Spring Break

As in past years, this year we decided to take a family trip over Spring Break, while the girls were out of school.  In the past we travelled to Utah and to Oregon.  This year we stayed in Canada.  The recent decline in value of the Canadian Dollar made it too expensive to consider a trip to the United States.  This year it would be Vancouver Island in British Columbia.

We set out fairly early on the morning of March 25, which was the first day of Spring Break for the girls, and Good Friday.  We hoped to put a good part of the driving behind us on the first day.  Just after passing through the town of Hinton we ran into a traffic jam.  Traffic was at a stand still and it was pretty much a parking lot.  It took us almost two hours to inch our way to the Jasper Park Gate.  There was a temporary sign set up saying something about the Yellowhead Highway being closed and re-opening at 3:00PM.  The staff at the park gate were just waving everyone through and not allowing anyone to stop and ask any questions, and not offering any further information.  At this point we noticed that there was virtually no eastbound traffic coming out of the park.

We drove on to the Jasper townsite expecting the Yellowhead Highway to be barricaded at the junction.  We wondered what the problem could be... avalanche, washout, rockslide...?  We wondered whether it would be better to head down the Icefields Parkway to Lake Louise and take the Trans Canada Highway into British Columbia.

When we got to the junction there were no signs, no barricades and no information.  There were no vehicles travelling east, but nothing to indicate that the highway was closed.  We kept driving and made fairly good time, almost to Mount Robson.  Here traffic ground to a halt again.  All the cars turned off their engines and people were wandering around on the highway, getting very impatient.  There were a few roadside signs that indicated an accident scene ahead, and a flagman.  After about two hours finally eastboard traffic started to pass us and soon the westbound lane began to move.  We never did see any accident, any police, or any emergency staff of any kind.  If there was some sort of serious accident it was completely cleared up by the time we rolled past it.  Needless to say this put a big dent in our travel plans.

We rolled into Kamloops in the early evening, just as it was beginning to get dark.  We stopped and fuelled up the truck, grabbed some crappy fast food, and continued west.  Two hours of driving in the dark took us over the Coquihalla Pass and down into Hope.  Here we decided that we would stop for the night.  We took a cheap hotel room, crammed all five of us into it, and settled down for the night.  At least by pushing this far we knew that it would be a fairly easy drive the next day.