On Saturday we headed further north up the valley to see what it had to offer.
Halfway up the road detours about 5km to the east, to go around the Downie creek arm of the lake.
Then Gold Stream and finally, in the middle of nowwhere is Mica Creek - which is the remains of the dam construction camp, but still inhabited by BC Hydro employees who work around the dam. They even have a mess hall where you can get meals (at meal times), but I did not test the fare. I did discover some wi-fi, tho, which enabled me to post the previous update! The dam is pretty impressive and is one of the largest earth-fill dams you'll see and is 670 feet high! It was completed in 1976 and created Kinbasket lake, stretching 216 km from Valemount in the north to Donald Station in the south, and covers 427 square kilometres.
Almost immediately below the dam is the start of Revelstoke lake - which runs 150km to the south, ending at Revelstoke (dam).
The paved road ends right at the dam, but I checked out a couple of Forestry rec sites just a ways further up the road.
They weren't that great, so I headed back south and eventually selected a free site on the south side of Downie arm.
It was a nice site, with 180 degree view of the water and a nice little sandy beach. Only a few fishermen were camped nearby.
Had a nice campfire overlooking the lake and listened to some owls hooting in the woods behind. Strangely, have not seen a loon on this lake despite an apparent abundance of fish. Saw a family of merganzers at Carnes Ck, but that's it.
Perhaps the banks are to steep for nesting, but sure missed hearing their calls. Even though the traffic on the road was strangely quiet even for a sunny weekend in the summer, that ended sometime after midnight on Sunday! Not sure if it was Hydro staff getting back to work in
time for Monday morning, or logging crews resuming (likely both), but after midnight, the road got quite busy, which didn't do much for the serenity of the area! Them's the breaks, I guess! Another lazy blue-sky day on Monday.