Thursday, June 2, 2011

Town of Burns Lake, west on Hwy 16

Traveling 94 miles (150 km) to the Village of Burns Lake and Sandy's RV Campground at Francois Lake.

We continued west on Hwy 16 past Fort Fraser which was established in 1806 as a North West Company fur trading post by the explorer Simon Fraser

Next was Fraser Lake and then finally the Village of Burns Lake




At Village of Burns Lake, BC  we turned south for 20 km to Sandy's RV Campground on Francois Lake the second longest lake in BC.  The lake stretches over 25,250 hectares and a depth of over 87 metres and 110 km (68 miles) long.  There is a ferry (free) to reach the other side.  This is considered an alpine lake with an altitude of 715 m (about 2,340 feet) and a fisherman's paradise.

As you know this has been a very wet cool spring and heavy run off of melting snow. Well, Francois Lake was rising 2 - 3 inches every day and this is a very large lake so you can imagine how much water that is. The employees and family were making sand bags and they started lining the shore. We cut our stay short by one day just so we could still get out of there. We were camped right by the water and the water was seeping up to our trailers.


 We were prepared for wet weather with two cozy tents that were set up next to the lake.  As you can see the lake is very high and getting higher.
 Some of the sand bags


 Moving our tents to higher ground

Driving back into the Village of Burns Lake we visited the local museum displaying some of the local artifacts.  I have never seen so much that was displayed so beautifully and everything labeled by hand.  They also had a reading room.  All the newspapers from the last 100 years were laminated and filed.  We were encouraged to pick a block of them to read.  You could spend the entire day just reading these newspapers.  The docent was very knowledgeable and gave us a little history lesson of the area for the last 100 years or so.


Next stop was Smithers, BC at Riverside RV and Golf Park and they were able to take us a day early.

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