day was all about scenery. I stopped at a rest area at Bob Quinn Lake where I met an Alaskan part-timer, a feisty dame named Lynn who travels in a spacious class B with her adorable little dog Maya. Lynn has ‘been Outside fifty-six or fifty-seven times’, spending her winters somewhere warmer than Alaska. This day, she was zipping along as she was on schedule to be in northern Washington state in a few days. Our paths crossed a few more times, but she eventually left me in the dust shortly after the junction of the Cassiar (route 37) and the road leading to Hyder, Alaska (37A).

I planned to stop at an RV park called Bell 2 which promised 15A hookups, but changed my mind when they informed me that their rates were 31.50$. For 15A!!!!!!!! I was already tired by this point, but I decided to push on in the hopes of finding another cheap legal option. Coming close to six, with only a half hour of light left, I gave up and pulled off the highway at a turn out. It wound up being much too sloped and I resigned myself to continuing in the dark since the Milepost indicated that there would be no more turnouts for a great distance. Thankfully, it was wrong, as it occasionally is, and just a few clicks down the road I found a nice flat turnout, the far side of which was a respectable distance from the road.

Dinner was fettucini with homemade rosée sauce primavera. Who says that just because you’re spending the night on the side of the highway you can’t eat a first class dinner? 😀

The highlight of the evening was the incredible fuschia sunset I watched for almost a full half hour.

Don’t be fooled by the snow; the road was in great shape and it was a pleasure to drive.

This is one of my favourite landscapes; something about the white and the leaden sky and the trees for contrast…

So beautiful

Go RVing! In winter!

I was less than an hour from Tanzilla when the landscape and climate changed abruptly.

amber and emerald

Lynn with Maya

Red lights in the wilderness amuse me. 🙂

The turnout I was very grateful to find

October 16, 2009 by Rae

Flight From Nugget City

Leaving Nugget City as suddenly as I did ahead of the major dip in weather was a wise decision brought on by the not-so-wise decision I made last fall to stay at the RV park in Oliver. Whadya know, the gal can learn from her mistakes.

The owners were very understanding of my decision and paid me promptly. By the time my water hose was thawed and I’d taken on water and dumped my tanks it was close to 2PM. It was a beautiful, clear day; perfect driving conditions.

I decided to head south via route 37, the Stewart-Cassiar Highway. I’d heard mixed reviews about this road, with some people saying that it is a muddy, rutty mess while others claimed that it had much improved over the years. What finally made me decide to take it is that the Alaska Highway would have taken me more east than south and over high mountain passes while the Cassiar was almost a straight shot south, bettering my chances of finding improved weather conditions after only a few hours of driving:

routes

I hadn’t driven more than 5KM when I crossed over into British Columbia for the final time this year. As I stood there, between the signs on each side of the highway welcoming travelers to BC and the Yukon, I faced my adopted territory and thought of McArthur, vowing that I would return. 😀

The first section of the Cassiar was very scary. It was narrow, slippery, and steeply uphill. One particularly nasty incline made me consider turning back, but I’d done enough research to know that the worst was behind me. After, there were a lot of hairpin turns, but it was smooth going. The landscape was a kaleidoscope of emerald pine and amber poplar, snowy peaks and rocky hills. I could not stop gasping at the sheer humbling beauty of it all.

All the literature about the Cassiar and many signs along it state that it is unlawful to overnight anywhere but in established campgrounds. The only reason for this that I could find is that there is a concern about bears. I’m told that ‘everyone’ ignores the rules and boondocks on the Cassiar, but I decided to at least try to be legal. It was easy the first night since the Milepost mentioned a Lions Club campground with unserviced RV spots just south of Dease Lake on the Tanzilla River, roughly 200km from Nugget City. It sounded idyllic and the 10$ per site was a price I felt comfortable paying to avoid having the RCMP possibly ticket me.

The campground was indeed very beautiful, with sites tucked in between trees along a roaring river, but to call the sites RV spots was really stretching it. I would say that Miranda at 31′ was the absolute biggest RV I’d recommend trying to squeeze in there, and I only found one site wide enough for her. Moreover, the back-in only sites aren’t even remotely level.

I unhooked and then tried to manoeuvre Miranda into spot number four. Even though the site was super wide, I could not get her into it because of trees on the opposite side of the laneway. I noticed a clearing ahead and decide to turn around and approach the site from the other direction. This worked like a charm and Miranda slid in fairly easily.

This is where I came up with an idea that is really going to help me with my backing up. I’m going to get some bright flagging tape to tie around items I want to avoid. I notice that when I’m backing up I have a hard time identifying in a mirror the objects I’m trying to avoid, and my relation to them, especially if the objects are trees and there are a lot of them.

Once Miranda was tucked away, I tried to get her level, but failed since her muddy tires kept sliding off the the levelers when I tried to put her on more than two. The fridge was level enough, so I didn’t push it. I was only there for a night after all.

I spent a quiet evening reading a fantastic book I picked up at the Dawson dump called Parrot Pie for Breakfast. It is an anthology of first hand accounts of pioneer life written by women from the early 1600’s to the mid-1900’s in places all over the British Empire, from Burma to Sierra Leone, Canada to Australia. This book occupied several evenings after my departure from Nugget City.

I made chicken, potatoes, and veggies for dinner and used a new toy I picked up during my last shopping trip at the Dawson thrift store, a vegetable steamer. It’s one of those things I couldn’t justify spending 10$ on but thought would come in handy if I ever found one cheap. I used it to cook frozen veggies and it was the ideal method, rendering them nice and crisp.

Miranda history was made that night. I checked her useless sensors just for fun and for the first time, the grey and black tanks read empty!

This could be a pic for one of those cheesy Go RVing ads 🙂

Miranda and Pommette tucked into site number 4 at the Tanzilla River Lions Club campground

the Tanzilla River on a snowy (but not cold!) morning

trying to show just how not level Miranda was that night

the Tanzilla Lions Club campground

October 13, 2009 by Rae

Boondocking Success

I probably won’t be able to give a write up of my trip from Nugget City to Campbell River, complete with pictures, until I arrive, so in the meantime, I’ll just share my experiences with the house batteries this time around.

I noticed last spring that my house batteries were not charging while driving. I started by blaming the installation of the new truck battery, which proved to be correct as there was no voltage on the cable from the truck solenoid to the house batteries.

There were no loose wires around the truck battery, so I examined the connections from the solenoid to the battery and found them loose. I cleaned the terminals, applied conductive gel, and tightened the connections. After that, there was proper voltage going from the truck to the house batteries. But that only solved part of the problem as I found that the charging was not satisfactory, especially after long days of driving.

My next suspect was the refrigerator. I guessed that by putting it on ‘auto’ it was switching to battery power rather than LP and that I was draining the battery as I drove.

When I left Nugget City, I purposely left the fridge on ‘auto’ and when I arrived at my spot for the night, my voltage read 12.3. I had left with a fully charged battery and driven almost three hundred kilometres. This did not seem right. I switched the fridge to LP. The battery voltage dipped to about 12.0 overnight as I left the inverter on to recharge the laptop.

The next day, I stopped after about one hundred kilometres of driving and my battery was at 12.6, fully charged! This confirmed to me that my charging problem was resolved. When I parked for the night at the turnout, I still had a fully charged battery. However, I had no sooner turned on the furnace than my battery was at a 50% discharge evidenced by an 11.1V reading!!! I turned off the furnace and the battery reading increased to a more reasonable 11.5 to 11.6 range, more than enough for a comfortable night.

I had recently checked the distilled water levels for the batteries and found them to be satisfactory, but decided that maybe they did need a bit of topping up. They each took on a little water, not enough to make a difference I thought, but I was in for a surprise.

I parked in Prince George with the battery at 12.6V. I ran the furnace all night while recharging the laptop and the battery levels dipped down to the 11.6 to 11.8V range and stayed there steadily.

From Prince George, I returned to the Chasm. My voltage was at 12.6V upon parking and 12.1V upon going to bed after running the furnace and charging my laptop. I left the furnace on all night and awoke to a voltage of 11.8. During the day, the only direct use I made of my batteries was to charge my laptop and the voltage hovered in the 11.6 to 11.8V range. It was a nice sunny day and without doing any math, so take this with a grain of salt, I suspect that I was getting enough juice out of the 15W solar panel to compensate for the laptop charge.

I stayed a second day at the Chasm just for a rest and my battery remained at the 11.6 to 11.8V reading right straight up to my departure (so, two nights of running the furnace). I drove only about a hundred kilometres, including careening down a mountain, before my stop for the night where my battery was at 11.5. It was at 11.3 when the tow truck came this morning.

It seems that my batteries rapidly discharge into the 11V readings, but then stay there steadily. I was glad to be hooked to power tonight, but would have had enough juice for running the furnace.

The generator will be useful to help me boondock in one place for several nights, but I now know that I can boondock from place to place with a small of driving in between each and still be perfectly comfortable. This knowledge is very comforting. I’m starting to feel like a seasoned RVer. 🙂

October 3, 2009 by Rae

Nugget City Projects

Here, for your viewing pleasure, are pictures of some of the work I’ve done at Nugget City. The owner has enough projects left to last me until doomsday and I know he’d love to have a certain painter on staff full-time. Oh well. 🙂

This was one of the biggest jobs I did. The whole front of the restaurant in May was covered in mounds of dirt. Using a shovel, rake, and wheelbarrow, I leveled and cleaned up the space of rocks and twigs.

The deck that ate up a week in May.

Just two of the several dozen planters I weeded in the spring, planted, and reweeded in the fall.

My current project is restaining these posts.

The back of the Ore House. I did two coats each on the white trim and the siding. There’s one coat of white left to do.

The fence that ate up several days and a shocking number of gallons of stain.

This garage door was sky blue when I arrived and driving the owner NUTS. Staff was relieved when I arrived since it meant they would no longer have to hear complaints about the blue door!

The painting project that started it all! I repainted the yellow strip around the island.

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A Life By Design

"Sometimes in life, we reach to a right place by departing from a wrong port with a wrong ship!" ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Accommodation

Plans Undone and a Chasm Respite

Somewhere on the Stewart-Cassiar

Flight From Nugget City

Boondocking Success

Nugget City Projects