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Dawson Creek is the launching pad for the Alaska Hwy. While it may not be somewhere you'd otherwise stop, it's almost impossible to avoid a night here whether you're approaching from Edmonton and the east or from Prince George on the scenically more uplifting John Hart Hwy (Hwy 97). Named after a former BC premier, this seemingly innocuous road is one of the north's most vital highways. Completed in 1952, it linked at a stroke the road network of the Pacific Coast with that of the northern interior, cutting 800km off the journey from Seattle to Alaska, for example, a trip that previously had to take in a vast inland loop to Calgary. The route leads you out of British Columbia's upland interior to the so-called Peace River country, a region of slightly ridged land that belongs in look and spirit to the Albertan prairies. There's some 409km of driving, and two daily Greyhound buses make the journey. Out of Prince George the road bends through mildly dipping hills and mixed woodland, passing small lakes and offering views to the Rockies, whose distant jagged skyline keeps up the spirits as you drive through an otherwise unbroken tunnel of conifers. About 70km on, Bear Lake and the Crooked River Provincial Park are just off the road, and it's well worth taking the small lane west of the park entrance to reach an idyllic patch of water fringed on its far shore by a fine sickle of sand. There's a provincial park campsite ($15) at the park. Both Mackenzie Junction, 152km from Prince George, and Mackenzie, 29km off the highway, are scrappy, unpleasant places, easily avoided and soon forgotten as the road climbs to Pine Pass (933m), one of the lower road routes over the Rockies, but spectacular all the same. The Bijoux Falls Provincial Park , just before it, is good for a picnic near the eponymous falls, and if you want to camp plump for the Pine Valley Park Lodge ($11; May-Oct), an immensely scenic lakeside spot that looks up to crags of massively stratified and contorted rock just below the pass. Thereafter the road drops steeply through Chetwynd (three motels and a campsite) to the increasingly flatter country that heralds Dawson Creek.
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