August 20

This was mostly a downtime day in Smithers. Mom cut my hair, we did a pile of laundry, washed a ton of caked mud and dirt off the Elantra and washed the worst of the bugs and dirt off the motor home. Mom and I then went for a walking tour of the town starting at the local art center and museum. Besides a lot of neat displays of old pioneer and mining pictures and items a gentleman there showed us the first automated egg carton making machine invented here. He then showed us a pair of large machine guns and told us a lot about how in 1950 a U.S. Air Force B36 bomber dropped an atomic bomb that resulted in a “dirty” bomb blast but not a full-blown atomic bomb blast in costal waters near here. It did this because it was in distress and was preparing for a crash landing. The guns came from that wreckage. He also explained that a large immigration of Dutch and Swiss people came to settle this area in the years preceding and soon after World War II. We then visited a Dutch bakery followed by a Dutch sausage market where we bought some freshly baked cheese biscuits at the bakery and then some samples of salami and sausage and a genuine Dutch chocolate-covered hazel nut bar at the Sausage Factory. They were pretty pricey but fresh and very good! We then took a short ride up to the Twin Falls in Glacier Gulch near town. Each water fall seems more beautiful than the preceding ones but this one may have been because we could hike right to the base of one of the falls where we got sprayed by the blast of water hitting the rocks at the bottom of at least a two hundred foot final drop. And in this case you got two waterfalls for the price of one only a few hundred feet apart and both about the same height with typical multiple drops.