matwaites
We were very eager to do this route after looking at it on the internet for more information.The Ootsa Lake Circle Tour starts in Burns Lake, where you will go at the intersection from Highway 16, the Yellow Head Highway to Highway 35, and you follow this road, passing a ski club, and then you find yourself at the Francois Lake Ferry Terminal.The Francois Lake ferry runs approximately every 30 min., and will take you along to Southlands, which gives you the starting point primarily for this exciting wilderness route.When you get off the ferry, then you go through some small communities with limited resources, but some of them will have fuel, and will have some food, and then theo ther ones will not have anything.The communities that you will pass through during the journey are Takysie Lake, Grassy Plains, Danskin, and Eakin Settlement. There are also several of key attractions that you would be interested in searching. We however, didn't visit all of them with the fact that you really need to have the full day to attempt all of the attractions, but we were able to get to some of them.The attractions are: The Eagle Creek Fairgrounds, Omenica Ski Club, Chesalata River and Falls, Skins Spillway, the entrance way to North Tweedsmuir Provincial Park, Nadina Mountain Recreation site, Little Andrews Bay Provincial Park, Francois Lake Recreational Site, and many other sites that are also along the way. The best suggestion is to visit the Visitors Center at Burns Lake, and they will be able to hand you a brochure, or you can check the circle tour out including the km markers by visiting the website and typing in "ootsa lake circle tour" and they will be able to show you the different sites as well.When you get to near the end of the circle tour, you will come across the area of trees that were burnt by the Swiss Fire that happened in 1983, and also a couple of saw mills that have a lot of bundles of lumber that are going to be used for a variety of projects.At the end of the tour, you're able to choose whether you would like to head east towards Houston and Burns Lake, or whether you would like to head west to Smithers or Telkwa.Please note that in many of these areas that it is very likely that you will see wildlife, such as bears, moose, deer, wolves, cougar etc. It is very important that you stay in your vehicle, even if you're wanting to take photos of them, and to mind the space. We didn't see any when we were going by, but I did speak to a conservation officer who knows the area well while waiting for the Francois ferry, and he was mentioning that it is very common to see wildlife especially near dusk or dawn, and also in the cooler portions of the day.This is also a route that has little or no fuel, or services such as food around, so you need to be self sufficient, i.e. with enough water, and other resources such as spare tire etc.Hope that you enjoy this route as much as we did.
