my travels in pixels

Bella Coola, British Columbia, Canada This place is special and this trip has been planned on the time we wanted to spend in Bella Coola. We don’t actually stay in Bella Coola, but in the valley which is at the end of Highway 20 aka the Freedom Road after descending the Heckman Pass otherwise known as “the hill”. A steep, winding, narrow in parts gravel road that descends from 5000ft to the valley floor in just over 21 kms which takes about an hour to travel. There are places which are only one vehicle wide and while downhill traffic is supposed to give way to uphill traffic, they don’t! The drops are breathtaking and I was much happier when our lane was closest to the mountain side. We only had to pass one truck which happened to be in a wide section, all the other vehicles were cars. As we passed the Provincial campground at Fisheries Pool, we stopped outside and I walked in to see if there were any vacancies. As I was walking down the pot-holed dirt road overhung...

As this was taken from inside the car, it doesn't show the gradient Ever since Lindsay heard there were bears in Bella Coola he has wanted to go there. Me, not so much, you see we had heard horror stories about the road in. They call it the Freedom Highway. It's the steepest road in North America, it's narrow, windy, unpaved and wait for it, has an 18% grade. What does 18% mean anyway? Shouldn't that be degrees? It descends for 43kms, with 9km of very steep descent. Anyway, it sounded scary. Maybe not for a car, but we would be towing a heifer lump of a trailer behind us. We rang the ferry to see how much it would cost, but they said they were booked up for the next few weeks, did we want to go in mid October? An aerial view of the switchbacks -  Photo from:  Bella Coola Blog It was just over 1,100 kms from when we got off the ferry from Vancouver Island. Drive down Canada 1 to Hope and continue on it north. We stopped off the first night at a rest stop alon...