Driving the Crow’s Nest Highway in Canada (Hwy 3)

We crossed into Canada at the Roosville station, north of the Kalispell MT area. Our original plan was to enter Canada here close to the Banff, Yoho and Glacier National Parks of Canada, then travel to Vancouver and cross back into the US at Washington.

But, shortly before we crossed the border we learned that it’s not hard to bring handguns into Canada, it’s almost impossible. Citizens in Canada cannot carry guns, and the process to bring a gun into Canada takes at least 3 months, has to be approved by a provincial official and may still be denied if you don’t have a good reason. So, we decided to put our guns into a mini-storage unit in Kalispell while we were in Canada.

This meant that we had to travel back to Kalispell to get them. So, we decided that from Vancouver we would travel east on the Canadian “Crow’s Nest Highway”, Hwy 3, which runs very close to the border and is very scenic.

Our trip along Hwy 3 took 2 days, partly because we don’t travel for over about 5 hours in a day and partly because it was a windy mountain road so for long parts of it we were going much slower than 100 kmp (60 mph).

It was a beautiful drive. Very scenic, first we went through forested areas, up and down the mountains. Then we entered a beautiful valley that was like a fruitbasket. Tons of apples, peaches, plums, pumpkins, fruit stands, fields of corn and wheat. Our first night was in Osoyoos which is near the Columbia River that runs through this valley. It was a beautiful RV park, lots of trees, right on the river! I wished we could stay a week!

The next morning we drove to Crestin where we planned to cross the border the third morning. We got up into some summits that were about 7,000 ft and noticed they had recently had snow. There was some along the road and all through the mountaintops nearby. Beautiful, but cold! I think it got to the low 50s along that drive, mostly was in the 40s. In September, brrr!

The third morning we crossed into the US and headed back to Kalispell. The night before we crossed I had a nightmare that when we crossed the border they wouldn’t let us in unless we swore loyalty to Trump. Argggghhhhh! NNNNNNNNNNooooooooooooo!

Luckily it was just a nightmare and we crossed without incident!

I tried to take a few pictures with my phone but in a moving vehicle they didn’t turn out. Here’s a picture of the snow: