Canada : Monday 13th August 2007 - Wells Gray Provincial Park and Clearwater Lake

We left our campsite at Jasper, picked up some groceries and fuel in Jasper town and headed east towards Mount Robson National Park, with Wells Gray Provincial Park as our ultimate destination. It was time to leave Alberta and head back into British Columbia. Set those watches back an hour!

Our first short stop was at the Mount Robson National Park infocentre. We read about and of course gazed appreciatively at the Rockies' largest mountain. It looks just like a proper mountain! Big, pointy and snowy white.

The drive to Wells Gray continued through the usual splendid Canadian scenery, getting greener and softer as we descended from the Rockies. At the entrance to the park, we stopped at the info centre as usual and had a picnic lunch in the grassy grounds. Afterwards, we crossed the road to a log cabin style cafe that sold ice cream. We all ordered double scoops of various flavours. Jack's came first.... but when we saw the *massive* amount of ice cream (each "scoop" seemed to consist of about 6 normal sized scoops!), we downgraded to single scoops... apart from Jack of course; it was too late for that. Jack had no concerns about this :-)

Turning off the highway, we headed north into the park, destination Clearwater lake, about 50km in. We stopped on route to look at some unspectacular (relative to other things we'd seen) waterfalls and then continued. About half way, the road surface changed to gravel, which made for fun 4WD driving.

On arrival at the campsite at the southerly tip of the 20km long Clearwater Lake, we camped. About 50m from the site, the lake drains via a fairly powerful waterfall. It was evidently quite shallow at that point as a fisherman had waded 100m out into the lake.

Martin and Jack decided that they would not stay in the camp site. They had something more adventurous in mind, which we'd read about and heard about at the info centre. We packed up the two man tent, the mini-trangia spirit stove, sleeping bags, food and water (amongst other things) and walked up to the foot of the lake where we hired a Canadian style open canoe for 24 hours. We then had to hike for 45 minutes along the lake, each carrying quite a load, to the point where the canoe itself was racked. The canoes were kept away from the foot of the lake because of the danger posed by the waterfall of course. From there, we loaded the canoe up and paddled north for another 30 minutes and over to the far side of the lake. There are a number of campsites on the shore of the lake at various intervals, 30 minutes paddling time being the nearest. The sites can only be reached by canoe. Our site had only three pitches, each with its own little beach and 100m away from each other. On arrival, we paddled hard into the shore like pros and Jack leapt out to drag the canoe in. Martin followed and we got the canoe safely onto shore and our kit out.

Out area was in a clearing in the thick forest and had a level spot for the tent, a fire grate and a picnic table. With Jack's help to get started, Martin got the tent up whilst Jack went collecting firewood, largely drift wood from along the shoreline. Soon we had a blazing fire going. We played games with Jack's frisbee thing in the clearing and then Martin made pasta in two passes using the one man spirit stove, the mini Trangia. After dinner, we played more frisbee games and then as the light started to fade we played cards and ate huge numbers of cookies :-)

As soon as we knew we'd finished with everything other than those items we could safely store in the tent, without attracting the unwelcome attention of local wildlife, we packed everything into our two bags and Martin threw a climbing rope over a high branch in a tree, connected it to the bags with a handy karabiner and then hauled the bags high off the ground where they would be out of reach.

Just before we decided to get some sleep, we spent some time on our beach, watching bats swoop down to catch insects. One of the bats nearly flew right into Martin's head!

The camp site had a chemical toilet shared by the three pitches, set way back into the forest. We only had one light with us, a helmet lamp, and so we walked close together into the dark, dark forest in search of it. En route we saw a couple of toads, a protected species in fact.

Switching the light off in the tent was fun....it was *pitch* black!

Mount Robson.

Mountain of ice cream.

There were huge numbers of butterflies on way in to Wells Gray.

Hard to see in the above reduced size photo, but there's an angler wading right out in the lake about 100m from the shore. He's about 50m from the powerful waterfall that drains the lake.

Jack, preparing to paddle to the camping area on the far side of the lake and about 30 minutes north.

And we're on our way.....

Our canoe, safely beached.

Home for the night.

Jack collecting driftwood for the fire.

Jack, Martin and... no-one else.

Fire lit, we're ready for an evening of isolation... and fun.

As the sun went down, the lake got even more beautiful.