Wells Gray Provincial Park?

[Thad Gerheim]

Has anyone here spent anytime in or around the Wells Gray Provincial Park in British Columbia? I hope, wildfires allowing, to travel from Idaho up through BC past Kootenay Lake, Upper Arrow Lake and Revelstoke Lake to the park. We'll start next month and hopefully be living out of my pickup camper for a month or more. This park looks like a good place to go if you like waterfalls and lakes for canoe trips.

[Thad Gerheim]

With more than 380 wildfires burning in British Columbia the Province enacted a state of emergency which banned non-essential travel in areas that we would have had to travel through to get to the Wells Gray park. We did enjoy a week in the Kootenay lake and Slocan lake areas before the smoke became unbearable and we wisely returned to Idaho. What makes these areas more appealing to me is that they are not Banff and Jasper with the crowds and the commercialism, but have spectacular landscape. We camped in small campgrounds right on the lake edge in what should have been cool wet pacific climate with huge cedar, hemlock and birch trees. But it was hot an drier than a cracker. We were able to hike on trails that offer views of glaciers, icefields and waterfalls without seeing another person. So in a nutshell it is the fairly easy ability to do extended trips into areas that have a wilderness feeling to them that the national parks don't have.