The Cassiar Highway is the wildest part of Canada

Where is the wildest part of Canada? The Cassiar Highway is the wildest part of Canada. I know last week I was amusing you with my visit to the hospital, but I’m not done telling stories about our trip to Alaska. Of course, we had to cross Canada both northbound and again southbound, and we took mostly different routes. Northbound, we started in Alberta and stayed on the Alaska Highway (ALCAN) from Dawson Creek. Crossing the Yukon on the Alaska Highway was the worst road in Canada, but overall, it was tame compared to the Cassiar Highway in the wildest part of Canada.

Southbound, we took the ALCAN starting in Tok (Alaska) to Watson Lake (Yukon Territory) and then departed the ALCAN at Watson Lake heading south on the Cassiar Highway through British Columbia. At the north end of the Cassiar Highway, we sat and waited for the road to open. The Cassiar Highway was closed when we arrived because of a huge, very active fire.  

The Cassiar Highway is known by several names. The Stewart–Cassiar Highway is also known as the Dease Lake Highway, the Stikine Highway, and the Thornhill – Kitimat Highway (from Kitimat to Thornhill). The Cassiar Highway is the northwesternmost highway in the Canadian province of British Columbia. The official name is British Columbia Highway 37. I would love to go back and see Boya Lake near the north end of the Cassiar Highway. We missed it, but more about that later.

The Cassiar Highway starts just north of the British Columbia border in the Yukon Territory. It crosses into British Columbia in about a mile. Most of the Cassiar Highway is in northern British Columbia and runs pretty much north/south with little deviation. Cassiar (the namesake of the highway) isn’t a town anymore but rather a location near the Jade Mine, just outside Jade City. We didn’t stop at either place(Cassiar or Jade City). Jade City is a traditional stop and is a one-store “town”. Most of the other named locations on the Cassiar Highway are just that, locations, not towns. Overall, the Cassiar Highway is almost 550 miles long unless you also include the small section that leads to Stewart and Hyder.

Stewart isn’t on the southern end of the Cassiar Highway, despite the name. Highway 37 continues south to join Highway 16 in Kitwanga. At Meziadin Junction, you can turn west onto Highway 34A to Stewart. From Stewart, you can continue across the border back into Alaska into a tiny town named Hyder.

Hyder Alaska

Hyder is the southernmost town in Alaska that you can visit by road. Other than using the one road, you would need a boat to visit Hyder. Other than a famous food truck and a Forest Service bear-watching station, there is not much in Hyder. By the time of our visit, the famous food truck was closed for the winter. The bears at the bear-watching station were no longer interested in the fish at the Fish Creek Bear Watching Station. Since it also rained when we were in Hyder, really, Hyder was a bust with not much to see in the nearly constant mist.

Stewart Canada

We went to Stewart (and Hyder) twice, hoping for a bear sighting. At the Stewart/Hyder Border Crossing, we found it curious that no one on the United States side of the border cared that you went to Hyder. Hyder, after all, is at the end of a dead-end road, and from there, unless you get on a boat, the only thing you can do in Hyder is go back to Canada.

The Canadians, however, do care if you cross from Hyder into Canada, and they want you to check in at the border when you return. It was at this border crossing that we met the most serious border guard on our entire trip, even after crossing into and out of Canada several times. Overall, border crossings into Canada were a breeze, and crossing into the United States was only slightly more painful.

We didn’t have any problems at any of our border crossings into Canada or the United States, but we had friends entering the United States where border guards (Customs Agents) thought it necessary to confiscate multiple food items. These Customs Agents (both in Canada and the United States) have wide latitude in determining what the rules are and whether to enforce them. I would suggest that each agent makes up the rules on the spot and has no problem changing them depending on their mood, perhaps several times a day. This may not be true, but it sure seems like it.

We were due for a lecture

This Canadian Border guard thought it important enough to stand in the rain and give us a lecture on how to properly hand over our passports to a border agent. He wanted each passport open to the photo page and stacked in an order that was easiest for him to scan the occupants of the car. This was to make his job at least 4 nanoseconds faster. We unknowingly just handed him our unopened passports, stacked in whatever order they happened to fall in. This made his job immensely harder, and that is why we got our lecture. How rude that we didn’t know the correct procedure for handing over a passport.

We had already learned that sunglasses, hats, and eggs at a border crossing were a big no-no, and we didn’t have a refrigerator for them to raid. So we got a lecture. He knew there were no stores (nothing, zero, nada) in Hyder, so it would have been impossible to buy anything. Since we obviously crossed from Canada into Hyder in our car, we weren’t packing guns or explosives.

This border crossing job should have been the easiest in the world; not many people visit Hyder. It would have been easier if we had handed him our passports in the correct order. Explosives were something that we could have found in Hyder at a huge mining operation, but as tourists, we only drove down the muddy road right through the heart of the mine, heading for the foot of the Salmon Glacier. As far as the glacier goes, it was way too muddy to go any further in our Subaru. The car’s sides and windows were plenty dirty.

At least, unlike a Canadian friend we met in Stewart, we stopped at the border crossing. He thought it was closed and just drove past. The Canadian Mounties caught him at the only coffee shop in Stewart and gave him a public lecture (audience of the two scofflaws and the coffee shop staff) outlining how grave his assumption that the border crossing was closed could have been, and how it could have caused an international incident resulting in a multi-agency manhunt. His lecture had a little more bite than our passport protocol blunder.

Canadian Mounties

We met a Canadian Mountie at the start of the Cassiar Highway. He was driving a truckload of rocks (from a gold mine somewhere north of Watson Lake to Hyder). Similar to some underpaid police officers in the United States who work at sporting events, he was driving a huge dump truck to earn extra money. We were both parked overnight at the north end of the Cassiar Highway, hoping that the road would soon open and that we could make our trip through the wildest part of Canada.

We arrived at the head of the Cassiar Highway at about 10 AM and expected to proceed down the one-lane section shortly. Unfortunately, that day the road was closed due to a very active fire. Had we arrived just one day earlier, the road would have been open. We were wrong about the road opening that day and instead spent the night camping at the start of the Cassiar Highway. The next morning, we were first in line. Others, perhaps locals, had abandoned their quest to go south that day and showed up the next morning. A few people live to the south along the Cassiar Highway. Watson Lake has the only grocery store and gas station for the next 400 miles.

Cassiar Highway

I mentioned that the Cassiar Highway was a little rough. The road was built for traction, not smoothness. There were no lines on the road, neither in the middle nor on the edges. There were also no guard rails for you to bounce off if you decided not to turn when the road turned. It was paved except for a few places where erosion washed away the edge, narrowing the road. Overall, it was more comfortable to drive the Cassiar Highway than it was to drive the ALCAN near Destruction Bay in Yukon territory.

The Cassiar Highway goes through the wildest part of Canada that we have seen, all from a paved road. It is right next to the wildest country in North America. In terms of remote and rugged, the mountains between the Pacific Ocean (both in Canada and Alaska) and the Cassiar Highway are crazy remote, with no towns or roads, paved or otherwise. The only road(s) that crosses this wild and remote part of Canada was the one we took from Haines Junction to Haines and Skagway and then from Skagway northbound to Watson Lake. Here is a link to our story about our visit to Haines and Skagway. Historic Skagway and the Klondike Gold Rush

The mountains to the west of the Cassiar Highway are the same mountain chain that starts in Alaska and includes the Wrangell-Saints Elias National Park, Kluane Canadian National Park, and the Tatshenshini/Alsek Canadian National Park. The same mountains include Glacier Bay National Park and hundreds of islands, including Sitka. These mountains eventually join the Cascade Mountains in Washington State.

We first encountered this ice-covered mountain range during our visit to Valdez and told the story about our visit to the Columbia Glacier. Here is a link to that story. Deep into the ice flows at the Columbia Glacier

The Kennecott Mine and Glacier were part of this mountain range. Here is a link to that story. Kennecott died when the last train departed, never to return

Our trip down the Cassiar Highway

We spent a night sitting next to the start of the Cassiar Highway waiting for the road to open. As you can see from the top picture, there was a huge fire on the Cassiar Highway. We had been there since the day prior, happy that we weren’t driving south and worried that we wouldn’t be able to drive south on the Cassiar Highway. The road was closed for the first 30 miles due to a fire. (See the picture at the top to see the reason that we were happy not to be on the Cassiar Highway that first day.)

The fire along the Cassiar Highway has been burning for so long that it doesn’t make the news at Watson Lake. Some days the road is open, and some days the road is closed. There is no way to drive around this section of road. This is a little ten-year-long wildfire, and it is impossible to put out because it lives underground in a coal seam. As I gather, it was started by lightning and somehow caught the coal on the surface on fire, and then it started burning underground, year-round, for the last ten years. Occasionally, it pops up at random places, catching the forest on fire. When it pops up, assuming that it threatens the road with either fire or smoke, they close the road. Tomorrow, it may be open or closed depending on the location of the wildfires.

Our friends had gone down the Cassiar Highway only a few days before. We sat and waited for the road to open. We had about five extra days to wait before making our run through the fire zone, or we would have had to cancel our trip down the Cassiar Highway and go around, perhaps more than 1000 miles around it. We went around a wildfire on our trip northbound. It wasn’t fun. The only way we made it to Alaska was through a three-day rainstorm. Here is a link to our northbound trip to Alaska. Our route around the wildfires in Alberta

Driving the Cassiar Highway

When our friends, only a few days earlier, drove down the Cassiar Highway, they had to follow a pilot car through the fire zone. The pilot car wasted no time waiting for the cars, trucks, and RVs. His job was to go first, not to go slow. Kathy described it as Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Bill, trying to keep up with the pilot car, may have been a little aggressive in his RV driving.

As for us, we waited and parked at the north entrance to the Cassiar Highway until about 10 AM, about 24 hours after our arrival. Eventually, the northbound pilot car led about thirty cars north. Then, just as we were expecting to follow the pilot car south, they said we could go. Tami was driving the RV at the head of the pack. For a short time, we were the pilot car. After letting a couple of hotshot pickup trucks zoom past, Tami also let some of the commercial drivers pass us. We could see where the fire was burning along the road just one day prior. As expected, there wasn’t any fire danger and very little smoke.

Passing up Boya Lake

I wanted to stop at Boya Lake because, as I understand it, it was an awesome turquoise blue color. But since we sat at the north end of the Cassiar Highway for an extra day, we drove past, only stopping to change drivers. If we kept driving, we could make it to Dease Lake in one day, spend the night, and then on to Meziadin Junction. Meziadin Junction is merely a gas station. We had an epic campsite picked out at Meziadin Lake Provincial Park. Meziadin Junction is also where the Cassiar name changes to the Dease Lake Highway, and where the road to Stewart and Hyder connects to the main Cassiar Highway.

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Jade City

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Tatshenshini/Alsek Canadian National Park

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