British Columbia

On Monday morning Katherine and I began our trek up to Alaska to see Julie.

This post will illustrate the 3 day journey through British Columbia and the Yukon to get there. From Seattle, it's not too far before you cross into Canada. They wouldn't stamp our passports here!

I was so impressed with how beautiful it was in BC!

It was overcast and rainy when we first entered the country, but it was so pretty with the mountains in the clouds like this!

We drove all day and ended up parking the truck (my parents let us borrow theirs) in a hotel parking lot to get some sleep. We set up a big air mattress in the back of the truck and just slept back there. We stopped at a rest area about an hour after we left on day 2 to make some breakfast using my parents' handy dandy cook stove.

We made several scenery stops along the way so we could snap some pictures!

This place was so pretty and had some pretty serious rapids!

I loved it there!

As we turned onto the Cassiar highway, we saw these awesome totem poles.

We decided to take a little detour to see some glaciers that one of Katherine's travel books raved about. This is the first one we saw and it was pretty impressive!

This waterfall was really near the glacier. I was actually out of the car and running to the waterfall I saw from the road and just happened upon this one as I was running by.

I wish this picture did this waterfall justice! It was the most breathtaking waterfall I've ever seen!

oThese two pictures were taken on the beginning of a long dirt mountain road that we went on to see the world's largest glacier that's accessible by road. We were hoping to see some live bears along this road, but no such luck.

I think this is my favorite shot I've taken this whole trip! This was a little detour we took from our route to go see the Salmon Glacier. To get on the road that lead up there, we had to venture into Alaska for a bit, but the glacier is in BC. This shot is from the dirt road leading up to the glacier.

Here's the top of the glacier. It was insanely huge!

Of course Katherine and I tried several poses in front of it.

While we were up there, we thought it would be fun to play in the snow for a little bit. We had a little snowball fight and then Katherine kept throwing snowballs, but my favorite part of the snowball throwing was that Katherine kept making the noises little boys make when they're playing cars and they make the cars wreck. The same noise is also made when trying to simulate an explosion. It was hilarious!

Here's a shot of the Salmon glacier as we were heading back down the mountain.

After we got back on course, we drove for a long time. We actually saw a black bear as we were getting back on the road, but couldn't get a good shot of it. I got back into the woods before we could get very close. Not long before we stopped for night 2, we saw this awesome lake and caught this shot of it at sunset.

We stayed night 2 at a nice little rest stop along the Cassiar Highway. It was pretty deserted and quiet. The mosquitoes were our only problem - oh, and the fact that everything in the back of the truck was COVERED in dust from the dirt roads heading up to the Salmon Glacier.

We know we had hit a lot of bugs the night before we stopped at that rest area, but were amazed to see just how many the next morning. You may need to click on this picture to see it up close!

Day 3 was our lucky day for seeing bears. Up to this point, we'd only seen the one black bear. Well, on day 3 we saw 6! This was the first one we saw on that day!

This mother and baby brown bear were bear sightings 4 & 5 that day. All the others were black bears - no grizzlies!

This is a terrible shot, but I wanted to include it to show you how close this mother bear was to the road. We were so close to them! This is a bad shot because Katherine had to move the truck suddenly because another car was coming.

Here's a better shot of that cute little cub!

This shot is in the Yukon just before getting into Alaska. We arrived safely in Skagway and you can look forward to another post about our adventures here soon!