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For several hundred kilometres beyond the Stewart junction there's nothing along the Cassiar other than the odd garage, rest area, campsite, trailhead and patches of burnt or clear-cut forest etched into the Cassiar and Skeena mountains. In places, though, you can still see traces of the incredible 3060km Dominion Telegraph line that used to link the Dawson City gold fields with Vancouver, and glimpses of a proposed railway extension out of Prince George that was abandoned as late as 1977. DEASE LAKE , the first place of any size, has two motels , the Northway Motor Inn on Boulder Avenue (tel 771-5341; $60-80) and Arctic Divide Inn on the highway (tel 771-3119; $60-80), still 246km from the junction with the Alaska Hwy to the north. Close by lies ISKUT , an aboriginal village offering tours into the adjacent wilderness parks, which are also accessible by float plane from Dease Lake itself. For information , contact the Iskut Band Office (tel 234-3331) or local stores and garages. The village accommodation amounts to the Red Goat Lodge (tel 234-3261 or 1-888/733-4628; $80-100, tents $13; late May to mid-Sept). The road from Dease Lake is wild and beautiful, the 240km up to the Yukon border from here passing through some of the most miraculous scenery of what is already a superb journey. Some 84km north of Dease Lake is the Moose Meadows Resort (radio phone only; up to $40, tents $10; May to mid-Oct) which has cabins, tent and RV sites, a convenience store and canoe rentals. Much of this area was swamped with gold-hungry pioneers during the Cassiar Gold Rush of 1872-80, when the region got its name - possibly from a white prospector's corruption of kaskamet , the dried beaver meat eaten by local Kaska. In 1877 Alfred Freedman plucked one of the world's largest pure gold nuggets - a 72-ounce monster - from a creek east of present-day CASSIAR (133km from the junction with the Alaska Hwy to the north), though these days the mining has a less romantic allure, being concentrated in an open-pit asbestos mine 5km from the village. Most of the world's high-grade asbestos once came from here, and poisonous-looking piles of green chrysotile asbestos tailings are scattered for kilometres around. The mine closed in 1992, transforming the community into a virtual ghost town at a stroke. Equipment has been sold and sites cleared, and the area is off-limits to the public until reclamation is complete.
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