Stewart-Cassiar Highway Detour --- Stewart, BC

We have a couple of extra days to kill before our ferry to Juneau so we have detoured off the Yellowhead Highway, going north instead on the Stewart-Cassiar (Highway 37).  It’s been a scenic drive, but very misty with rain so some of our photos may look a little dreary.  I’m starting to wonder if the sun will ever come out, it’s been so drizzly lately.  We haven’t seen too many bears (maybe they don’t like the weather, either) but we did run across this guy hiding in the underbrush along the Cassiar highway.

We stopped briefly in the small First Nation town of Gitanyow.  (“First Nations” is the term Canada uses just as we use “Native American”).  Gitanyow is home to some of the oldest totem poles in the world that are still in their original location.  One of these is called “Hole in the Ice” and is approximately 140 years old; our guide book hypothesizes that it might be the oldest standing totem pole in the world.  Unfortunately, we don’t know which one it is since none of them were labeled and the visitor’s center was closed.

The Stewart-Cassiar highway goes north and eventually meets up with the Alaska Highway, but we aren’t going to Alaska that way.  Instead we turned west at highway 37A, a small spur that leads to a pair of quirky towns that straddle the US-Canada border at the top of the Portland Canal – Stewart, British Columbia and Hyder, Alaska.  Both were mining boomtowns in the early 1900’s.

Of the two towns, Stewart BC is the more populated and busy one with a gas station, a few hotels and restaurants, and a couple grocery stores.  Most of the original structures in both towns were actually built on pilings out in the tidal flats of the canal.  The buildings are long gone but many of the pilings remain – eerie reminders of a distant past.

We did cross the border into Alaska once today, but we were only in Hyder for a few minutes before crossing back.  We plan to go back for a little longer tomorrow – stay tuned.

One of the more interesting stops on the Stewart side of the border is the Bear Glacier.  As you approach the town of Stewart on highway 37 you come around a bend in the road and all of a sudden you see this magnificent blue glacier.

I was disappointed that the sky was so cloudy, because these photos don’t really do justice to the color – I tried to get a few close-ups just to show how bright blue it really is.  Seriously, it looks like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude or something.  And the surface is riddled with crevasses – very different from the Athabasca Glacier we were standing on just a few days ago, and not somewhere I’d like to go hiking.  We enjoyed the view from the safety of the road, instead.

And of course, Kevin had to get the requisite shot of the van in front of the glacier.  Look!  They kind of match!