August 8-9, 2009

We headed down the Alaska Highway and very soon ran out of the smoke. We stopped at Rancheria Falls and it was nice but not as spectacular as the falls we had seen along the coast.




We turned South on the Cassiar Highway crossed into British Columbia again. We ran into about 20 miles of construction where the road was gravel and rough and wet – we could only go about 20 miles per hour. We saw some mountain goats beside the highway – 2 ewes and 3 or 4 lambs but we not able to stop and take a picture. We stopped at an overlook of the Cassiar Mountains, it was cloudy but we did get some good pictures. We read that 90% of the world’s jade comes from the Cassiar Mts. In British Columbia. We stopped at a store called Jade City and looked at their beautiful jade jewelry and sculptures.

A few miles down the road we blew a tire on the 5th wheel. While Rex was changing the tire an older couple from Montana stopped. They stayed with us until Rex was finished changing tires and offered to follow us to make sure we were going to be OK. We stopped at Dease River Crossing RV & Campground for the night. The owner is the niece of a couple in our camping group in Colorado. She told us that they have sold the campground and hope to be in Loveland by mid September. It started raining about the time we got to the campground.



This is the view of Joe Irwin Lake from our back window - it was a beautiful place to spend the night.



The next morning we headed back down the Cassiar Highway and ran into more construction – but not as bad as yesterday. We stopped at the town of Dease lake and found a repair shop/ junk yard that was open on Sunday. He had a couple of used tires that we bought to replace the blown tire and another bad tire that was getting ready to blow. We are on our way again feeling a lot safer. It rained all afternoon and the clouds were low so we couldn’t see much of the mountains. The scenery was beautiful with ponds and lakes every couple of miles. We were hoping to see some moose but we didn’t. We stopped at Bell 2 Lodge and stayed in their RV park.

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