Day 60 (July 13). Yellowhead Highway to Prince George

From: Smithers, BC

To: Prince George, BC

Miles today: 227

Total miles: 12460

According to Wikipedia, only five per cent of BC’s land is arable.  A significant fraction of that five per cent must be along the path that the Yellowhead Highway follows.  I ride for long stretches without seeing any farms, then they appear again, mostly growing hay.  I didn’t see any livestock today at all.  This stretch, between the mountains that border the panhandle of Alaska and the Rockies, is gently rolling countryside.  While the trees remain mostly Aspen and evergreen, there are now definitely some other broad-leaf trees mixed in. This is no longer taiga, or at least no longer unbroken taiga.

Idyllic view of BC from the Highway 16 Topley Rest Area.

 

Proof that there are actually farms up here.

It was raining again this morning when I headed out, and the guy at the front desk of the motel commented on it. I had assumed that this was just what BC was like in July, but he told me that it hadn’t rained in months before this stretch, and they really needed it.  So that’s good.  By the afternoon it was blue skies and puffy clouds.  I rode to the city of Prince George, just about dead center of the province, for the evening.  It has a population of about70,000, and it has a motorcycle shop that deals with Hondas.  They are closed today (Monday), but I will call them in the morning to see if they have some new tires I can have installed.  The ones I had put on in Edmonton are starting to wear pretty low.

One of the things about riding through “civilization” at this level that I now have to deal with again is the air blast from a fully loaded logging truck going by on the other side of a two-lane highway going 70 mph.  I have also noticed that the background music played in restaurants has changed from pop hits of the 60’s and 70’s to Country.  Also, while it still stays light well into the evening up here, when the sun does go down it actually gets dark.