Kelly Lake: The Backroads of Lillooet
We left Vancouver early Friday morning and drove to Lillooet and beyond. The starting point of the trip was actually farther then we thought and was way past Lillooet. The original idea was to do a trip along the Fraser River which was quite involved with steep down and uphill sections. I wasn’t too excited about it and we came up with a plan B that worked out just fine. Anyway we discovered that the road down to the Fraser was closed for construction, so it’s not even sure that we could have done it.
The road we drove on (the Clinton-Pavilion road) was washed out, luckily close to the peak, so we had to park the car and start cycling from there. We crossed to washout area and had a steep downhill section to Kelly Lake. It was way cooler than we expected and way greener too, it wasn’t the typical Lilllooet desert scenery. We cycled for a few hours on the first day and then found a nice spot to camp. The sky turned gray as we were having dinner and of course it started to pour once we finished. Gili still managed to hang the food somehow and the rain didn’t stop for a good few hours.
We were happy to wake up to blue skies and some sun and we continued riding. We hardly saw anyone at all, just a few cows and a few passing cars here and there. We passed some huge farms and many lakes. At some point there were some cows on the road but we also noticed one angry looking bull. We detoured through the forest not to encounter the bull. All of this time I thought about what those people that never get out of the city miss out. Eventually we passed the cattle and were safe and sound again on the road.
In the late afternoon we reached the small town of Clinton. We cycled some more and made our way back to Kelly Lake. We camped by the lake just the two of us, there was no one else around. The next morning we climbed back to our car and it wasn’t as bad as I thought. We still had a long way to drive back home and we made a lunch stop somewhere along the Fraser which is extremely high this year. We also passed through Boston Bar which had a sign that for that month the name of their town is Vancouver Bar. It was in the middle of the play offs, the pre-riots days, when people were still hopeful that Vancouver would take the Stanley Cup.
