Unlike the Trans Canada, travelling on Highway 7 just has the feeling of a slower pace and you really get to see the farmland stretch on around you all the way to the local mountains. It’s simply beautiful.

At Harrison, it was another story. In search of nature and beautiful scenes to photograph, I found instead suburban development. I wasn’t too impressed, that is until I walked a bit further down the dike towards the hot springs.

Fenced off now to keep people out of the waters, the pool emits the smell of egg salad gone wrong and while the water is clear, it only provides the view below of muck gathering on what looks to be concrete stairs leading deeper into the springs.

I was captivated by the old relics of the former Harrison left to the elements while the hot water continues to be pumped into town to heat a local pool and hotel. The lamps and old trail leading visitors to the springs have been left alone, and nature is slowly taking them back.

A week and a half ago I drove a British Columbia Circle Route, starting from Vancouver and passing Squamish, Whistler, Pemberton, Lillooet, Lytton, Boston Bar, and Hope before shooting back home through the Fraser Valley. It was a trip around the Coast Mountains.

My B.C. Day long weekend was actually two trips in one, with Day One taking me about 30 kilometres past Pemberton and into the Coast Mountain range to the trio of lakes that make up Joffre Lakes Provincial Park.

I spent the night by the upper lake, sleeping under the Matier Glacier. Then on Day Two I packed up and hiked out with the intention of racking up some major kilometres in my car. I had misjudged the distance from my home to Joffre Lakes believing it was “just a little past Whistler,” when in actual fact it was much past it. But looking at maps, I figured it was the perfect opportunity to attempt the circle route, bypassing the much hated Sea-to-Sky Highway construction on the return trip.

But the road north to Lillooet then south to Lytton was new territory for me. I’ve never driven it, only hearing that it posed its own challenges of narrow highways winding along mountainsides and plenty of areas that faced its share of regular rock slides.

The visual rewards were worth it. From Joffre Lakes to Lillooet the road travels up, over, down, beneath and around mountains. There’s climbs up to sweeping panoramas of rock and descents into tree-filled valleys running by rivers with names I do not know.

I ate lunch in Lillooet before crossing the Fraser River bound for Lytton. By now the sun was out and the temperature was rising and I sweated in my car, lacking any air conditioning but an open window bellowing hot air. But I rolled into what I take as cattle country, rolling grass fields that stretched north and south between Highway 12 and the boiling brown waters of the Fraser. I forgot the heat in those surroundings, stretching my neck to see the abandoned farm equipment being claimed by the grass and abandoned structures slowly succumbing to time and the elements.

At one point the highway narrows into a single lane and swings around a turn at the edge of a mountain. On the mountainside, scree. On the cliff side, broken highway barriers and bits of rock missed by clearing crews. It was the only white-knuckle part of the drive, and I was happy to get past it and shoot into familiar roads at Hell’s Gate down into the Fraser Valley and, after nearly seven hours behind the wheel, home.