Escaping the Snow /// EFRT S6•EP8

Welcome to another episode of the Epic Family Road Trip. In last week's episode of the Epic Family Road Trip, we left Northern Rockies Lodge on Muncho Lake to continue on our journey back to Southern British Columbia along the Alaska Highway. We took a break from the paved highway to explore an alpine back road up Nonda Peak and saw the northern lights for the first time over our camp in the wilderness, which was an experience we will never forget. We then drove through the beautiful autumn colours to Jasper National Park. Alright in last week's video we ended up spending the night here in Jasper and then we drove all the way through Jasper down to Banff and this is called the Icefields Parkway, one of the most beautiful drives on the planet. We drove all the way from kind of Northern Alberta down to Jasper and this is a, not a provincial park, this is a national park and it is a gorgeous place. We forgot it was Friday and all the campgrounds are full but we're in the overflow parking and we have a little place to plug in and charge up all our batteries. We've been moving so fast we haven't had time to leave out the solar panels so that's nice but man this place is gorgeous. Before driving the world-famous Icefield Parkway, we headed to Jasper Village to get a delicious beaver tail for the road. We've been lucky enough to have driven the Icefields Parkway quite a few times over the years and during all different seasons and conditions. No matter how many times we drive through these spectacular mountains and vast wilderness areas, we are always blown away and humbled by the grandeur of this incredible place. This time we drove through the beautiful fall colours that amplified the beauty all around us with the vibrant yellow trees along the towering mountainsides, vibrant blue lakes and glacial rivers. And then we took this road all the way through the Kootenai National Park back to Radium Hot Springs and we headed up into the mountains to find a camp spot and spend some time relaxing and having Thanksgiving dinner. So as soon as we got to Radium Hot Springs, we went down and picked up the motorhome out of storage. Our intention, as you know, was we brought it from Ontario to BC to put it on the market and sell it but with all the uncertainty around the border still being closed and it looks like there's no end in sight, at least for the winter, we decided to take the RV out of storage on the east side of BC and bring it across to the island where the temperatures are at least a little bit warmer. You know we've been rooftop tenting as a family for many years now and what we do is follow the warm weather and typically this time of year we'd be heading down to the the southwest into the desert where the temperatures are warm and a lot more, the climate is a lot better for winter camping. It can be quite brutal especially in the mountains in Canada, rooftop tenting for a long period of time. We've done winter camping, snow camping, we're good with that but just imagine yourself week after week in rain and sleet and ice and snow without being able to travel somewhere warmer to dry out the tents and so on. It just wouldn't be good so we're glad in a way that we didn't sell the RV and we still have it with us at least for this winter while we see what happens in the world and that way in January or February when things get really really cold up here in Canada we might have a shelter to go to and to dry our things out but in the meantime we're going to keep on exploring with the jeeps. When we get out west we're going to put the motorhome in storage and do all kinds of epic adventures on Vancouver Island. Oh my that looks like a huge grizzly bear walked here this morning. How many? One, two, three, four. That's as big as my foot. So if I'm reading those footprints right they look a lot like a huge bear not not a black bear those look like grizzly. So we're going back to get our bear spray and we're going to be very careful and keep Lando near. After our morning hike we started prepping for cooking our Canadian Thanksgiving dinner. We've got some charcoal on the fire here it's smoking right now but it'll get white hot and then we're going to push it down into this area and then we're thinking of digging a hole right here big enough to bury the cast iron dutch oven and put the turkey in there so stick with us and we'll let you know how it turns out. Very rocky ground here but that should do it. This is called the shake we've shown it in a few of our videos and it's a real handy way to use cast iron over an open fire. So step one is you put the foot down which is that piece and then you pound the rod in the ground tighten it up and then you slide this unit on top and this can go up and down depending on how much heat you want to get cast iron and then you put another one of these bolts in to put it where you want and the nice thing is you can slide it towards you you have this handy little thing to pull it towards or away from the fire. We've also got an extension which I'm not using now but that allows you to put this part up here and you've got a really big fire and then finally there's this little piece and I'm going to turn it away this little piece is for hanging a kettle on heat up some water let's get warm in there one more time and then you can also put a grill like that which you've seen us cook on and that's a really handy feature as well. All right so with our turkey we just cut the backbone out on the other side there and we did that so we could flat cook it it'll fit nicely into our cast iron pots there and we just crack the backs and it sits flat and tuck the wings and legs up and it'll sit nice and so we got the turkey in there flat lay got some herbs and butter and all kinds of yummy stuff now we're going to get it on the coals we've got about four inches of coals down there which are hot and then we're going to pack coals around the sides and on top and then cover it over and give it two hours for each pound so it's oh no sorry one hour for every two pounds so it's a five pounder so we'll give it two and a half three hours of heat so let's get some coals on there let's see give it a couple hours of cooking and it should be moist and delicious. Lando found the warm spot. Is that warm? Protecting the turkey? oh that smells so good that looks good that's our first in-ground um cast iron turkey happy thanksgiving guys we're just going to get the uh juices here and put them in the stuffing make it delicious flavorful stuffing ready sit wait sit happy thanksgiving after that we drove all the way down here to cranbrook and made our way along the bottom it's called the crow's nest highway and it's just unbelievably gorgeous we did it now with snow on the road in spots up in the high elevations but we definitely want to drive this entire road again sometime in the summer we made our way down to Osoyos which is canada's only desert and it's the end of the sonoran desert a really unique and beautiful spot in canada we just came along the crow's nest highway we're heading heading east sorry west straight west this area here is really neat um it's called Osoyos BC and it's the top northern most part of the sonoran desert the sonoran desert starts in northern new mexico and stretches all the way up through the united states through nevada and all the way to in washington right to bc and this is just the northern tip of the sonoran desert it's very unique for the rest of get it boy are we in arizona or in canada check this place out good morning it's october 19th and uh just the last couple of days we were driving through the kootenays getting snow up in the elevations and in the passes and things were getting very chilly up there below zero every night we had heard about this place called Osoyos BC and here we are and we woke up this morning and it looks like we're in somewhere in arizona in the desert it is actual it is the actual sonoran desert and uh it's just amazing it doesn't look anything like what you'd expect in uh in canada so the very tip of the sonoran desert just pokes over the the border and this lake Osoyos lake which we'll try to show you actually crosses the border into washington state so a really neat place we look forward to exploring around here in the town that we're going to take you with us as we explore Osoyos BC after that we carried on all through here winding our way out through hope and down into chilliwack where we parked along the river all right so this morning we left Osoyos which is dry desert and it's actually quite warm compared to here and then we worked our way through the mountain passes all day and we're now in the in the middle of a mountain pass it's so peaceful about a river after that we traveled right out to richmond bc to the ferry and jumped on the ferry and took a trip out to sydney from there we are now on the island and we took this route up the coast north of Nanaimo and we're currently in beautiful parksville right on the water in the old growth forest here morning it's october 27th and it's around 11 30 in the morning and we're on the ferry crossing from the mainland right near vancouver and we're coming across to vancouver island right now we're between some of the outer islands and we'll be docking soon in sydney our plan is to explore as much of vancouver island as we can get to we're going to take you guys with us we're right on the front of the boat and what they call the sun docking the wind is coming pretty hard but you can see it's starting to clear up a little bit out there it looks really nice morning the first night on the island we found a nice little provincial park here and spent a very quiet beautiful night and we just took a nice hike through the forest it went down to the water and now we're heading farther north and head to the coast we can't wait once we set up camp in the beautiful old growth forest along the ocean we took a walk on the beach to plan for the epic vancouver island overland adventure that lay ahead and in the meantime we'll see you down the road