Offroading

After we got up quite late, at around 8 am, we started our day with some sandwiches and a drive from our hotel to Wells Gray Provincial Park.
After having driven to all easily accessible falls yesterday, today would be a day filled with hiking and trails to get our legs working again, and to see all beauty of the park on foot.

We started off with a trail to some alpine meadows which should be brimful of flowers by now, according to the local weather and season.
The trail is called Trophy Mountain and is only accessible through some secondary road. Yes, that would be ye olde gravel again.
What we didn’t know was that it would be a 15km drive on this dirt road and that the dirt would get worse every kilometer. In fact, it did. We went from a very wide, nearly three lane and well maintained dirt road to a barely two lane wide poorly maintained road to an unmaintained, abandoned forest service road about 1 vehicle wide. Signs told us that we should proceed with extreme caution and that cars not equipped with two-way radio should expect oncoming traffic at any time. This backroad is about 10km long…

After ‘quite an interesting ride’ we arrived, fully shaken and not stirred, at the parking lot to access the trail. We were quite happy with the 3.5 litre 250bhp AWD car we were given as it cruises up with ease. It was just the shaking, rattling and imminent leak in a tire which got to us.
All in all, you should still go to the Trophy Mountain trail, as the rewards are bigger than the price. But one must come fully prepared! The journey to the trail is 40 + 15 km from Clearwater, and the last part is really hard core. 😉

After this ordeal, we went to a watchtower on a hill called the Green Mountain to overlook the vastness of the park. Peering into the abyss one can spot a ridge of three snow capped peaks in the distance. These peaks are the half way mark of the park. One is able to access the park to about halfway these peaks by car, about half this road is paved. The rest of the road is dirt, and beyond this road only trails exist to to the peaks. After that, it is just untamed, wild ruggedness. And some more trees. 😉