The Cassiar Highway.
The Cassiar Highway. A 450-mile ribbon of chip rock and gravel that winds from the Alaska Highway in the Yukon to the Yellowhead Highway in British Columbia. Along the highway you will find more bears than people. Only a few small communities dot the route – most of them on First Nation tribal land. There is no cell service and only a few fuel stations. It is so remote there is not even a single Tim Horton’s along the entire length of the road.
When we reached the northern start of the highway we were nearing the point of no return. I was very ill. Coughing, sore throat, chills, fever, and crushing fatigue. Our options – turn around and backtrack to the relative security of Whitehorse to see how things developed, or turn south and forge our way down the Cassiar toward home. We had a well-stocked med kit, but if things went sideways there would be no calling for help. And if Pati were to become ill, we could be profoundly screwed.
The north end of the Cassiar Highway.
At the time, Canada was still in high alert over the pandemic. If I were to test positive for whatever variation of the plague was floating around at the time, we may have been required to quarantine for up to 14 days. I had no interest in adding a 14-day hotel lockdown to our trip. That was not the type of adventure we were looking for. Besides, we had been camping in the wilderness for days, and would be for several more – you couldn’t get more isolated than where we were going. We ate lunch in the parking lot of the Junction 37 fuel station and discussed our options. Then we fueled up and turned south out of the lot and started our adventure down the Cassiar.
At this point I was pretty much worthless as a navigator. I was well medicated and the scenery melted into a blur of semiconsciousness. Fortunately, there is no way to get “lost” on the Cassiar. Once you get started you just stay on the road until you reach the other end. We spent our first night on the road at the Boya Lake Provincial Park. I helped Pati set up camp, then slumped into a camp chair until it was time to crawl up into our tent.
The beautiful Boya Lake, BC.
The next morning my condition had not improved. Pati was worried. She was scampering around breaking camp, even forgoing her morning coffee. Before our trip if you had asked her what she was most looking forward to she would tell you “I want sit in my chair, drinking a cup of coffee, looking across a lake at beautiful mountains.” Now we were here, and she was too concerned to enjoy it. I finally got her to settle down. We were still more than a day’s drive from civilization. Rushing wasn’t going to get us anywhere faster. I pointed to the mountains across the emerald green lake. “This. This is literally why we are here.” We sat and she had a cup of coffee. It really was an amazing view.
Jade City - Population 25
There isn’t much in the way of roadside attractions along the Cassiar, but one place you must stop is the infamous Jade City. There may have been other attractions, but if so, I missed them while passed out in the passenger seat. The Bunce family has been mining jade from the Cassiar Mountains for generations, and their original roadside stake is now a community of about 25 permanent residents. They claim over 80% of the world’s Nephrite Jade comes from the local mines. Here you can buy almost anything made from jade. If they don’t have it, they will have it made for you.
Example of the steps in the jade carving process.
I found it interesting that most of carved jade they sell at Jade City is not carved locally. They send huge blocks of jade to Australia with drawings of what they want cut. Artisans create the pieces and ship everything back to Jade City, including any tiny bits of leftover jade. This obviously contributes to the already high cost of the finished product. If you are curious, you can learn all about the Bunce family, Jade City, and the jade business by watching the seven seasons of Jade Fever on PlutoTV. It's worth watching just a few minutes to get a taste of some of the local flavor!
Below the Line
Sweet Medicine
It was Day 41 when I hit “the wall.” “The wall” is that point you can reach in any endeavor where the suck factor gets high enough that you find yourself mentally, physically, emotionally, and/or spiritually stressed to the point where you just want to stop. It is a very real thing, and it helps to think ahead of time about how you are going to deal with it.
We used to see young Boy Scouts encounter “the wall” on a pretty regular basis. It was usually after several days away from home, exhausted, hot and sticky, still miles away from the refuge of the car ride home. They would just stop, sometimes in tears, and plop down in the middle of trail. Done. I learned to carry a handful of Jolly Rancher candies in my pack for just such occasions. They provided magical sweet medicine that could help break through “the wall.” We would move to a shady spot, drink some water, cool down, and talk through the crisis. Then we would enjoy a Jolly Rancher. There was something about that little boost of sugar slowly melt in your mouth, that little hit of endorphins that provided just the right kick to get moving again.
As Pati and I prepared for our trip we both chose our own sugary treat. A special favorite to be held in reserve just in case we ran into “the wall.” For me it was a bag of Buc-ees Cherry Sour candy; for Pati, a bag of Kit Kats. If you are not familiar with Buc-ee, he would be the patron saint of travelers if beavers could be saints.
It was Day 41 on the Cassiar Highway when I broke into my Cherry Sours. The exhaustion, fatigue, fever, and endless rattling down the road had caught up to me. My head felt like a gumball machine dropped into a washing machine on the spin cycle. I was done. I had found my wall. But the Buc-ees Cherry Sours saved the day. The shiny sour shell and sweet, chewy artificial cherry center plucked me out of despair. Of course, it took more than one. No, I ate the whole damn bag over the next two days. But it worked. We were back on the trail.
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