Boya Lake, BC
Tonight we are back into British Columbia after travelling south along the Cassiar Highway. It was cold last night, but sometime after midnight it began to cloud over, and then the temperature stabilized, and didn’t go below freezing. Fortunately it didn’t rain, or it would have been very chilly.
We saw a small black bear along the way today before we left the Yukon. It stood in the right hand ditch for a while, then walked onto the highway and stopped, but as soon as it saw us it took off across the road and into the bush on the left side. We also stopped early this morning at Teslin Lake. It is a very large lake, as most of them here seem to be.
After lunch we started south on the Cassiar into BC. The highway is supposed to be a lot of gravel, but we haven’t hit any yet. I saw smoke just off the road shortly after we left the junction with the Alaska Highway. Very soon we were into an area recently blackened by forest fire. This went on for several kilometers, and you could smell the charred bush in the air. As we got farther and farther south you could see patches of smoke off in distance in the burned area. Then just before we reached the end of the burn there was one area that was actively burning, just off the edge of the road. A large spruce was aflame, and the needles would explode in a burst of fire, until shortly the whole tree was burning.
That was the end of the fire, and after that we continued on south to this park. The lake is very beautiful, not large, but parts of it are emerald green and reflect the low mountains that surround it. It seems to be quite popular, as there were quite a number of campers who arrived in their vehicles after we got here. We hiked for a ways around the lake after our tent was set up, to a place where there was a small beaver dam on a narrow channel joining two lakes. I walked across the dam, which wasn’t very solid, but good enough to get across.
Tonight is calm, and there are a few clouds. Across the lake against the mountains it is raining, and there is a part of a rainbow in the golden glow of evening. The sun has set and it gets cool once the sun drops, as it now has below the mountains. Although it is still light, the power of the sun is gone, and the air is cool.