Onward to Iskut!

The Cassiar-Stewart Highway represents all that we looked for in this trip to Alaska - even though we haven't set foot in Alaska beyond Hyder.  On Saturday, May 21, 2016, we moved from Stewart, B.C. to Iskut, B.C., a drive of some 190 miles through some of the most picturesque wilderness we have ever seen.  The mountains, lakes, rivers and forests rival anything we have seen in the Rockies - even the Alps.  The following photo is representative of the highway itself, which just takes off north from nowhere to nowhere:

We stopped to change drivers at Mehan Lake Provincial Rest Area, a picturesque roadside pull-out beside a beautiful mountain lake.  At this time of year, the mountains still have appreciable snow on their peaks, which adds to the visual delight:

This is the wilderness, too, that harbors wildlife, and we saw our third bear just munching in the grass by the side of the road.  Unfortunately, our diesel truck is loud, and he alerted to us when we were nearly a quarter mile away.  By the time we could get close enough to him to snap a photo, he was already moving quickly into the bushes.  It seems we're destined to get lots of bear-butt photos on the road.

The scenery is so striking that it makes the long moves seem short.  It didn't seem but a beautiful blink of the eye before we arrived at Mountain Shadow RV Resort, which has to take the prize of the grandest vista of any campground yet on this trip North to Alaska.  This is what we saw from our campsite:

In the center distance in the photo above, tucked below Mount Poelzer, is lovely Kluachon Lake (more about that lake in the next blog entry), which is a pleasant half-mile hike down from the campground.  The next morning for our coffee walk, we hiked down to the lake to see what could be seen.

Our breaths were taken away by the view south down the valley, a view that we enjoyed when we fished the next day and which you'll see in that blog entry.  But this was our view back up at the campground, with our truck and fifth wheel nestled in on the hillside:

Baxter has decided that this is perhaps his favorite campground.  He cries to go outside, and when we let him out, he spends the hours in the tall dry grass, sniffing out mousies, pouncing on imaginary animals in the crunch long grass blades, or simply presiding over his sunny domain:

Seeing Baxter's delight, and the pleasures Kluachon Lake offers, we had a feeling we would feel a lot like Baxter about this place the campground owner calls, "A Little Heaven in the Wilderness."