There are many scenic highways in Western Canada. But there is only one that can be considered the best, twisty, mountainous, scenic, challenging drive, especially if you happen to be piloting a car that stirs your blood and holds the road. That would be the Duffey Lake section of Highway 99 from Lillooet to Mount Currie. Either direction.
Why best? It’s scenic. But that’s so common in this province it’s almost prosaic. It’s challenging—multiple hairpin turns, sneaky decreasing radius corners, roller-coaster sections and ascents/descents that are so steep they’re likely flagged in Road Design 101 as Not Recommended. The cherry on top is an almost total lack of RCMP and no cell coverage along its length.
Pity, the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure (MOTI) has let it degrade into a condition that can only honestly be described as dangerous. Brutal. Life-threatening. Criminal. Nearly third-world. And we’ll have to wait, well, no one knows how long we’ll have to wait while it continues to compost before they finally decide to do something about it. Wait because getting road project information out of MOTI is second only to getting any decision.
Two recent Pique stories underline the horrors of driving the Duffey. One, citing a committee of the Squamish-Lillooet Regional District, turned a harsh light on roads contractor, Miller Capilano. But coming from a governmental body, their assessment of the road didn’t even begin to underscore the horrors.
For the past several decades, I’ve driven the Duffey a number of times between April and November and not infrequently in the winter. It’s the principal route out of Whistler to the central Interior and the only route to Smilin’ Dog Manor. It climbs and rolls and twists and turns through some of the province’s most stunning scenery. But winter or summer, it’s a horror show.
The half out of Mount Currie is the worst. That may have to do with harsher winter conditions, geotechnical issues, Miller’s maintenance as opposed to Dawson’s—which has the contract for the other half—and more traffic from Instagomers heading to Joffre Lakes and Duffey Lake. But largely it has to do with the fact that half of the highway was resurfaced several years before the half out of Lillooet. It’s had a number of years more neglect.
The atmospheric rivers a few years ago didn’t help, either. There was a period when the Coquihalla Highway and Highway 97 were both impassable and all traffic heading to the Lower Mainland used the Duffey, a road definitely not engineered or designed for large transport trucks.
The first time I ever drove the Duffey it was still a dirt and gravel road, much like the Highline Road to Seton Portage but with less scary switchbacks. There are currently sections of the Duffey—lookin’ at you around the lake—that are more broken up and rougher than the dirt road was.
Rain, frost heaves, sub-structural sloughs, traffic and mediocre maintenance have made the section approaching the lake from the Lillooet side to beyond it on the Mount Currie side a terrifying drive. Long sections of the pavement is broken up in two long strips... the width of tires, not surprisingly. There are crushing potholes, suspension-bottoming compressions, edge erosions and a couple of spots where the blindly brave can still legally pass. Guilty.
Just past the too-small pullout at the end of the lake, heading toward Mount Currie, there’s a wicked compression that spans all of the westbound lane and part of the northbound. Travelling toward Mount Currie, it used to be invisible. I hit it once before I knew it was there. It sounded like I’d hit a wall when my front suspension bottomed and the front tires threatened to join the rears.
Now I know where it is and respond accordingly. Now anyone paying attention knows where it is because its far side is black with the rubber left behind by people hitting it at or below the posted speed limit. I’ve seen unsuspecting cars literally thrown into the other lane, their drivers struggling to regain control.
Hopefully they’ve recovered and still have sufficient alignment left to negotiate the hairpins at the top of the pass, the sudden jolts, like hitting a curb, where the road meets a couple of bridges and make the descent into Mount Currie.
There are two ways to slow down a vehicle with an internal combustion engine. It seems most drivers only know one—hit the brakes.
But the descent after Joffre Lakes is relentless and steep, with one sign posting an 18-per-cent grade. Along with the grade, there are several sweeping turns where the road is subsiding near the edge in the downhill lane. Subsiding enough to eat a front tire and pull the car toward the abyss. There are also a handful of carnival-ride hairpins. And if you’re unfortunate enough to follow anyone who doesn’t know how to use their gears, but especially one of the many rental RVs driven by Europeans used to roads that are well-maintained, there is the acrid smell of brakes nearing the point of combustion.
There is nothing quite as exciting as seeing the car in front of you trailing flames from the rear brakes. And no place you’re as likely to see it as that section of the Duffey. Unless you’re focused on the two burned-out cars that have been there for a while.
But the best ever sighting was a rental RV whose hapless driver mistook the narrowness of the road shoulder, slipped the passenger side wheels off into a ditch and the top of his RV came to rest against the vertical rock face on the other side of the ditch. I stopped, explained it would take me another 30 minutes for me to get within cell range and I’d call the RV company when I did. Oh, and it would likely take a couple of hours to get a tow truck up to pull him off.
So get with it, MOTI. Best road around, on the scenic tour of all those rental RVs, great tourist draw, but all in all, the road from hell. I know, deaf ears. But whenever you get around to bringing the road up to snuff, add a couple of pullouts, like mountainous roads around the world.
