The Alaska Hwy-Dawson Creek to Ft St John, BC

We arrived in Dawson Creek – Mile 0 of the Alaska Hwy and my old stomping grounds.  This fertile grain growing area is called the Peace River Valley and is where I spent my childhood on a 1000 acres we farmed on mile 73 of the Alaska Hwy.    We left here in 1970 and I have never been back.  I always wanted to see what the area looked like now and what became of our land and that became the impetus for this trip.

Mile Marker 0 in downtown Dawson Creek.

A final steak dinner before hitting the road and doing some long distances.

The other 2 parts of our convoy headed north from Dawson Creek without us as we took a slight detour visit the W A C Bennett Dam, a massive hydroelectric project built in the 1960’s and considered the largest earthern filled dam in the world.  My father worked on this project and I have lots of pictures of the huge pieces of equipment they used.  (Me standing inside a tire and such).

W A C Bennett Dam on the Peace River in Hudson’s Hope, BC is the largest earthen dam in the world.

The dam is 183 meters tall x 800 meters wide by 2 km long.

This photo below cleared up a memory that I had that I didn’t understand.   This is a conveyor belt that they built to move 55 million cubic yards of nearby glacial moraine into the area to build the dam.   It was great to see the photo, I had always wondered about that memory.

From our detour to the dam we got back on the Alaska Hwy, through Ft St John where I went to school and up towards the old homestead.  The land had all been virgin timber when my father aquired it but we had cleared much of it and were growing grain.  Now it looks like it is all reverting back to bush.  No sign of our house.  At least now I know what became of it.

Nothing left of our old homestead on the Alaska Hwy.