Fantasy Caravan Day 14 - Dawson Creek to Fort Nelson, BC

On Friday, we left Dawson Creek (our site at Northern Lights RV Park)...

... heading north and a little west toward Fort Nelson, British Columbia. The bridge that we were coming up to in this picture is the "new" version of the wooden bridge that we had seen on Thursday (https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2024/07/fantasy-caravan-day-13-dawsons-creek-bc.html).

Looking up the river toward where the wooden bridge is located (it is far enough around a corner that it isn't visible from the new bridge).

I was trying to get a picture of a NorthwesTel microwave tower. Our Milepost guide told us: "Alaska Highway travelers will be seeing many of these towers as they drive north. The original Cantel land line between Grande Prairie, AB, and the YT-AK border was replaced by 42 microwave relay stations by the Canadian National Telecommunications (now NorthweTel) in 1963."

There was another milepost point marked back in Dawson Creek where the U.S. Army Alaska Highway Control Station had been in 1942-43 with information about Cantel Repeater Station: "843rd Signal Services Battalion of the U.S. Army Signal Corps was given the task of setting up, operating, and maintaining the telephone link, called the Cantel system, between Edmonton and Fairbanks." Another milepost location indicated: "Mile 2 was the site of 1 of 28 repeater stations built by the Army in 1942-43. The 2,850-mile line stretched from Dunvegan, northwest of Edmonton, AB, to Fairbanks, AK, and included a 600-mile circuit to Norman Wells. According to John Schmidt's This Was No #@&! Picnic, each repeater station was a small community in itself, with a crew to man the circuits 24 hours a day and tones of equipment to keep messages moving to some 1,600 army phones and teletypes. One of the world's longest open-wire toll circuits at the time, the Cantel system was the forerunner of today's communications systems."

With Carl's background including work with Ma Bell for much of his career, he found this interesting!

You might notice that it is looking pretty hazy out... it had looked like it may rain (and was raining a little) as we left the campground, but it soon became quite smoky.

View over Peace River Valley to the northeast -- pretty much obscured by smoke.

Peace River Bridge - we had been cautioned that it had a metal grating deck, which could become slick in rain.

The Peace River Bridge is the longest water span on the Alaska Highway. We had heard from the Dawson Creek Visitor Center folks that the original bridge collapsed in 1957 after erosion undermined one of the piers. Traffic was diverted to ferries, and then, for a couple of years, vehicle traffic was allowed to flow (one direction at a time) across the railroad bridge that had been fitted with additional structures to allow highway vehicles to drive on it. This sufficed until the new Peace River Bridge (the one we crossed) was built in 1960.

As we continued on, the smoke continued.

Crossing the Sikanni Chief River Bridge

Looking down at the river -- according to the Milepost, the original wooden Sikanni bridge was built in 72 hours (or 84 hours, accounts differ) on October 28, 1942, by the African American 95th Engineer General Service Regiment. It was the first permanent structure completed on the Alaska Highway.

The Sikanni Chief River flows east and then north into the Fort Nelson River, which flows into the Liard River, and on to the Mackenzie River, which empties into the Arctic Ocean.

Meanwhile, the smoke got thicker -- we would judge how dense it was by how many utility poles we could see at any time along the roadway. It got down to 3-4 poles.

Crossing the Muskwa River bridge, the lowest point on the Alaska Highway.

The Muskwa River also flows into the Fort Nelson River and thus eventually into the Arctic Ocean.

At the lowest point on the Alaska Highway

We made it to our campsite at Triple G Hideaway. It is pretty smoky, so, even though the weather is a pleasant temperature, we're keeping the rig closed up and have our HEPA filter running.

I found a website that has smoke information (https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/). We traveled from Dawson Creek (bottom right side of screen marked with blue arrow) to Fort Nelson (top middle left). It indicates that there is no smoke in Dawson Creek, but we started smelling smoke and experiencing haze within about 20 miles of leaving the campground. We were rather shocked to be driving in smoke for 280 miles today, and it doesn't look much better for tomorrow. Carl says, "I thought we booked non-smoking seats!"

We're hoping we'll have some clear overnight weather since the recent solar flares make the potential to see the northern lights very high... but not visible for us when the sky is totally covered with clouds!