Grizzly bear with cub
Tonight we are in the King Edward motel in the border town of Stewart, BC. This morning it was starting to get cloudy, and as we drove south along the Cassiar highway, it began to get more and more cloudy, and eventually started raining just about noon. It rained off and on for the rest of the day, more on than off, and so we changed our plans.
Along the way we stopped at “Jade City”, a city in name only, as there are 25 permanent residents. It is the outlet shop for the jade mines in the area, which apparently are some of the largest suppliers of jade worldwide. They had many interesting carvings, most of them far out of our price range, including an inukshuk of jade that stood about a metre high.
Our plans had been to camp at Meziadin Provincial Park, and drive in to Stewart tomorrow, but because of the rain we decided we’d go in today and try to get a hotel room. We phoned from a payphone (no cell phone coverage up here) at the small hamlet of Iskut and made a reservation for a room with a kitchenette. It is good that we did, since it is really wet here today.
We had no intention of camping here as it is famous for the number of bears, both black and Alaska brown bears. We stopped at the information centre, and the lady at the desk suggested we go up right away to the bear viewing area, as there has a mother grizzly with cub visiting there in the evening. We drove up and just as we got there the ranger said that the bear had just arrived. We got some great video of the two bears eating the dead Pink salmon in the river. There were many salmon swimming up stream, but the bears mostly just ignored them and gorged on the many carcasses of dead fish that were in the water.
The bears are across the border just a couple of miles up the road in Hyder, Alaska. There isn’t a US customs post, but you do have to check in with Canada customs to get back. I guess there are very few people living on the US side, and if you got in there is no where to go except back out through Canada.
Its about sixty five kilometres in to Stewart from the Cassiar highway. On the drive in we saw two black bears. Neither paid much attention to us, and one just stood in the ditch grazing on the grass as we took its picture. There are also many glaciers along the way, and a lot of waterfalls running down the sheer cliffs of the mountains from glaciers on top. Stewart doesn’t have a very cold winter since it is right on the ice free “Portland Canal”, a ninety mile long fjord connected to the Pacific. It does get a lot of snow though, the sign in the tourist information centre claiming it to be ninety two feet, the greatest anywhere in the world.