Suggestion for CG in Dawson Creek, BC

Is Tubby's RV still there? We stayed there on our 2004 trip. Nice place, close to town.

We like the little Kiskatinaw provincial campsite on Old Alaska Highway road, turning off highway 97 about 25 km north of Dawson Creek. The turn off the highway is well marked, on the right going uphill and the approach is not as large as you would like so try to so right down on the turn. No services at the park but you get to experience a wee bit of the actual Alaska Highway including the fabulous curved wooden bridge - it is a nice place for a walk and a cool off in the river. Most interesting to study the 1942 bridge design from underneath. It is the largest curved wooden bridge ever built in Canada. The best swimming hole is right under the bridge. Upstream on the north side, right at the water is the nicest walk if you can handle a km or two. I think the old bridge is still rated at 25 tons but I personally wouldn't take a large unit across it. Come to think of it, the campsite isn't suitable for large RVs either.


In Dawson Creek, the Art Gallery in an old wooden elevator right near Mile Zero is a great stop with RV parking - don't miss the Alaska Highway construction photos in the stairwell. The tourist info and museum next door is also well worth a visit. It is interesting and pleasant to visit the 25 big windmills on Bear Mountain on the west side of Dawson. Ask for directions locally and go with just your towed or tow vehicle. If you can't go, take a look at the skyline to the west and admire the wind energy project created by a local group with some government grants.

I stayed at Mile 0 last July on my way to Alaska. Didn't check out any others. Below are the comments from my blog and a picture. You might also get some ideas for other stops from the 2012 blog of my AK trip . Have fun! :)

78 gravel sites on slightly sloping land, close
together. Minimal trees. Free showers and dump
station. Do your laundry here for much less than
laundromat in town. Swimming lake a short walk.
$32 (w/water & 20 amp).

When we drove to Alaska in 2009 we spent two nights at the Northern Lights RV Park. We did not like it at all. We are leaving for Alaska at the end of this month. We have reservations at the Mile 0 RV Park. Have a great trip.

I think that Dawson Creek used to be the big staging area for travelers, before heading up the Alaska Highway. People would stop and camp for a few days in Dawson Creek, while they built the elaborate front end protection devices to keep off the rocks, (which most generally did more damage than they prevented), to cover the bottom of the fuel tank with carpet or some other protective product, install headlight covers, buy an extra tire to two, stock up on food and get ready to risk life and limb on the world famous Alcan Highway.

But all that changed with the paving of the Alaska Highway in the late 1980s. There were sections paved before that but the different sections were connected about then. I had already made 9 round trips over the Alaska Hwy before it was paved and had learned early on, that the key to not damaging the vehicle was up to the driver. Speed or lack thereof was the key to not damaging a vehicle, and it still is to this day.

I wish they had kept the old unpaved dirt and gravel highway running the 1,523 miles to Fairbanks and would have required first and second timers, to use it instead of the nice paved road, just to give the newbees a real taste of what a rough road was all about. Reading some of the comments from some about how rough the current highway is, just makes me grin and I am sure it does others that drove the highway prior to it being paved.

Staying in Dawson Creek is not something I have done in 30 or 40 years that I can remember. There are several campgrounds there, but our timing doesn't work out to stop there for the night generally. On our 2009 trip we stayed in Hinton on the way north, (great KOA just west of town) and we stayed at the municipal campground in Grande Cache on the way back south. Another real nice place to stay, in the woods, nice showers, lots of room between sites, firewood delivered to our site by the host's son (he had just gotten his driver's license and was looking for excuses to drive the family pickup, LOL)

Just north of Dawson Creek a ways, we have stayed at the Rotary RV Park and at the Charlie Lake PP a few times. So we usually end up staying either north or south of DC. Dawson Creek is a nice town, all services a person could want, but getting a tad busy with all the related traffic from all the natural gas development in the area and north of there.

Most of the campgrounds in the area, I would not consider to be "destination" campgrounds, but are "passing through" ones. A night or two is more than likely the norm for most RVers. Several of the caravans "muster up" at one of the campgrounds but not sure which ones the different caravans use. A reservation would probably be handy if a person wanted to stay at one of those and not affiliated with a caravan that already has reservations for their clients.

Howdy!

We looked at both and chose to stayed at Mile 0.

"Happy Trails"
Chiefneon