lillooet

This is gonna be one of those unfair recaps of a place because I was hardly there. I spent a night a few minutes from the city core, which is quite small, and had breakfast at a cafe before taking off.

Sometimes impressions form that quickly, but admittedly mine is fragmented.

Lillooet is in the BC interior, reasonably close to Kamloops (about a two hour drive), which is what I’d consider the nearest true city. Lillooet is one of the southern most communities that has over 50% Indigenous residents, particularly the St’at’imc.

The most captivating thing about Lillooet by far is the mountains around it. The mountains aren’t what I think of as west coast mountains. When driving from the coast, somewhere on the way the Lillooet, the landscape starts changing from lush green tree-lined mountains to desert. I remember being surprised when driving through Kamloops years ago that it looked more like what I thought of Utah than Canada. I thought this was the westernmost part of the Rockies in Canada, but turns out it’s part of the Pacific Ranges of the Coast Mountains, with the Rockies starting up a bit more to the east.

As you might expect, this is the area in BC where wildfires are the biggest problem. It gets the hottest too. Sometimes people from other parts of the country hear about forest fires and they assume it’s a problem in Vancouver, but it’s really not, aside from smoke in the sky every once in a while.

We drove through nearby Lytton on our way leaving Lillooet, which famously was in national news for a couple weeks in 2021. It set the record for hottest temperature ever recorded in Canada twice within a few days, and then a few days later, completely burned to the ground.

We drove through the strip that used to be the downtown, and was all just debris. Trucks worked behind fences continuing the arduous task of picking up the rubble before, perhaps, one day rebuilding.

Another thing people hear about BC is grizzly bears, which is another thing that isn’t in the Vancouver area but is in the Lillooet area. I didn’t see any bears there, but where we stayed has gotten bear visitors.

According to the town website, in 1860 it was the largest settlement west of Chicago and north of San Francisco, which admittedly is hard to picture. This would have been at the peak of the BC gold rush, so people would come here as a jumping off point.

The claim to fame for Lillooet seemed to be as the beginning of an old highway through the interior. It’s where people started to go up north for things like the gold rush. From what I can tell, all the BC locations like “100 mile house” are being measured from Lillooet. It’s a place to start going somewhere else.

The structures in town seemed pretty rundown. I’m not sure what people do there now. They have some cool bridges and seem to really like caribou.

Seeing the dry desert mountains engulf us in the town was quite spectacular. It’s not a landscape I encounter much so it definitely captures my attention. But it’s also not a landscape that would feel comforting to live around for a long period of time.

I often get the itch to relocate places that I travel. I think the closest I came to feeling that way about the Lillooet area is drives on the smaller highways towards the towns. Occasionally there’d be a random house along the highwayside with like 12 cars, 11 of which didn’t work, and various pieces of machinery or furniture that looked like they were being carted somewhere and then dropped and forgotten.

Most of the houses on those plots of land were shacks, like trailers with add-ons. Seemed like a cheap place to go to be forgotten.