Chetwynd

Thursday, August 26 - We split off for the day, Collins to take his car in to have the battery checked while Marilyn did laundry, and the rest of us headed to Chetwynd.  The trip was well worth it, the wood scultpures were amazing!  There are 100 scattered around the town, with a large concentration of them right around the visitor center.  We didn't see them all, but we found most of them.  Here's some of my favorites.

These sculptures were carved all the way around, and many of them had very neat " backsides."  I really loved this one, front and back.

I thought the "no vacancy" was a clever addition to the back of this one.

This next one was one of Mazie's favorites.

Mazie had her first "near panic attack" of the trip while we were here.  We were out of the car, looking at the sculptures, when all of sudden, she had to go to the bathroom.  Like now!  I thought she was heading back to the car, but she decided she couldn't make it that far, she was dancing!  She was afraid she was going to have wet pants all day, so she got behind a wood fence and found a bush.  Right after that, we took this picture on this carved bench.

But when she sat down, the bench had a little puddle of water, and she ended up with wet pants anyway.

Here's a few more pictures.  They do the sculpting in June, in a 36-hour period.  We would love to be here for that sometime.

There is a huge sawmill on the edge of town, and there were piles and piles of lumber there.  I think this is the logging capital on British Columbia, so I guess that's why the wood carving is done here.   We had lunch (at A and W Rootbeer) then headed out of town, through the little town of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia's newest community.  It was incorporated in 1981, built in conjunction with the development of the North East Coal resource.  One of the mines here was the world's largest computerized open coal pit mine until it closed in 2000.  There are several waterfalls around this town, but we didn't hike to any of them.  We did stop at Gwillin Lake along the way, a pretty lake and campground.

It ended up to be a 200-mile day in the car, so we were tired when we got back.  Collins' battery checked out OK, so everything is good.