After a health scare in January and surviving a stent procedure in March, I decided it’s time to start knocking off items from my bucket list.
I’ve always wanted to cruise through the Panama Canal. I don’t know why, but it’s just one of those things I’ve always wanted to do. My husband wanted to take a road trip through British Columbia and Alberta, retracing part of the route he traveled 60 years ago with a bachelor uncle.
“Let’s do it,” I said. “No time like the present.”
Especially for long driving trips as we’re not growing any younger. In fact, we brought a younger couple along with us, my daughter and her husband, who are still newlyweds a year after their wedding. We rented an SUV to give us more room and headed north.
Unlike my husband, I’m not a huge fan of road trips, in large part because I often need to stop along the way. But we managed without any fiascos.
I hoped to see wildlife along the route from Washington north through the Frazier River Canyon to Clinton, Williams Lake, Prince George and Dawson Creek, the start of the Alaska-Canada Highway, and then to Grand Prairie, Edmonton, Canmore near Banff National Park and then through Glacier National Park to Bigfork, Montana, on Flathead Lake. We enjoyed gorgeous scenery and stopped at waterfalls and lakes as the highways passed through British Columbia and the majestic Canadian Rockies.
We drove 2,500 miles in a week but saw very little wildlife — a raven, an eagle and a herd of captive cow elk behind fences. Apparently, Canada has more than 2,200 deer and elk farms, primarily in Alberta and Saskatchewan, with red deer farms in Ontario and Quebec.
I took their photos, but I much prefer slowing for the wild elk sauntering across U.S. Highway 12 in Packwood and seeing them laying on the lawn in front of the Cowlitz River Lodge near Skate Creek Road.
We looked for moose and grizzly bears. In fact, I hollered out the window for them. “Here, Moosie. Here, Grizzlies.”
Yes, parents often embarrass their kids. It’s what we do best.
Of course, we would have encountered more wildlife driving the back roads and hiking in the woods during early morning hours or at dusk and night, but by that time each evening, we were settled into our hotel engaged in feisty games of pinochle.
When we reached Canmore near Banff, we spent two nights and took a bus trip to Lake Moraine, where we hiked up the rockpile trail to see the shimmering green lake tucked among the rocks and trees. We rode the bus to Lake Louise, hiked near the Fairmont Chateau, and then visited Emerald Lake in the British Columbia side of Banff, where our guide went for a swim, and then stopped at the Natural Bridge over the Kicking Horse River.
Before we left home, we couldn’t cajole our cat into her carrier for the trip to the boarding kennel, so a friend fed her each day on the deck. Our camera caught a huge feral cat, bobcat or raccoon with a ringed tail eating her food at night.
Another day, while I scanned the side of the road for wildlife, I caught movement on our deck camera and checked to see a doe and her fawns sauntering through the backyard. We had seen them earlier in the summer too when I snapped their photos.
It could be the Canadian wildlife stayed away from the freeways and simply crossed on one of the 44 bridges and underpasses built specifically for them in Banff National Park. Studies show that deer, elk, lynx, coyotes, wolves, wolverines and moose all use the bridges while bears and cougars prefer the underpasses. Wildlife fences along the Trans-Canada Highway have cut the number of animal-car collisions significantly (between 80 percent and 97 percent).
Washington state has nearly two dozen wildlife bridges, half of them in Kittitas County. The first was erected in 1976 on Interstate 90 near North Bend. A study by Washington State University in Pullman in 2022 reported that wildlife crossings saved between $235,000 and $443,000 in fewer wildlife-vehicle collisions, with an estimated one to three fewer collisions per mile in a 10-mile radius around each crossing every year. Each crossing costs between $500,000 for underpasses to more than $6 million for broad bridges like the one spanning I-90 near Snoqualmie Pass.
It was disappointing not to see more wildlife because British Columbia abounds in big game. Our chances were better with our original itinerary, which included a stop at the Overlander Mountain Lodge at the east gate to Jasper National Park. When an 81,663-acre wildfire swept through the Jasper community in July, destroying a third of the town, we canceled our reservation and rerouted our trip to avoid the devastation.
Returning home, we followed the Going-to-the-Sun Road through Glacier National Park, a true test for people like me with acrophobia, and arrived in Bigfork, Montana, to see trees toppled by a storm and power out throughout the community, including at our vacation rental.
We did see a buck and two does along the driveway to our VRBO, but without power, we kept driving to Missoula for the night. We dropped off Nora and Chase in Spokane and headed home.
The next day, as I drove near Schoolhouse Lane to walk with my friend on Howe Road, I saw two young deer bound in front of a car into the underbrush. Welcome home to Lewis County, land of the free and home of the wildlife.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
