Lillooet announces itself as a change of climate. You come down from the mountains of the Duffey Lake road, with their dark spruce and old snow, and within an hour the land has turned to sage, dry benches and bare golden slopes above the Fraser River. The town sits right on that river, in one of the hottest and driest corners of British Columbia, and a summer afternoon here can feel like Spain has been dropped into the Rockies.
It has history to match its size. In 1858, gold seekers heading up the Fraser turned this place into a boom town, and Lillooet became Mile 0 of the Cariboo Wagon Road, the route that pushed north to the goldfields around Barkerville. At the height of the rush there were said to be more people here than in Victoria, which is hard to imagine when you see the quiet main street today. The old milepost cairn is still a stop on the way through. The valley is also long-standing country of the St'at'imc people, who fished the river here for salmon, and you can still see racks of wind-dried salmon in the right season.
The ride to Lillooet is the real event. From Pemberton, Highway 99 climbs the Joffre valley and crosses the Duffey Lake pass before dropping steeply in a run of tight switchbacks beside Cayoosh Creek and the long turquoise ribbon of Seton Lake. The grades are serious, particularly coming down, and the surface is generally good but can have rockfall and frost heave. In the high section the weather can change quickly, so a warm layer belongs in the bag even in July. Early or late in the day you will usually have a lot of road to yourself, and sometimes wildlife, including deer, the occasional bear, and bighorn sheep along the river.
Lillooet is a small town, not a big one, but it has fuel, a couple of grocery stores, motels and enough cafes that nobody goes hungry. It is also the right place to refill water bottles before you continue on toward Cache Creek or Kamloops, because the next stretch is open, dry and sparsely settled. Hot afternoons are common, so an early start from here is a kindness to yourself.