(from New York Times Magazine, February 27, 2000)

British Columbia's Long Road to the Far North
The Cassiar Highway runs through nearly 450 miles of fierce wilderness
By ROBERT STONE

A gas station on the corner of Route 16, at Kitwanga in the northwestern quarter of British Columbia, displays a homemade sign: "North to Alaska." The station marks Kilometer Zero off Route 37, the Cassiar Alaska Highway, at its junction with the section of the Yellowhead Highway between Prince George and Prince Rupert on the Pacific Coast. From Kitwanga, the Cassiar runs 446 miles to join the main trunk Alaska Highway at Watson Lake in the Yukon Territory.

The highway runs west of the Skeena Mountains and east of the Coast Range, connecting fingers of the great northwestern rain forests with the spruce and jack pine plains of the Yukon. At Dease Lake it passes the continent's other "great divide," where the waters stop flowing westward into the misty valleys of the Pacific drainage and flow instead to the north, into the treeless ultraplanetary deltas of the Arctic. Along the way they plunge through vast silent forest in many ways unchanged by time. A short walk from the roadside brings the stroller to the margins of human settlement on this continent, unspoiled wilderness that still belongs to the wolf packs, the grizzlies and mountain goats. The sheer beauty of this part of North America, its thin magical light, the short, star-dazzled summer nights and the snowpeaks laced with rainbows and glittering white waterfalls, is hard to exaggerate.


The Cassiar, completed in 1972, is busier than it used to be. More and more recreational vehicles, many driven in convoy by senior citizens from the United States and southern Canada, lumber over its grades. It's still a long, lonely highway by United States summer standards. There are few towns and few roadside facilities. Logging trucks own the road and have to be watched for and allowed clearance. A couple of the Cassiar's bridges are still single-lane. People who drive it are cautioned to inspect the mechanical soundness of their vehicles beforehand and advised to carry a spare tire and extra fuel, especially in the off-season.

In its course from the beautiful, relatively populous Skeena and Nass Valleys to the flats of the Dease and the Liard Rivers, the Cassiar Highway follows an ancient route that traces the frontiers of vanished native empires. In the upper reaches of the westward flowing rivers, it leaves the sites of the potlatching, coastal empires for the traditional lands of interior Athapascan speakers. Between the coasts and the Arctic plains it passes through different climatic zones, marked by landscapes that range from canyons where sage and juniper grow, glaciers that stretch to the sea and surreal stretches of black volcanic rock that mark the craters of extinct volcanoes.

The area has a dramatic history. Gold rushes, from the mid-19th century on, turned silent caribou trails into frenzied thoroughfares, churned up populous boom towns that thrived for a while and then disappeared into new-growth forest. Missionaries and Hudson Bay Company factors pressed ever deeper into the fur-rich northern forests.

During the great fur-trading years in the early 19th century, imperious, highly cultivated coast tribes like the Haida and the Tlingil, who commanded the western inlets and river mouths of northwesternmost British Columbia and Alaska, briefly prospered and expanded their areas of control. In the first heady days of European trade, the Indians obtained a plentitude of metal implements -- axes, knives, traps and firearms -- from Hudson Bay Company and New England traders. The Yankees, operating from ships that had come around the Horn, were known to the Indians as "Bostons." The "Bostons" carried Canadian and Alaskan furs across the ocean to exchange for ivory and patterned china in Canton.

The sea-based Tlingit and Haida empires extended their influence far inland. Their cedar totem poles were emulated all over the Northwest. So were practices like drying salmon in cottonwood smoke and sculpturing in argellite. Neighboring tribes often found themselves subjugated, enslaved and absorbed by the ambitious coastal nations, whose culture and language they adopted.

The affluence and dominance of the coast peoples, stimulated by contact with whites, were finally undone from the same source. European diseases and incessant intertribal warfare reduced their numbers grievously. By late century the days of the great feasts and potlatches were over. The Hudson Bay Company, an imperial corporation in its own right, took over.

The first town on the highway north to Alaska is Kitwanga, the predominantly white town of that name adjoining the more phonetically correct Gitwangak, a village on the reserve of the Gitxsan people, whose home is this section of the Skeena Valley. Gitwangak has some fine relics of Canada's frontier days, including one of the last of the Grand Trunk Pacific railroad stations and St. Paul's Anglican Church. Both are handsome wooden structures decorated in the neat red-and-black trim beloved of the Hudson Bay Company. They seem representative of the mixture of American Gothic and Anglophile nostalgia seen in so many of the older buildings of the Canadian West. The village also contains a number of authentic and well-preserved totem poles. Local kids who operate one-bucket, two-teenager carwashes here during the summer can explain each, like, totally.

Off the highway is Kitwanga Fort National Historic Site. A path with interpretive signs follows a route up Battle Hill, where an Indian fort commanded the valley in precolonial days. Gitwangak, a crossroads then as now, was a trading center, and trade wars were not then a metaphor. Thirteen miles farther north, Kitwancool, another reserve village, also has a number of antique and restored totem poles on display.

The totem pole has become as instantly significant of the northwestern North American native people as the feathered war bonnet is of the Plains Indians or the wooden masks of the Iroquois. Sometimes it seems the very emblem of the Northwest itself -- suggesting rain, backpacks, king salmon and espresso machines. What these tall cedar carvings exactly signify seems still to be a matter of mild dispute. The Gitxsan poles to be seen along the Cassiar are apparently elaborate family crests, incorporating the mythical genealogy and history of an individual or clan. Their story is generally told from the base up and the figure at the base is usually (though not always) representative of one of the four Gitxsan clans: Frog, Wolf, Fireweed or Eagle. The figures are often captured in the act of metamorphosing. People turn into salmon as in Irish lore, mosquitoes into beavers, arms into legs. Thus the pole can be used as a mnemonic device for a verbal recitation about the clan's founders, a record of who people are and how they got that way, or as a simple memorial to past and present glory. They appear to have no particular ceremonial or religious dimension.

The southerly stretch of the Cassiar Highway between Kitwanga and Kitwancool commands a breathtaking backward view over the valley of the Skeena, one of Canada's great rivers. Its cedar-lined, grassy banks suggest the mountain west more than the north country. Across the river rise the snowpeaks of the Seven Sisters range, visible in clear weather from the highway and approachable from the Skeena Valley by a system of trails that follow the creeks to alpine lakes and flowery meadows. Beyond the meadows are ice fields where summer never comes.

North of Kitwancool, the highway passes Kitwanga Lake and crosses one of its many bridges, this one over the Cranberry River, an important salmon stream. At the foot of Mount Weber, it begins to run beside the Nass, another major watercourse, whose temperate alley divides the Coast Range from the vast wilderness of the Spatsizi plateau. A forest service road, originating in Terrace back on Route 16, follows the Nass through the Nisga'a Native Reserve and the spectacular Nisga'a lava beds to hook up with the Cassiar Highway at Cranberry Junction. The Nisga'a visitor center is near the ranger station at the Nisga'a campground. The young people there are shy, but friendly and informative.

Continuing north up the Nass Valley, the road affords some of its most spectacular views. Glacial ice fields sparkle in the coast range, dominated here by Lavender Peak. Beyond them lie the border with Alaska and the coastal wilderness of Misty Fjords National Monument. Eighty-eight miles from its junction with the Yellowhead Highway, Route 37 crosses the Nass into the Meziadin Lake watershed, one of the continent's prime seasonal spawning grounds for sockeye salmon.

Meziadin Lake Provincial Park, 105 miles up the Cassiar, has the first public campground along the road. Its lakeside setting and mountain backdrop make it a memorable place to pass the long summer twilight. Many of the sites are beside the water; there's a boat launch and a beach for the intrepid (though the water isn't really as cold as it looks). The trout fishing here is legendary, especially where the Nass's tributary streams feed the lake.

A motorist who has come as far as Meziadin Lake will undoubtedly have seen a few bears foraging along the roadside. Meziadin Lake, with its abundance of fish and fields of alder shoots and clover is, as many written guides advise, "prime bear country." In spring and well into the summer, most of the bears to be seen are black bears. Later in the year, grizzlies make their way down from the higher elevation to feed on the abundant fish. Among the features of the Meziadin Lake Park, just beside the shed of free firewood, are a pair of curious green steel kegs with reinforced seams, each appearing like a cross between a beer barrel and an armored personnel carrier. They're humane bear traps, built to contain animals that persistently prowl the campsites, and can be linked to cables and helicoptered out to more remote areas.

Bears are a pervasive subtext around here as elsewhere in the north, almost always out of sight, never altogether out of mind. Signs and pamphlets, especially around hot bear habitats like Meziadin Lake, spell out evasion techniques for hikers and campers: Make noise, wear bells, don't try to outrun the creatures, which can do 35 miles an hour in open country. Black bears have been known to engage in rare predatory attacks on humans. If a bear fails to desist when the victim covers up and goes limp, bear warning literature indicates this may indicate a predatory attack. Helpful to the end, it advises that individuals subjected to predatory attack "fight back vigorously."

Park rangers will provide campers with available information about the local wildlife. At Meziadin Lake in July 1999, a female black and her two cubs appeared near the shore each morning shortly before dawn. Bypassing the occupied sites, the family would lumber into the water and swim to an offshore island to forage as dawn lighted the lake. Silently observing them became a sunrise ritual for the dozens of campers around the lake, the kind of connection to the wild that is never forgotten.

Near Meziadin Lake Provincial Park is a general store providing groceries and gas along with camping and fishing gear and licenses. Meziadin Lake Junction, north of the lake at Mile 96, has a service station that does basic repairs and a coin-operated laundry.

About 70 miles north of Meziadin Lake Junction, the highway crosses Ningunsaw Pass, at an elevation of 1,500 feet, where it leaves the Nass watershed to enter an area dominated by one of the spectacular rivers of the continent, the Stikine. The road here is confined by canyon walls.

At Mile 178, a marker commemorates the route of the Yukon telegraph line. The wires ran between Vancouver and Dawson City and the right of way was pressed into service by travelers in Gold Rush days. The rockfaces of the Skeena Mountains to the east stand above the Iskut Valley.

The Iskut is the largest tributary of the Stikine, which rises in the Cassiar wilderness and flows into the Pacific near Wrangell, Alaska. Around Bob Quinn Lake, Route 37 comes into the Stikine watershed and the landscape subtly but visibly takes on a different cast. Spruce and jack pine predominate, along with poplar and aspen, replacing cedar, hemlock and high- country firs. Route 37 bisects the big river roughly at its midpoint, and the country east and west of the highway and beyond Bob Quinn Lake belongs geographically and historically to the Stikine. The river and its plateau are the heart and soul of the Cassiar country.

There is a campsite with the full run of camp accommodations in the provincial park at Kinaskan Lake, along the highway. West of the lake and the Iskut is the thrilling and surreal region around Mount Edziza. This section of the Tahltan Highlands, so called for the Tahltan Indian bands whose home is here, is a provincial park in its own right, incorporating nearly 570,000 acres of lava beds, extinct volcanic cones, basalt cliffs and craters. It's landscape as a state of mind, a petrified inferno, dominated by the 9,143-foot peak of Mount Edziza itself. Edziza's crater is some 8,200 feet in diameter.

The volcanic flows that raised the mountain and its smaller attendant cones above the valley floor took place over a period of four million years, with Mount Edziza's last eruption taking place about 10,000 years ago. Within the vast area of cinder fields are other extinct volcanic formations. Cocoa and Coffee Craters mark geologically recent upheavals and perfectly symmetrical Eve Cone rises almost 500 feet above the desertlike cinder plateau, devoid of vegetation. Polychromatic cliffs mark the horizon. The country abounds with wildlife -- moose, caribou, bear -- and the park's lakes receive a large variety of waterfowl. Stone sheep, related to the lighter-colored, more familiar Dall sheep of Alaska and the Rockies, live on the slopes of Mount Ediza and Eve Cone.

There is no vehicular access to Mount Edziza Park; trails enter from Kinaskan Lake and from guest ranches along the Klastline River. The trails are hard going, the weather unpredictable and the amenities in the eye and backpack of the beholder.

To the east lies the Spatsizi plateau, much of which is incorporated in Spatsizi Provincial Park, one of the largest park reserves in all of Canada.

"Spatsizi" means "land of the red goat" in the Tahltan language, and it takes its name from the proclivity of the local mountain goats for rolling in the iron-oxide rich dust of the Skeena slopes. The park covers more than 3,000 square miles, consisting of two geographic regions, the Spatsizi plateau itself and the Skeena mountains in its southwestern area. The jagged Eaglenest Range of the Skeenas is dominated by 8,250-foot Mount Will, reflected by Gladys Lake at its foot. Among the glaciers and hanging valleys of this wilderness, peaks too remote to bear names tower over boreal spruce forests. Here, too, the wildlife is varied and prolific. Licensed, guided hunting is permitted and popular here, though, of course, expensive. The only maintained improvements in this vast wild park are eight cabins, a sauna and cookhouse at Cold Fish Lake camp, which is the principal fly-in point.

Two hundred and seventy miles north of Kitwanga, the Cassiar Highway crosses the mighty Stikine itself, roughly bisecting it between its source in a nameless glacier 6,000 feet above the Spasitzi plateau and its mouth near Wrangell, Alaska. Thirty miles farther along, the highway hits Dease Lake and the last lap of its journey to the Yukon Territory. From the village of Dease Lake, the unpaved Telegraph Creek road runs 70 miles to the banks of the big river, descending into its narrow valley and arriving a few miles beyond the Grand Canyon of the Stikine.

This road is not for trailers or big RV's -- or for people with a really significant fear of high places. In bad weather, forget it. It's a dirt road with steep grades and narrow spots and even in good weather the highway guide recommends allowing two hours to cover the 70 miles. It does, however, offer never-to-be-forgotten views. At around Mile 56 it runs along the top of a butte 50 feet wide, the surface of which consists of a black lava bed. On this precarious perch, 400 feet above the roaring river, it makes a 180-degree turn. Before joining the road in this spectacular antic, it might be an option to use the pull-off here and stroll across the ossified lava for a look at the Grand Canyon of the Stikine and the Tahltan Canyon, both of which yawn below.

The town of Telegraph Creek looks much as it did at the turn of the 20th century. The river around here is rich in the history of the north. It was the imperial road of the Tlingits, the coming of whose carved and painted war canoes spread fear in every riverside village. Later it served as the teeming highway of half a dozen gold rushes, most notably the one to the Klondike in 1897-98, when the trail from Telegraph to Teslin Lake and up the Teslin River to Dawson City promised an "All-Canadian" route to the gold fields of the Yukon, bypassing the haul over Chilikoot Pass. War canoes and traders' whaleboats were replaced by steamboats carrying whiskey and fast women to tent cities and raw saloons out of Robert W. Service.

The last regular boat service from Wrangell to Telegraph Creek was phased out in the 1960's. In Telegraph Creek today, the Pakula family runs an outfitting operation and general store, Stikine RiverSong, out of the old Hudson Bay Company post. They organize wonderful hikes and river trips between the coast at Wrangell, Alaska, and the Grand Canyon of the Stikine. There's no rafting in the canyon itself; a National Geographic expedition some years ago barely got through and pronounced it unrunnable. And throughout the Cassiar country, resort operators, guides and outfitters, each different in wilderness philosophy and innkeeping style, work unbelievably hard to wrest a living from this unforgiving land. Adventure travel is the new gold rush and its lure continues to draw adventurers and visionary young people from their customary skies.

Beyond the Telegraph Creek road, Highway 37 carries on to meet the Alcan Highway at Watson Lake, a way station for decades on the way to Alaska. But the alternate route through the Cassiar is a memorable adventure to be taken on whatever terms the visitor chooses.

ON THE ROAD

The southern 200 miles of Route 37, when I drove it last summer, were perfectly comfortable, paved two-lane blacktop. The rest, except for some short sections of gravel, was seal-coated with further paving underway.

Three campgrounds able to accommodate vehicles are spaced out over its distance at Boya Lake Provincial Park, Kinaskan Lake Provincial Park and Meziadin Lake Provincial Park. All provide good fishing and a variety of activities.

Along and close to the stretch of Route 37 between Mount Edziza and the Spatzizi, along the shores of Kinaskan, Eddontenajon, Tatogga and Ealue Lakes, are a few accommodations ranging from modest bed-and-breakfasts and hostels to luxuriously appointed lodges in staggering settings. At Red Goat Lodge, for example, a hard-working and unaffectedly hospitable couple from Saskatchewan provide canoe rentals, llama trips into the wild and the best breakfast in the north country from their homey operation beside Lake Eddontenajon; while only a few miles away, at Wolf Creek Retreat, an anthropologist and writer whose brochure informs us that he is "often likened to a modern Indiana Jones" operates a lodge and cabins offering everything one might want to do in the wilderness from a base of authentically woodsy opulence. His wife and partner, adds the brochure, is "a former Parisian fashion model . . . an anthropologist who studied Bedouin tribeswomen in the Saharan desert" and is "active in dance and polarity massage." -- Robert Stone

For information on the Boya Lake, Kinaskan Lake and Meziadin Lake campgrounds, write to Skeena District, 3790 Alfred Avenue, Bag 5000, Smithers, British Columbia, Canada V0J 2N0 (telephone: 250-847-7320).

Inquiries about Red Goat Lodge may be addressed to Box 101, Iskut, British Columbia, Canada, V0J 1K0 (telephone and fax: 250-234-3261), from May through September, and to 3-29 Menzies Street, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada V8V 2G1 (telephone and fax: 250-383-1805), from October through April. Bed and breakfast for two from about $50 a night.

Wolf Creek Retreat, Iskut, British Columbia, Canada V0J 1K0, or 3411 Woodley Road Northwest, Washington, D.C. 20016 (telephone and fax: 202-966-4892), chiefly serves as a base for wilderness expeditions sponsored by The River League (800-440-1322). Individual bookings, when available, begin at about $350 a couple, including all meals and beverages.

The price of a four-day trip on the Stikine River from Telegraph Creek, British Columbia, to Wrangell, Alaska, ranges from about $625 to about $725 a person, depending on the size of the party (minimum of four, maximum of six). Two nights camping on the Stikine, with all meals, and one night in Wrangell are included. Standard double rooms in the lodge are about $42.50, or about $50 with kitchenette. Write to Dan Pakula, Stikine RiverSong, Box 47, Telegraph Creek, British Columbia, Canada V0J 2W0 (250-235-3196; fax: 250-235-3194).

Discover British Columbia maintains a comprehensive information and reservations service for all parts of the province, including the Cassiar region: 800-663-6000.

Sophisticated Traveler, February 27, 2000

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