Fort Nelson

Tuesday, August 24 - Last night after dinner we walked down to the river with Collins and Marilyn.  Joe took his weapon to protect us.

We found a lot of pretty "Brenda" rocks there.  Collins tried to get one for her, but Marilyn said it was too much weight for the RV.

I got up early again this morning, so I walked down to the river to see if there was any wildlife about.  On the way, I passed a flatbed truck with black sand on the back, so I checked it out for gold nuggets.  No luck, still!

I collected a pocketful of rocks for Brenda last night, so today I left the rest of them there, but Brenda would have had a heyday here.  She really should fly in and start picking them up.  We passed a grass airstrip just a few miles back.

I came upon a rock formation someone had built.  I'm not sure if it was a bed or a grave (it had ferns in it), but it was interesting to see.  (I didn't check to see if someone was buried there.)

The sun was just starting to come up over the mountains, so I got a few pictures.  My picture makes the river look dark, and it wasn't, which you can see in the second picture.  It was all very pretty.

Then we hit the road, 9:00 start again, but we had a scenic view just about 3 miles down the road, Indian Head Mountain, followed a few miles later by Steamboat Mountain.

We got to Fort Nelson about 11:00, and stopped at their Heritage Museum, which had "one of the most impressive collections of antique cars in British Columbia."  It also had a lot of drilling equipment, old office equipment, tools, etc.  Joe took 77 pictures here, so I've narrowed it down to about a half dozen.

This grinding wheel is one like my grandparents had, so I thought it was picture-worthy.

And they had a stuffed "white moose," so of course we needed a picture of that.

We had lunch in town, then headed on down the road.  It got to be a long driving day, got slowed down by some road construction a couple times, and didn't get to our campground until about 5:00 p.m., put in 182 miles so everyone was worn out.  After the wildlife we saw the last two days, we had high hopes for today, but all we saw was a dead black bear, a dead deer, and finally, a live gray fox just before we quit driving for the day.

But we got great campsites, right by the Sikanni River.  I saw a few fish jump, so I'm thinking Collins needs to get his fishing pole out.

Collins never did get his fishing pole out, so the fish were safe.