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Backroads: The Anti-Alaska
Western Living, May 2003
The Stewart-Cassiar Highway heads north from the Yellowhead, between Prince George and Prince Rupert, providing an alternate route for Alaska-bound travellers who feel that the savage Alaska Highway just isn't rugged enough. There's no reason to be here and almost no one is. Hours can go by and you'll never meet another vehicle.
Tourism officials will tell you this road, which winds through the mountains toward the highway's namesake, the mysterious townsite of Cassiar, is paved the whole way, but they're being overly optimistic. The pavement randomly gives way to rickety stretches of dirt. Bears and mountain sheep stroll comfortably along the shoulders, and gangly moose pose in pools of standing water. All this is a delight to camera-toting Americans, who love to snap photos of the wildlife and the Gitxsan totems without ever leaving the comfort of massive RVs stuffed with a bunker's worth of Costco cookies and cases of RC Cola. Visitors who venture a little further from the roadside are likely to run into some of the locals-mixed white/native families living undocumented lives in log cabins on Crown land, deep in the bush.
The highway begins at Gitwangak (near Kitwanga), a native reserve nestled above the banks of the Skeena River's turbulent, rushing waters. At Meziadin Junction, you can turn off for Stewart, on the Alaska Panhandle. If you're sticking to the main route, be sure to refuel at Dease Lake, where the supermarket roof doubles as a perch for ravens the size of house cats. Like much of the Canadian North (and the prairies, too, for that matter), the landscape is littered with rickety old buildings that haven't been used in years and that no one has found a compelling reason to tear down.
The road ambles northward through endless scenes of pristine mountains and massive forests. Just when you're convinced that nothing ugly exists within a thousand miles, you'll hit the bizarre, abandoned townsite of Cassiar. It's a slight detour from the main road. The spur is marked by piles of rubble and scarred, pitted mountainsides, a legacy of the deceased town's number one industry and one of Canada's more dubious exports: asbestos.
Most of the townsite was levelled after the mine closed in 1992, but a few houses remain, doors unlocked, still stuffed with '80s-style chairs and sofas. Cassiar once boasted a swimming pool, a post office, a curling rink and a grocery store; now there's just a bunch of rusted-out cable cars that once brought rock down the mountainside to the mill for processing. A few small buildings remain, including the old dog pound, which speaks to another reality of northern life.
On the final stretch, you'll cross the border into the Yukon where, instantly, the mosquitoes seem to double in size and ferocity. It's just beyond here that the road ends, and you find yourself back in the mainstream of wilderness travel, heading out on the vast, spectacular Alaska Highway.