August 2 - Williams Lake, BC to Vancouver, BC - 320 miles

Today was a day of real variety in riding and scenery.  We had four very distinct regions in our 320-mile ride.

We started out in the broad, fertile valleys we had been following since Prince Rupert.  These valleys were beautifully green, with larger and larger farms and ranches as the valleys widened out, with the large Fraser river being the dominant river.

Then we turned southwest to go down to the Strait of Georgia coast, north of Vancouver.  

Almost immediately the mountains and vegetation changed.  The mountains became very steep and rocky, with trees only on the upper parts, and with the lower areas very dry and almost desert-like, with sagebrush.  We never thought British Columbia had desert-like areas.  

Then after the little town of Lillooet, almost within a mile, the vegetation changed dramatically, to high rock-tipped mountains with patches of snow on top and very green trees up to the tree line.

Following this was the sharpest, steepest valley we have seen on this trip, with very high mountains on either side.  

Absolutely beautiful, with a very narrow road in the canyon, fir or spruce trees up to maybe 125 feet high, a fast-running little river changing into a long narrow lake, with a really curvy road allowing no passing.  Logging had been done in this area, with logs having been floated down the river (a few got stuck at a couple of places).

Then it changed again, in a transition area to more coastal trees and much more undergrowth and bushes.

In the area approaching the coastal mountain range, these mountains had as much snow on the top as anywhere we’d seen so far on the trip.  Neither of us expected to see so much snow on the mountains this far south and so close to the coast.

This led us to the actual coastal road coming into Vancouver.  Beautiful trees on steep coastal cliffs and a road that just sort of hung onto the cliffs.  The visibility today was probably as good as it ever gets, and the views of Vancouver Island and other smaller islands were spectacular.  It had been  a cloudless day with bright sunshine.

What a great day for us to come to Vancouver.  As we plan to spend a couple of days in and around Vancouver, we were glad that we seem to have hit a good weather time.

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