Counting the Miles

Friday, August 17, 2007
CACHE CREEK, B.C. — Tonight we are staying in the heart of cowboy country. Cache Creek is south of Williams Lake, and west of Kamloops, in a setting straight out of the western movies. There are dry hills studded with sage grass and many a ranch outlined with weathered wooden fences, where horses graze for a few blades of grass and cows cluster in the shade of a clump of trees. A creek meanders through the valley, and the hills rise up, all tan-coloured, with pine trees, both green and rust, silhouetted against the sky.
The desert-like terrain is broken up from time to time with startling green fields of grain and other crops, rendered that way by great spurting irrigation systems. Apparently the soil is quite fertile here as long as it gets sufficiently watered, and there are enough rivers and creeks around to make this possible. The contrast between dusty brown and emerald green is stark.
We got off to a bit later start today, since we had a relatively short distance to cover. Val hauled out the air compressor to inflate the trailer and truck tires. Some of them had softened a bit in all the tough driving we have done the past few weeks, so he got them in fighting form once again.
It was a lovely fresh morning, and the first town we came to after leaving McLeese Lake was Williams Lake, named after the Shuswap Chief Willyum. It’s a large town of 12,000 where there is an annual rodeo, the Williams Lake Stampede, that draws cowboys from all over Canada and the US.
Shortly afterward, we came to 150 Mile House. The name comes from this settlement’s early days, when it was a stopover during the Cariboo gold rush. They started the count from Lillooet to the south, which was Mile 0 of the journey. Nearly every town we went through after 150 Mile House was a something- Mile House! There was 108 Mile Ranch, 100 Mile House, 83 Mile House, and 70 Mile House. (Just outside of 100 Mile House was the 99 Mile Restaurant!) This part of the country must have gone into fits when Canada adopted the metric system!
A couple of other neat town names that we read on distance signs by the road were Likely and Horsefly. And yesterday we passed through Cinema!
We had a nice lunchtime stop at 108 Mile Ranch, where there is a small cluster of old log buildings from gold rush days. They have a post office, a school house, a blacksmith shop and a barn, as well as a goldminer’s cabin and a museum. Inside the cabin, there were bunks, an old stove, and a tin bathtub that had to be filled with kettles full of hot water — a tedious job that didn’t happen all that often in the bush!
Log buildings are frequent sights along the highway in this region — which is known as Cariboo. We passed several log-building establishments, where great stacks of logs are cleaned to a gleaming golden colour and carefully stacked one on top of the other into beautiful homes. Some are very simple, but others have elaborate dormers or porticoes over the front door. We saw one building set back on a hillside that looked like it was going to be a conference centre or something. It was huge, and all made of beautiful golden logs. 100 Mile House calls itself "the hand-crafted log home capital of North America", but all we could see along the road as we drove through were gas stations and fast-food places, none of which had so much as a visible twig in their construction!
More evidence of the mountain pine beetle could be seen on the hillsides. The bugs seem to favour mature lodgepole pines, and the milder winters have meant that the larvae aren’t killed off by freezing temperatures any more. There were several hillsides where all the diseased trees had been cut down and stacked in huge piles. In other places, there were great rust-coloured stripes across the green hillsides where the trees continue to be ravaged.
The flat plains we passed earlier in the day were soon replaced by more hills, and at Chasm Creek Valley there was a turnout from the highway where you could look out over a deep valley that rose up to hillsides striped with different colours of red, brown, yellow and purple, caused by varying layers of lava flow from thousands of years ago. This section of British Columbia has certainly been a change from terrain we have seen in the north.