Sea to sky highway …

We left Vancouver on a beautiful day and headed out to the west and up along the Howe Sound inlet. It wasn’t long before we came across the Britannia Mine, which used to be the biggest copper mine. It is just a tourist attraction now, and they are trying to preserve the huge old building which was precariously built of the side of a mountain. You go on a small train trip, into the mine a short way and try to imagine how life would have been as a miner! Cold, wet and dirty!! And dangerous!

From there we headed towards Whistler, stopping only at Brandywine Falls. Just a short walk from the road and you come across these spectacular falls. They are 70m in height and are really very beautiful and because of their power they have created a cavern, so you can hear them before you see them.

We have made a decision to only stop once a day for waterfalls, or we are not going to get anywhere. We have also decided not to do anymore Gondola or suspension bridges!! There is only so many you can do and every corner you go around there is another spectacular view, lookout, lake, waterfall or mountain with snow on it. We have a lot of road to travel, so just need to keep going.

This is us alongside Duffey Lake, we met a couple there from Mexico and what we are doing in a week, they are doing in 4 days! I am not sure I am committed to that level of driving.

Whistler is gorgeous, but really a ski / hiking town. Well we weren’t skiing, mountain biking, bungy jumping, golfing, RV tours, heli tours, gondola riding, stand-up paddle-boarding or white water rafting!!! So we only spent one night here and continued on the sea-to-sky highway up to Pemberton, Duffey Lake, Lillioot, Cache Creek before finally arriving in Kamloops.

Colin sitting on the Olympic Rings in Whistler village

The next day we stopped at Nairn Falls. These were a short walk from the road, along a reasonable track [just a bit bumpy and lumpy in places]. Again we could hear them before we could see them. The water comes through a gorge and falls into a pool which has created a whirlpool, which in turn has carved out the rock, so the water goes under a bridge and comes up in the next pool before creating another waterfall leading out to Green River. We only saw a couple of people, so it was great to have the place to ourselves, so to speak.

We found a cheap and cheerful place to stay in Kamloops and then headed into town to the art gallery … its current installation was clearly beyond both of us and 15mins later we left! I know art is subjective, but this was just to ‘spatial’ for us. We ended up at the Frick and Frack for dinner and an early night.

After leaving Kamloops, we drove through Sicamous to Revelstoke. Sicamous is famous for it house boats, and we chatted to a local while we were stretching our legs and he told us that there is 1200km of coastal lake waters to explore on Lake Shuswap. It is a big business, with boats catering up to 24 people. They have a floating restaurant / supermarket you can call into if you don’t feel like cooking, or need extra supplies. Looks like this would be a fabulous adventure. They have just closed up for the season.

Revelstoke is a small city in British Columbia. Quite a pretty town, we had a walk around town along part of the River and then up to the dam. There was a forestry museum here but alas it was closed. Actually we have found that a lot of places are closed. It seems to be they close in October until the spring, or just to have a break before the madness of the ski season starts. There have been several places on our ‘to-do’ list that have been closed!

The trip has been quite reasonable so far, the roads not too busy, although we did encounter 50km of road works on our way to Lake Louise [as we crossed through Glacier National Park]. We are hoping that the weather holds up for the next 10 days or so … it did start snowing driving through ‘Kicking Horse Pass’, and continued as we drove through to Lake Louise yesterday.

See you in Jasper ❄️ ⛰ 🌞