Travel Guides | Stoness Travel Blog

Exploring the Chilcotin Plateau

Heading west from Williams Lake, British Columbia, spectacular Highway 20 takes the adventurer across the ever-changing scenery of the Chilcotin Plateau. This plateau fills the space between the Coastal Range and the interior.

The variation in topography is what makes up the exciting variety in the scenery.

You may not realize it, but the largest ranch in North America was the Gang Ranch.

It had cowboys tending cows over 1,000, 000 acres of the plateau. Several large ranches still operate in the area where seeing old fashioned log snake fences, and herds of cattle and horses will not be that unusual.

The traveller will enjoy the rolling grassland scenery, interspersed by canyons and cliffs. Lakes, streams, and rivers attract the fishermen, canoers, and those who like to sail. Distant whitecapped mountains draw the hikers, and also those who want to spend some time on a long trip into the wilderness on horseback.

If you want to camp, you will find a large number of campgrounds. The resorts attract people who want comfortable accommodations in rustic areas with great views. Certainly the wilderness ambiance permeates the atmosphere of the entire trip across the plateau. Escott Bay Resort, and Chilcotin Lodge are two, among many, that fit the requirements of a great stay, and also have a few campsites.

As you head west you pass into Tweedsmuir Provincial Park, and drop down a great hill into the Bella Coola valley, and a completely different type of scenery. At Stuie, near the bottom, you will find the Tweedsmuir Park Lodge, famed for its grizzly bear viewing. And in winter, even more famous for its skiing.

The 450 kilometre drive from Williams Lake to Bella Coola has long been part of one of British Columbia’s most popular scenic circle drives. Instead of returning to

Williams Lake, drivers would board the ferry at Bella Coola, cross to Vancouver Island and make their way via another ferry to Vancouver.

This circle drive is facing disaster! The BC government is cancelling the ferry, apparently with total disregard to the damage it will do to the tourist accommodations along the Chilcotin route. It’s difficult to imagine how a government could spend so much money promoting tourism and with a single act, destroy everything it had built.

No matter what they do, they cannot destroy the experience of a visit to the Chilcotin, although they can make it a great deal more difficult.

Happy RVing !

For more than four decades James Stoness has travelled the roads of North America, photographing and writing about what he has seen. His travel articles and beautiful pictures have been published in several magazines and newspapers. He is also the author of five western novels. Visit his website at: www.stonesstravelguides.com

British Columbia’s Nemiah Valley

West of Williams Lake, British Columbia, there is a remote valley. It is a valley of great beauty backdropped by white crested mountains. This is the Nemiah Valley, the homeland of the Xeni gwet’in (honey gweteen) , one of the six T’silhqot’in bands of aboriginals. The forests broken occasionally

White tipped mountains add to the beauty of hte Nemiah Valley.

by sparkling lakes, and rivers, have been providing food, and medicine to these people for hundreds of years. Their traditional food has been salmon, moose, and deer meat. Their vegetables were the wild potato, balsam root, and other plants they learned to eat, and some of them they used for medicine.
In 1994, the government created Ts’yl?os Provincial Park, a large protected area of over 233,000 hectares, to protect the land

around Chilko Lake. Chilko Lake is the highest fresh water lake in Canada and is known for it beautiful blue waters and the two mountain ranges that close it in. the lake is more than 60 kilometres long and narrow, making it a prime target for high winds moving down the lake. It can quickly go from peaceful, to having 5 foot high waves and is not a lake for novice boaters. Its steep shoreline makes it difficult to get of the off water for shelter from the winds.

Konni Lake Campground area en route to the Provincial Park.

You access the valley over a long, sometimes rough, gravel road, and drive for long distances surrounded by forests of aspen, poplar, and evergreens with few places for long views. Once you are down in the valley you start to see the white tipped mountains in the distance flanked by endless green forests.
There are a few cattle ranches along the way, and in many places you will see the traditional pole snake fence. This is an

fairly easy fence to construct as it uses the tree trunks intact, and laid end to end.
You may glimpse herds of the wild horses that still roam the Chilcotin Plateau. Or you may see roaming herds of horses from a nearby ranch.
The Taseko River you cross will be quite wild, and turbulent, and grey in colour, because of the silt from the glaciers on the mountains. The white colour is often called ‘glacial milk’. There is a small campground at Konni Lake, not too far from the administration area, with a great view.
If you want to get away from the pavement and enjoy a quiet day or two, you will find it here.

Happy RVing!
For more than four decades James Stoness has travelled the roads of North America, photographing and writing about what he has seen. His travel articles and beautiful pictures have been published in several magazines and newspapers. He is also the author of five western novels. Visit his website at: www.stonesstravelguides.com

Barkerville’s Waterwheel Show

British Columbia has many reasons for you to visit, and one worth paying attention to is a visit to the Historic Town of Barkerville. When great finds of gold happened in the west, Barkerville was at the forefront.

You can tell that this fellow never does anything wrong.

Gold was being rooted out of the streams all along the Fraser River. When Billy Barker arrived at Williams Creek, 1862, he found miners already abandoning claims and heading for new areas. They had panned the surface gold, and even dug down a few feet, and finding nothing, they had had enough and were ready to move on. Barker staked land along Williams Creek, perhaps even bought a few claims from those leaving the area,

and he started to dig down. There was an abundance of scoffers about his great digs, and with good reason. He dug several pits, and found nothing, and that’s what everyone had told him. “You are wasting your time. Move on to some new areas before all the good claims are gone.”
It must be realized that digging a pit down through accumulated river sediments was not a simple task. You needed to build a solid wood frame on the sides of your pit to prevent a cave-in from

burying the digging crew. Also, the lower you went, the wetter the digging, and there was even more potential of cave-ins. You had to send up the muck, sand, and rocks in buckets pulled up using a type of tripod and pulley. The object of the pit was to dig to bedrock in an old river channel, and see if gold might be located in the crevices and adjacent sand or clay. Once at the bottom you would explore sideways along the solid rock by building a tunnel. This is not work for the claustrophobic.

Winch for Lifting Bucket of Gravel, and people

In late summer of 1862 they were down 52 feet when they saw the glint of gold. Their digging had landed them right on top of a rich gold lead. This rich lead was extremely rich. One day they recovered as much as 50 ounces of gold in a pail full of sand and clay. The gold bearing zone was thick and estimates the eventually over 2 billion dollars of gold in today’s prices, came out of the streambed.
Removing the paydirt was made easier using the Cornish Waterwheel. At Barkerville there is a tremendously popular skit between a worker, and a manager, showing how the waterwheel worked. The role of the miner is well done by a man who has been doing it for several years, and he has his actions and facial expressions down pat.

He shows how the waterwheel powers the cable that holds the bucket that brings up the paydirt. It was also used to move the miners up and down from their moist and dripping work area. It also passed water over the sluice box that contained the pay dirt, separating the gravel and sand from the gold which collected in places along the bottom of the sluice box.
Make plans for next year, and be one of the more than 60,000 visitors to the Historic Town of Barkerville.