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Dee and Cal spent the past six nights in the Liard River basin (including two nights at Watson Lake). Having crossed the Rocky Mountain Trench, they headed into the Cassiar Mountain Range today. Tonight they plan to spend the night at or near the Continental Divide.
The name Cassiar is derived from the word "kaska", a corruption of the Indian name of McDame Creek (a tributary of the Dease River, which drains into the Liard River), where the Kaska Indians assembled in summer to fish and trade. One anthropologist says "kaska" means "old moccasins", a term of scorn that Tahltan Indians applied to the neighbouring Kaska Indians in the Dease River area.
There is also a ghost town named Cassiar, which was a small company-owned asbestos mining town located at the red star in the map above. The town, which had a population of 1,500 in its heyday, had two schools, two churches, a small hospital, a theatre, swimming pool, recreation centre and a hockey rink.
Dee said that "Peterson Mountain" was a much harder challenge than Steamboat Rock, but when I tried to find the location, nothing came up in the search engine. So I did an elevation graph of the road between Toad River and Muncho Lake. Based on this, I am guessing that Peterson Mountain must be about at the red balloon on the Terrain view above.
If you have been following the River List you will have noticed that the rivers up to and including the Missouri drain into the Atlantic Ocean via the Gulf of Mexico, while all those after it in the list drain into the Arctic Ocean, hence a continental divide, the so called Northern or Laurentian Divide. Still not exactly sure where they are, we can assume Dee and Cal are approaching or have passed the Great Continental Divide, beyond which the rivers all flow into the Pacific Ocean. Travel plans posted before they started call for Dee and Cal to return by way of Glacier National Park (or near it), where the Northern and the Great Divides converge in a "triple point".
Being just a vicarious triker, I am free to explore places inaccessible to Dee and Cal. Don't get me wrong, I'd rather be with them, but since I'm not, I will take a little side trip. The Kechika River will not make it to our "river list" because the trikers will neither cross it nor follow it, but it deserves a blog entry nonetheless because: (1) it flows into the Liard River, which the trikers will cross (and then follow) soon, (2) most of its course is within the Rocky Mountain Trench, which I've already written about, and (3) its pristine watershed is home to moose, caribou, stone sheep, grizzly and black bear, timber wolf, (which we have encountered before) as well as elk and mountain goat.
In the image here, I have redrawn the Alaska Highway in red to make it more visible. The green balloon is where Dee and Cal stayed last night. The Kechica River rises near the lower center of the image and flows northwest before curving toward the Liard, which it joins at the Alaska Highway. You can click on the image to make it larger, or if you go to the Google map, you can zoom in and out as you wish.
What makes this river valley especially special are "the wildlife populations and ecosystems which flourish around and along the river. ... Not only is the river corridor pristine, but the valley as a whole remains largely free from roads, leaving the Kechika River as the largest remaining undisturbed watershed in British Columbia." I would love to quote the entire website, but you owe it to yourself to follow the link above. Also read about the Denetiah Provincial Park.
On the High Plains and into the Canadian prairie, the Terrain View of the map has, with notable exceptions, been mostly monotonous. Not so now. I have been watching the terrain ahead as Dee and Cal approach the Northern Rockies, and for a few days now I have noticed a feature that seems highly unusual, a deep valley in a perfectly straight line for hundreds of miles, the orientation of which is an almost uniform 150/330 degree geographic north vector. Today I discovered that this is the Rocky Mountain Trench, primarily the result of faulting (with minimal glacial carving). What you see in the image above is the northern half of the Trench, beginning at the Yukon/B.C. border. It continues at just a slightly different angle to the southeast all the way to Montana.
For orientation, Fort Nelson is in middle of the upper right quadrant (at the confluence of three rivers). The town of Watson Lake would be at the top edge (or barely above it) and toward the left. Prince George would be just off the bottom edge and toward the right. The large lake in the middle of the Trench is Lake Williston on the Peace River. To the northwest, the Tintina Trench continues on through the Yukon to Alaska.
The mountains east of the Trench are the Rocky Mountains, but to the west of it are the Cassiar Mountains in the north and the Omineca Mountains a little further south. We will check out the Trench again when the trikers come back through it a little further south on their way home.
This is the Google Maps Terrain View of the British Columbia Rocky Mountains ahead of the Trikers.
Dee and Cal spent the past six nights in the Liard River basin (including two nights at Watson Lake). Having crossed the Rocky Mountain Trench, they headed into the Cassiar Mountain Range today. Tonight they plan to spend the night at or near the Continental Divide.
