July 29

Travel day again. We did a longer drive covering more than 375 miles from Carcross, YK to Dease Lake, BC. We did not see any large mammals but did see several grouse. Why did we push on to Dease Lake? Well it could be a long story but let’s see how I can sum it up.

The story starts back in the 1970’s. BC Railway was building a railroad from St. George, BC to the Yukon. I’m not sure of the planned destination but my guess is Whitehorse. It’s several hundred miles between these two small cities and lots of nothing in-between. For those not familiar with British Columbia geography St. George is about half way up the Provence in the eastern part of BC. To get to Whitehorse the road route choices are from St. George to more or less head north then west or to head west then north. The planned railroad cut a diagonal across BC saving lots of miles.  The difficulty was the remoteness of the planned route. They had laid railbed but no tracks all of the way to Dease Lake. They had maybe two hundred miles to go with the bed, but in 1977 project funding was stopped just three days after a major bridge was completed over the Stikine River. Hang in there, there is a point which I will be getting to in a bit.

Fast forward a decade or so to the later 1980’s. Marsha and I along with our friends Everett and SC; and DeeJay and Kerry planned a mountain bike trip starting near Dease Lake heading southeast along the old railroad bed. This was not a walk in the park or rather a ride along a bike trail but more of an adventure. We did not know of anyone attempting this ride before us. So the three couples meet up in Dease Lake and arrange to leave our cars for just under two weeks. We located the railbed about 20 miles south of Dease Lake where the bed comes close to the Stewart Cassier Highway. We got a late start but we were off for Day 1. That first night we camped along the railbed and somebody had carried a bottle of champagne which we enjoyed celebrating the completion of our first day. An empty champagne bottle is heavy so we built a rock carrion with the bottle in the middle. Our plan was to pick it up on our way out in about 10 days. Day one was great, but it was not the case with day two. Day two started out okay, but soon the mud started gumming up our wheels until they stopped turning. We stopped a few times to clean out the mud. Maybe finding a pair of abandon bicycle fenders should have been a sign. We pushed onward finding washouts along the railbed. These washouts involved carrying our bikes and gear down step slopes with drops of maybe 150 feet, across a small stream and back up the other side. This got old after maybe the third washout. Maybe it was old after the first washout! Anyway Day Two was hell. We crossed over the Stikine River on the bridge I mentioned earlier and camped. The next day we discovered there was a small dirt access road from the highway to the railroad bed being maintained (I use the word “maintained” very loosely!) for fish camp access. Eventually the road was blocked not allowing vehicles to pass but we could continue on with bikes. The rest of the trip went great but when it was time to turn around and head back to Dease Lake there was no way we wanted to repeat Day Two so we used the access road to return to the highway maybe 5 to 10 miles away. We never returned to pick up the bottle.

We wanted to find it and bring it back. Thus the reason for heading to Dease Lake. It’s a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack or more accurately a champagne bottle in a wilderness. So we are at a campground in Dease Lake. Tomorrow we’ll start the hunt.