The second day of the History tour we woke up to 4 inches of snow on our car. Not quite the vision of a lovely fall day we had in mind for early October.
Our first stop was at the site of the old Roadhouse on the Patenaude Ranch, built to service the Cariboo Gold Trail.
Next pit stop was at Big Lake, just off the Likely Road. Apparently we've been driving right by the Big Lake Heritage site for almost 30 years,not realizing it existed. They have moved several buildings to the site from the old Big Lakr Ranch (now a subdivision). They look great in the snow:
And you can walk down a portion of the original Gold Rush Trail.
Next stop was the Bullion Pit, once the largest manmade hole in the world.
This viewpoint is actually over the Drop Pit, a smaller hydraulic mines it near the Bullion
Just past the ghost town of Hydraulic, we stopped at the turnoff to the once bustling Bullion Pit townsite, but we did not visit because of the muddy road. Its just as well, I was there in the pouring rain for work in the 1990s and all that was left was the roofs of the collapsed buildings. Apparently, the current owners are cleaning up the site and as they remove the debris they are donating artifacts to the Likely Museum.
Lunch was at the Likely Hotel.
Its really spruced up since the new owners bought it after the retired from running the Salvation Army Mission in Williams Lake. Yup, straight from saving souls to drawing draft! They can be counted on for good home cooking.
Our last stop of the day was the Likely Museum,
which was built since the last time I visited Cedar Point
Provincial Park on Quesnel Lake. Its a great little museum, and not just because there's a prominent picture of me playing with the Community Band in the Likely Victoria Day Parade in the mid 90s.
The docent told us a touching story of a visiting Japanese man who tracked down his lost Grandfather who moved to Canada and disappeared. He followed his grandfather's tracks to the Boulion Pit mine, and he has returned seeral times to the Likely area since.
We watched an old CBC documentary about the wife of the former mine manager revisiting the abandoned Bullion townsite in the 60s.
Cedar Creek is the site of the Cariboo's last Gold Rush in 1921. Its a nice campsite and on site is a large steam shovel from the Bullion Pit. There's another one now located at the visitor centre in Quesnel.
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