Side Trip to Fort St. James

On our way to visit Smithers we took a one day side trip to Fort St. James since neither of us had ever been there, despite its only being 40 minutes off Highway 16.

In doing so we checked a few items of our bucket list:  Fort St. James National Historic Park and we camped at a new Provincial Park:  Paarens Bay.  We also walked through nearby Sowchea Bay Provincial Park and made a short hike up Mount Pope Provincial Park;  Fort St. James has no shortage of provincial parks.

Sowchea and Paarens Bay are both lakeside campsites, we lucked out and chose a site at Paarens Bay with the campsite road between us and the beach vs. sites right on the beach at Sowchea.  But the sites at Sowchea were crammed right next to each other and our sites were the usual spacious provincial park sites with trees in between us.  We just had to carry our chairs across the road to enjoy the sunset with only a few other couples on the beach.

Our campsite at Paarens Bay

Beach at Paarens Bay in sunnier conditions

There's no shortage of beaches on Stuart Lake; there's also a beachfront campsite in town (no trees though), and the main hotel in town also looks over the water.

And the historic fort is of course also right on the lake.  We spent several hours checking it out.  You enter by walking down to the lake, then you walk up from the dock as the fur traders would have done.

 They say it's Canada’s largest collection of wooden buildings faithfully restored to the fur trade era.  We don't know though, we've been to Fort Selkirk on the Yukon River, and it has over 40 original buildings.

We had fun checking out the fur warehouse (full of real skins), 

the trading store, 

and Walker House, the administrator's home.

But the highlight was the chicken races where we got to lay bets on the winner.  

Some have suggested that this may constitute animal cruelty, but they didn't look any worse for wear to me.

Chickens get their reward

They basically get released from the chicken coop through the chutes and then run to the feed station.

Leo's chicken won and he got a 25 cent coupon reimbursed at the gift shop!

It happened to be our 28th wedding anniversary, so we celebrated by having lunch in their lakefront cafe.  I had the traditional beef stew, but Leo's Thai basil chicken, equally tasty, seemed less than authentic.

In the afternoon, we walked a short way up the Mount Pope trail to the first lookout through nice forest.

Heading back down the trail

All in all, thumbs up for Fort St. James!