Around Dawson Creek

Wow.  Two-and-a-half months.  All the way up through Alaska and back down the Alaska Highway to Dawson Creek, British Columbia.  Mile "0" of the Alaska Highway.  The southernmost point of all that WWII highway construction.  The beginning of the RV road-lover's dream, as big a dream as Route 66.  We had to take a selfie to record the occasion:

We lingered a few days in Dawson Creek, and on August 10, 2016, we drove some 30 miles east, back up the Alaska Highway to see the Kiskatinaw Bridge.  The Kiskatinaw Provincial Park was established east of the present Alaska Highway, along the old alignment of the highway, at the site of the bridge. The bridge was built during the Second World War, when the Alaska Highway was started. Due to the topography along each side of the river where the Alaska Highway had to cross it, the bridge, which took nine months to be completed, had to be constructed in a curved shape.  It was built entirely of wood, and remarkably still stands today and supports trucks as heavy as ours.

But we didn't want to drive it - we want to WALK it!

After crossing over and back, we hiked down to the day use area of the provincial park, which lies immediately below the bridge, and looked up at it:

The Kiskatinaw River is otherwise unremarkable.  Some say the fishing can be good, but the day we visited, it was a muddy chocolate brown and didn't look inviting for fisherman or fish.

After visiting the bridge, we headed back into Dawson Creek to visit its Pioneer Park, which, much like Pioneer Park in Fairbanks, is a collection of historic buildings from the Dawson Creek area:

The site is extremely well curated.  The buildings have been well preserved and rehabbed.  Almost all of the buildings contained artifacts from the earliest era of Dawson Creek.  The artifacts were gathered appropriately in a building associated with their use.  Most notably, the blacksmith shop was the original blacksmith shop owned by a local early resident, and it was filled with all of his original equipment and supplies.  Because there were some types of artifacts for which a surviving, original historic building wasn't available, some buildings were newly constructed to suit the artifacts, but in the style of the older ones.

While the site is not huge, we found it as interesting as some of the famous reconstructed towns such as Colonial Williamsburg, Upper Canada Village, and the like:

What most impressed us about Dawson Creek is how much farming and ranching are the centers of life there, as they have been for decades.  We hadn't expected to see such green, rolling hills of farmland.  It was entirely appropriate that the city is home to a stampede and rodeo (more on that in another blog entry).

And let's just say the weather and clouds provide some unique and amazing scenery, all by themselves: