Stewart-Cassiar-Highway, Part 1

In Prince Rupert, we first visited the tour operator for whale watching in the morning, but unfortunately only found out that they had already ended their season a few days earlier. So no more orcas for us, very disappointing!

As an alternative program, we did a little hiking: We started with a short city tour and a delicious cappuccino, then followed a small coastal hike (Rushbrook Trail), and finally got in the car and drove to the starting point of another hike (Butza Rapids and Grassy Bay). This was actually quite strenuous due to the continuous steep ups and downs...

The next day, we went to Stewart. We drove the first 200 km on the Trans-Canada Highway before turning onto the Stewart-Cassiar Highway. From Stewart, we made a detour to Alaska, which is only 5 km away. There is a small village called Hyder, the Salmon Glacier (accessed via a gravel road with some pretty big potholes), and a river where salmon spawn, which makes the river quite popular with bears. The observation platform there even gave us another chance to see a grizzly bear, which was very active and easy to see (and photograph) ...

On the way back, we had to go through the Canadian border control (surprisingly, the US does not control there at all), where we were told that we are allowed to have and carry bear spray in bear country, but we must declare it as a weapon upon entry, oops!