Once you get to Prince George, you’re at the launching point for all kinds of summer fun
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British Columbia is so vast, it takes almost nine hours just to drive to the southern end of Northern BC. But once you get to Prince George, you’re at the launching point for all kinds of summer fun. Here are eight activities you can enjoy around the northern half of the province.
Paddle the Bowron Lake Provincial Park canoe circuit
It’s 110 km long. It’s roughly a quadrangle.It’s easy to follow without having advanced map-reading skills, and many of the portage trails are smooth enough that you can use a cart to wheel your canoe down the trail.
The campsites are well marked and maintained, they come with fire pits and outhouses. If you’re really new to paddling, you can even chose to do just one side of the circuit, going down the west side through Bowron, Swan, Spectacle, and Sandy Lakes, then turn around and head back, a trip done easily in four days and three nights. I did that the first time I paddled the circuit with someone who had never been on an overnight canoe trip before, and we’re still paddling together today.
Like most B.C. provincial parks you do need to book your time in the park well in advance. This is a world-class destination for paddlers, who come from the U.S., Germany, England, and Australia to experience the Bowron.
Visit Barkerville and take a step back into BC’s gold-mining past.
Located near the town of Wells, it’s about a 30-minute drive west of Bowron Lake.
The living museum is named after Billy Barker, who discovered gold in the area and triggered a gold rush there between 1861 and 1867. The resulting gold rush led to then Governor James Douglas ordering a 650-kilometre road to be built from Yale to Barkerville to make transportation to the gold fields easier.
You can easily spend an entire day there, watching park interpreters demonstrate how to pan for gold, as well as how a sluice box worked during the mid-19th century. And if you’re really keen, you can take gold panning lessons, available at El Dorado Gold Panning and Gift Shop.
If you like to hear a great yarn, be sure to drop into the noon court session at the Methodist Church and listen to “the hanging judge” regale you with tales of criminals the actual Judge Matthew Begbie had to sentence during his stint there – sometimes to the gallows.
One of the highlights is eating at the Lung Duck Tong Restaurant. It was there I finally learned how to eat with chopsticks properly (much to my wife’s amusement, after she taught me the techniques she used to minimize dropping food.)
Backpack up the Beach at Naikoon Provincial Park
Several rivers empty into the Hecate Strait along this beach, and because they are tidal in nature, you do need to be able to read tide charts and hit them during low tide – otherwise you may end up waiting several hours to cross. Be sure not to miss a river on the map, either, or you’ll be faced with a similar predicament.
The entire trip is either 70 km or 80 km, depending on whether you go all the way up to Rose Spit and around or cut across along the Cape Fife Trail. You’ll pass at least one shipwreck on the beach – the Pesuta at the south end, a 1928 wreck; and the Kelly Ruth, a 1994 wreck at the north end.
You don’t need to backpack the entire trail to see these; short little hikes will get you to either site.
If you’re not into overnight backpacking, the Cape Fife Trail offers you an enjoyable day-trip option from the Agate Beach campground, 20 kilometres to the coast and back through woods that gave us the feeling we were tramping through Middle Earth when we hiked it.
From Tow Hill, at the park’s northernmost tip, on a clear day, you can see Alaska. Like the shipwrecks, you don’t need to backpack the entire trail to visit it, as it’s accessible from Agate Beach.
Visit the Museum of Northern BC in Prince Rupert
Located in a Northwest Coast longhouse, this museum houses exhibits and artwork reflecting the natural and cultural aspects of Northwestern BC. The museum is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year; it has been in the same spot in Prince Rupert for the past 27 years.
The museum’s collections of First Nations artifacts rival those of any other museum in British Columbia, including the provincial Museum of Anthropology at Vancouver’s UBC. Visitors from all over the world come to marvel at the exhibits, which include a current offsite exhibit that features nine house front paintings that represent the nine Tsimshian tribes, each one measuring almost five metres by two and a half metres.
“If you’ve come all the way to Prince Rupert, it really makes no sense to not visit the museum,” says Susan Marsden, museum director. “We get upwards of 20,000 visitors a year coming to see it.”
As well as the 10,000 years of First Nations history, the museum also depicts more current history, including aspects of the fur trade, the railroad construction history, and the development of the fishing industry.
Make like a paleontologist in Tumbler Ridge
The museum gallery displays several unique fossils, including many of Tumbler Ridge’s very own exhibits, found nowhere else in the world. They feature early marine life, dinosaur footprints and bones, a full-scale paleontological exhibit, and Ice Age discoveries from the Peace Region of B.C.
Through the museum, you can book guided dinosaur trackway tours that run twice daily throughout the summer.
In the geopark, which includes six provincial parks within its boundaries, you have a chance to enjoy the great outdoors, but while you’re hiking, you can look for dinosaur fossils. The series of trails within the geopark range from 2 to 13 km in length, from easy/moderate to strenuous/alpine.
Drive the Alaska Highway
From Dawson Creek up to Fort St. John, you’re moving through an eco-region known as the boreal plains. As you move up the highway toward Fort Nelson, you’re entering the taiga plains – and yes, at certain times of the year, you can see boreal caribou from the highway. Driving up there in winter, we often joke that Santa has left his reindeer out to graze. The landscape around you is remarkably similar to what you would see in northern Alberta. Just before Fort Nelson, the highway starts to turn west and you’re soon into the northern boreal mountains, an extension of the same Rocky Mountains that run along a good chunk of the B.C.-Alberta border.
Imagine driving through Jasper or Banff, but on a two-lane highway…with virtually no traffic to speak of. You’ll spot elk along the highway, maybe the occasional moose, and in some places, Stone’s sheep. There are some beautiful provincial parks along the way, including Stone Mountain and Muncho Lake Provincial Parks. It’s a stunning drive, one more easily enjoyed than the highways in the southern Rockies with all their traffic.
Soak in the Liard Hot Springs
For me, this is actually the highlight of the B.C. portion of the Alaska Highway. These hot springs are kept in a natural state, unlike hot springs in more southern locations and parks like Banff and Jasper.
Accommodation options include camping – it is a provincial park – or a lodge stay. The lodge also has an RV park. For another alternative, the Muncho Lake Lodge sits just 49 minutes down the highway.
If you camp in the park, be sure to watch for the “park moose” while crossing the boardwalk that leads across a swamp from the parking lot to the pools.
Horseback ride the Muskwa Kechika and explore the northern Rockies
This area is often called the “Serengeti of North America” due to its rich wildlife diversity. But it’s more than just a wildlife reserve: it is a globally significant area of wilderness, wildlife, ecosystems and cultures – and there is extraordinarily little industrial development anywhere within its boundaries.
It consists of 6,400,000 hectares of forests, mountains, lakes, and rivers. To put that size into perspective, it’s seven times larger than Yellowstone National Park in the U.S., slightly smaller than the American state of Maine, and can hold the entire island of Ireland within its boundaries.
It’s that untouched wilderness that makes horseback trips into the area so special, says Donna Kane, who’s in charge of client relations and logistics for Muskwa-Kechika Adventures, a company that leads horseback excursions there.
“It’s one of the few intact wilderness areas on the planet,” she says. “At this point, there is no industry there, so when you travel through there, you’re seeing the land like it would have been for millennia.”
You don’t have to be an experienced rider, but a good fitness level is needed for these trips, which can run from five days to a couple of weeks in length. Some knowledge of horses would be handy, as you are expected to do things like saddle and unsaddle your horse and look after it. But if you don’t know, they’ll teach you.
Learning how to camp in the rough and look after horses, all that experience in a total wilderness setting is why Kane says many clients describe their trips there as “life-changing.”