We leave Whistler today and are driving towards Jasper. Jasper is about 742 km from Whistler so we are breaking it into two days. Today we are driving to Clearwater which is about 423km from Whistler. According to Apple Maps it will take us a little over 6 hours without stopping.
Stu and I had a little walk this morning and did a lap of Blackcomb village. We were on the road a little after 9 which was well ahead of schedule. We stopped by Blueberry Hill which was where Molly lived when she worked in Whistler and saw her condo. Then we were off on our drive.
The drive to Clearwater takes you through several mountain ranges and across a number of First Nations’ reserves. The drive is spectacular as the road runs along a number of lakes and rivers. I didn’t understand why this drive was going to take as long as the maps were predicting but there are lots of points where you are only able to do 60 or 70 km an hour because of how windy or steep the road is. The road to Kamloops is pretty much single lane the whole way then opens up to a two lane highway for the last 180km to Kamloops and Clearwater.
We were on the wrong side for a lot of the viewing points but we managed to stop at one lake which also had a huge beaver dam. We didn’t see any beavers though.
We stopped at a little bakery at Lillooet for lunch. It is a quaint little town that seems to get most of its commerce from large tour buses that break their journey there for lunch. We arrived just before a bus load of tourists hit the bakery. Stu and I shared a very large roast beef sandwich and pumpkin spice cookie.
It took another four hours to get from Lillooet to Clearwater. Clearwater has a lot of adventure sports available and there are a lot of dirt bikers, hikers and mountain bikers come for the weekends. It was very hot when we got here (according to the car 30C) and is a totally different climate to Whistler.
Once we settled into our little motel, we walked down to the Clearwater river to have a look before we headed off for an early dinner at the Hop N Hog a BBQ place that has a 5 start write up on TripAdvisor. Because it is a Saturday there are a lot of Canadians up here enjoying the mountain biking and hiking at Wells Gray Provincial Park. We thought 6pm would be fine but the restaurant was already full when we got there so we had to wait 20 minutes for a table. It was worth it, the food was delicious. I even tried an Apple Cider.
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