Princeton - Peachland - Spences Bridge |
Thursday, April 9 - Monday, April 13, 1998
Participants |
Note: This trip report was written from memory, so the route may not be exact. For another account, check Nick's trip report. Nick was actually taking notes, and his trip report will be from his perspective.
Brad, Jud, and I left the Vancouver area Thursday afternoon, and camped at the Copper Creek campsite (Placer Mtn FSR (Forest Service Road)) overnight. This campsite is located on Hwy 3, approximately 9 km east of Manning Park's East Gate. Bright and early the next morning, Nick arrived at camp, having left Vancouver at 5:00 am, after his navigator got off work! I waited at the entrance to the campsite for the others to show up, while Brad, Jud, and Nick went for a short run up Placer Mtn, where it was snowing. Eventually, Scott and Mari Ann arrived (from Victoria), and after some introductions and checking out each others' trucks, we were off. I should mention that I met Scott through the Toyota 4x4 Mailing List.
Jud led the pack, and we drove into Princeton and fueled up. Scott suddenly realized his rear electric locker had been engaged since Copper Creek (oops). A short drive on the Old Hedley Road to the outskirts of Princeton put us at the old Kettle Valley Railway (KVR) right-of-way, and we turned north here and headed out of Princeton. The KVR right-of-way no longer has tracks on it, and is a pleasant, scenic alternative to the main gravel road.
We continued on the KVR road, removed a fallen tree with the help of Brad's chainsaw, and arrived at an old train tunnel carved through solid rock. We snapped a few pictures, and marvelled at the tenacity of the rail workers.
Along the way, we found a sand pit to play in, where Jud managed to get his 4Runner stuck. I took a picture before winching him out, in case he tried to deny it later! =)
One of the highlights of this part of the trip was crossing a railway trestle, high above a gorge. We got out to check the trestle on foot, and observed that the view of the river below was quite spectacular. Mari Ann took this opportunity to advise us she was slightly afraid of heights. One by one we crossed, carefully bumping over the spaced railway ties.
The KVR right-of-way is an easy, 2wd route, but it is well worth driving as the scenery is fantastic, with mountain passes, shelf roads, and numerous lakes. I definitely enjoyed travelling it, and I hope that it continues to remain open to the public.
We arrived at Thirsk Lake, where we started to set up camp for the night. Nick decided he'd go out and play in the mud along the shore, and suddenly found himself mired almost up to his frame. Not even his Lockright was able to free him. Nick exited his truck, and engaged in some creative language and throwing of inanimate objects, while the rest of us took pictures and chuckled at his predicament.
I drove my truck out to his, and hooked up the winch. However, he was stuck so deep that I was unable to pull him out, even with a snatch block. All we succeeded in doing was pulling my truck closer to his, and pulling my front end down into the mud.
We all started digging, trying to move some of the mud out of the way to help the winch. More winching; no practical movement on his side, but my truck was now into the soft stuff, and the mud was up over my front axle. We got out two High-Lift jacks, and started jacking up the rear of Nick's truck. Each click of the jacks pushed the jacks further into the mud, but eventually we were able to raise the rear of the truck up enough to hear the sucking sound of the mud grudgingly releasing it's hold on the tires. Music to our ears! An inspection of the undercarriage showed us the problem; movement of the axle and diff was halted by all the mud; in fact, we couldn't even see the axle or the diff. We shovelled as much mud as we could out of the way, noticing that the mud was slowly oozing back into the hole. We then took three long driftwood logs, placed one across the rear of the hole, and placed the other two on an angle from underneath his axle up over the first log, to form a ramp on either side of his diff. I winched him slowly up our makeshift ramp, and finally he was free. Nick then positioned his truck on a slightly-harder surface, off to the side of where he was stuck, and Scott chained his truck to Nick's. I ran my winch cable to Nick's truck, and winched myself out using the two trucks as an anchor. After three hours of recovery work, we were exhausted.
The next morning, some of us splashed through a nearby creek to clean the mud out of our brakes. Jud took a deeper line than the rest of us, and managed to soak his air filter. He popped the hood, and discovered that a mouse had taken up residence in his engine compartment, and was in the process of shaking the water off of itself!
After a few minutes of drying off Jud's air filter and other under-hood items, we continued on. We took a brief jaunt through a ghost town, checking out the old log cabins. We then took the Trout Creek FSR north to Headwater Lakes, where it was lightly snowing. After deciding that the snow on the Pennask Creek route that we wanted to take was too deep, we then took the Peachland FSR into Peachland. After fueling up, we took Hwy 97C over to Hwy 5A, encountering a huge snowstorm at the Pennask Summit area where the Pennask Creek route would have come out. We took Hwy 5A north into Merritt, fueled up again, and took Hwy 8 to the Promontory Mtn Lookout FSR, where we encountered a short but fierce hailstorm.
We drove up as far as we could, encountering snow about half-way up. According to Brad's GPS, we were almost at the top when we had to turn around. Jud got his 4Runner stuck in a snow-covered ditch while backing up, and Nick got his truck stuck trying to free him.
Nick was able to remove himself from his situation with some digging, and we then started to work on Jud's 4Runner.
Scott attempted to tug-em Jud's 4Runner free from behind, but unfortunately only pulled Jud further into the ditch. We finally ended up using a High-Lift jack to jack up the front of Jud's 4Runner, and push the truck over to get it out of the ditch.
We did this enough times to completely turn his 4Runner around so that it was facing down the road, then did it again to the rear of the 4Runner to get the rear end out of the ditch. Nick was able to turn his truck around to face downhill as he was at a switchback, and Mari Ann was able to turn her short-wheelbase YJ around in the middle of the road. Brad, Scott, and I backed down the hill in the snow until we found a convenient location to turn around, about 1 km away. While backing up, Scott managed to slide his truck off the road, but I was able to winch him out without incident.
While driving forward down the road, I somehow managed to slide into a ditch *argh*, but quickly winched myself out courtesy of a nearby tree. I blame a hidden ice patch under the snow!
Back at Hwy 8, we drove to the Skuhun Creek road towards Chataway Lake, passing through the Kinickinick Homestead, which may or may not be spelled that way. We set up camp in a clearing a few km's past the homestead, surrounded by White Birch and Lodgepole Pine trees. An old stone fireplace and crumbling chimney was here, but no other evidence of the original structure remained. The temperature dropped to -8°C during the night, and in the morning I had little icicles hanging from the glass of my sunroof from the condensation (I sleep in my truck when "camping").
We left camp and started up a barely-visible road east.
We crossed a shallow creek, and observed copious amounts of recent evidence of deer in the area. We encountered numerous trees that had fallen across the road, and during one of the tree-removal stops, Mari Ann gave everybody a Cadbury chocolate Easter egg (yum!).
Some sections of the road got fairly steep, requiring 4-Lo. After a while, we encountered snow. We powered through it for a bit, until it got too deep, then turned around in a clear area by a fence.
Brad's GPS said we were almost at the top of this mountain too. We drove back down the mountain, and had lunch back at our campsite, during which it first snowed, then hailed.
We backtracked on Hwy 8 to Cummings Road, then took the turnoff to the right on the Nuaitch Creek road. We slowly wound our way through mountains and valleys, moved some fallen trees, crossed an ancient bridge, and eventually popped back out at the KVR right-of-way at Platt Creek. Brad mentioned that nobody had driven this route since last September, as one of the fallen trees we removed was the one that stopped him and Jud back then, as evidenced by their hand-saw marks on the trunk. Apparently, they couldn't be bothered to manually saw all the way through it!
We took the KVR right-of-way, travelling parallel to Hwy 8 and the Nicola River towards Spences Bridge. Unfortunately, our progress was thwarted by washouts. We backtracked along the KVR, and passed through an Indian Reservation to get back to Hwy 8. We drove Hwy 8 to Spences Bridge, fueled up, and said our goodbyes to Jud, who had to work on Monday. The rest of us headed up the Spences Bridge watershed road, in search of a campsite.
The first turn-off to the right from the watershed road was a narrow, sandy, shelf road, which we took in the hope of finding a nice place to camp. A short distance along the road, we encountered a slide, where the sand from the cliff above had come down across a 4m section of the road, and had taken the outside portion of road with it. I was leading, so I exited the truck to check out the slide on foot. Walking close to the outside edge of the slide allowed a view of the valley floor, about 100m below. The slide formed a sandy, off-camber side-hill, but the ground seemed solid enough, so I decided to try it. I fastened everything down in the cab, and zipped up my CD case, so that I wouldn't have stuff flying all over if I rolled (like it would matter!). Halfway across the slide, the back end of the truck started sliding down towards the outside edge, but I made it across.
Mari Ann was next, and halfway across the slide, her Jeep started sliding off the road and over the edge, so I yelled "Go, go!" and she accelerated enough to get out of the slide and make it across before she went tumbling into the abyss (whew). I don't know how she felt, but it scared the heck out of me just watching it! I was sent on to check out the rest of the road, while the others decided what to do about the slide. The road continued on for a short distance, passed an open field, and ended at a couple of abandoned log cabins. The others advised me over the CB that they would be fixing the road and proceeding across, and that we would be camping in the field. After camp was set up, an elderly lady walked up to us, and politely advised us that we were on private land. Apparently, she had walked in from the main road. Hm, too bad, as it was a nice spot. However, if we had known it was private property, we would not have camped there (no signs were posted). After some discussion about an alternate campsite by the Alexandra Bridge by Spuzzum, we decided it would be too late by the time we got set up, and we wouldn't have enough time for 'wheeling the next morning before Scott and Mari Ann had to head back to catch the ferry to Victoria. We decided to call it a weekend. We packed up our gear, and started out along the road in the darkness with Scott in the lead.
I was the third vehicle, behind Mari Ann, so I don't know exactly what happened next, but all I saw was the back end of Scott's truck sliding down off the road, dragging the front end along with it, tires spinning. Mari Ann was screaming, and I gripped my steering wheel in shock, as his truck slowly went over the edge. Fortunately, Scott stopped spinning his tires, and the truck came to a halt, held in place only by the sand that had piled up against his passenger-side front tire when it was being dragged sideways. Scott carefully exited his truck, and we assessed the situation. There were no trees close by to anchor the truck to, and if we tied his truck to the Jeep, the weight of the truck might pull the Jeep over the edge with it if the ground collapsed. We could try backing everyone up, and I could attempt to winch it out from the back, but the wrong pull might send the front end of his truck over the edge, dragging my truck along with it. There wasn't enough room to drive around him to try to pull him from the front. We were definitely in trouble, with the road looking like it was about to collapse, and send Scott's truck crashing down to the valley floor below. The picture doesn't really show the angle, but it seemed to us that even gently leaning on the truck would send it over.
I decided that an expensive tow bill would be far cheaper than rolling the truck, and made the suggestion of calling a tow truck. Everyone agreed that that was a good idea, so Scott and Mari Ann walked out, back to Spences Bridge, and called a tow truck from the pay phone at the gas station (no cellular coverage here!). While they were doing this, we shovelled more sand around Scott's passenger-side front tire to help stabilize the truck. We also began repairing the road for the next vehicles.
Len, from Spences Bridge Tire and Mechanical, agreed to pull Scott out, and charge only $60.00 per hour, an excellent deal for a 4wd recovery at 11:00 on Sunday night. Len picked up Scott and Mari Ann at the gas station, drove up the watershed road, and then backed his old 3-ton tow truck all the way down the access road to Scott's truck. I should mention that Len, who was a very nice guy, looked like he was in his late sixties or early seventies. Mari Ann led Scott away from his truck, out of view, and talked to him while the recovery was performed. Len engaged his Mico Locks, and he and I spooled out his right-side cable and attached it to the right (and only) front tow hook of Scott's truck. Len started pulling, but Scott's truck only started sliding more over the edge as the anchor tire cleared the sand pile. Len and I then spooled out his left-side cable, and Len chained the cable to Scott's left-side front spring hanger and leaf spring. Len slowly pulled a bit with the left cable, and Scott's truck slowly slid down over the edge, the back end swinging out over empty space, the front tires against the collapsed side of the road. It looked like the truck was about to roll as it hung there, suspended only by the two cables. I could hear rocks and sand sliding down the drop-off. I was hoping his canopy door was locked! Len quickly and skillfully alternated between the left and right cables, and slowly worked Scott's truck up over the edge, where I was able to reach inside and turn the steering wheel to guide it back up on to the road. Whoo-hoo! Scott looked pretty happy when he saw his truck back on terra firma.
We quickly made some final road repairs, and after asking if somebody else might drive her Jeep over this section, Mari Ann started across the slide. She didn't have enough momentum at first, and bogged her Jeep down in the sand. After a couple of attempts, we got her to idle up it with us pushing from behind, until she was able to drive the rest of the way. The rest of us were able to cross the slide without incident, due to the improvements made to the road. After much thanking and shaking of hands, Scott happily paid Len, who had stuck around until we had all made it across, and gave him a very generous tip.
We took Hwy 1 back towards the Vancouver area, the bright, full moon offering glimpses of the Thompson and Fraser canyons. Scott, Mari Ann, and myself were too tired to drive, so we pulled over at Bridal Falls and slept for a couple of hours, while Brad and Nick continued on. I arrived home at approximately 8:30 am, and after unloading the equipment from the truck, I enjoyed a nice, hot shower before tumbling into bed. For the most part, the roads were all fairly easy until the snow got too deep, but I've never had to do so much digging and winching before on any trip. And of course, I'd do it all over again!
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