Aug 29 – To Smithers, BC

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We moved a short distance south on the highway to Smithers. It was pretty cloudy during the drive. There were some mountains there but we couldn’t see much of them.

Our first stop was the Moricetown Canyon on the Bulkley River.

This is a place where the First Nations people usually catch a lot of salmon but today they seemed to be doing a survey. There were two guys with nets that would rope themselves off and going out to the edge of the rocks. Each dip of the net would result in many salmon.

He handed them off to someone else that ran them up to the top where they were weighed, measured and then dumped back in the river.

We have seen a lot of signs about the Enbridge pipeline around here.

On down the highway to Smithers.

We hit the visitor’s center and then got settled into our campsite at the municipal campground by the river.

After a quick lunch we headed out to hike the short trail to Twin Falls. It was a short drive up the mountains to the west but as we got closer it got darker and darker. When we pulled into the parking lot it started rain pretty hard. We sat and thought about it for a while but said why not. We got all our rain gear on and off we went. 

There is a glacier higher up the mountain and these two waterfalls are from the melt water. The camera is in a plastic bag again as you can see in the corner below.

The falls are about 500 feet tall but it is hard to tell from the pictures. The left one had a lot of water.

The right one had a lot less water but was more interesting. It had a series of ledges where the water seemed to pool for a bit and then flow over each edge in waves.

I wish we could have gotten a bit closer.

The clouds started to come down and cover the tops of the falls.

By now the rain had stopped here and we headed back down to the valley into the sun.

Our next stop was Driftwood Canyon and Fossil Bed. It was up the other side of the valley and of course it started to rain as we got closer. It was very crowded.

It was also a major disappointment. All the guide books and brochures said to come here. We kept looking for the canyon and then finally looked up and realized we were in it but couldn’t see the walls for the trees. And then this was the fossil bed.

The rocks with the fossil are those light coloured rocks way up on the hill. Some of the rocks had fallen down the hill.

They are mostly plant and insect fossils here. The sign said to look for dark spots on the rocks. Even though you are not supposed to take any, I think the rocks were pretty well picked over because we couldn’t find much.

This is the best we could do. I have no idea what it was, if anything.

By now we were kind of cold so we headed back to town.

We drove down main street and even though it was only 4 pm we saw a sushi place and got a craving so we had an early dinner.

Today the weather worked the exact opposite from how we are usually treated. It rained while we were out and the sun came back once we in the RV for the evening.