Tuesday, May 24th
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| Toad River Lodge...just a spot on the highway |
We had a lot of fun this morning and last night watching the beaver family as they ate, swam around and worked on their dam. Sometime during the night, they had cut and placed a couple 6” trees in the dam’s spillway to lessen the water being released. DAM, they are smart. We traveled only 75 miles north and stayed at a really nice provincial (like a state in Canada, eh) campground at the Liard River Hot springs. It was a pretty amazing place where you can soak in the natural hot spring pools amid the really lush, almost tropical forest. The water comes in at 53 degrees Celsius (that’s Canadian for almost boiling) but gets cooler as the pools go downstream and cool spring water comes up from the bottom. What a great reward for having traveled about 2,500 miles in the last 2 weeks. We were so “wet noodled” afterward that walking the ¾ mile back to camp seemed impossible, but having heard the story of how a grizzly killed someone at the springs 3 years ago made it much less impossible.
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| Liard River Hot Springs, the hot pool at 108 degrees |
Wednesday, May 25th
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| The newest & bestest sign out of 71,001 |
Lots of driving today and we made it into the “Yukon Territory”. We were going to stop at Watson Lake for the night but it was not very pretty so we pushed on. We did stop long enough to visit the “sign post forest”, one of those AlCan highway stops that have grown famous. It was started during construction of the highway when a soldier hung the first sign. They now claim to have over 71,000 signs…make that 71,001 after we added our own. After that, we hit the road and soon almost hit a bear as she and her cub crossed right in front of us. We also saw a fox and a bald eagle flying by carrying a fish lunch. We stopped after crossing the longest bridge on the highway (1,900 feet long) on 78 mile long Teslin Lake. We only have about 300 more miles to get to Skagway, Alaska where we will catch the ferry to Haines. But we still haven’t found what we’re looking for…no wait…that’s the song by U2 we’re listening to right now.
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| It was THAT close to hitting her |
Thursday, May 26th
We made a stop early this morning at Johnson’s Crossing for their “world famous cinnamon rolls”. I’m not sure what qualifies them as “world famous” but they were the 2nd best I have ever had – nobody has ever beat my great grandma Smith’s. We were also “saved” by an 80 year old self-proclaimed preacher who was traveling the highway in a rolling junk yard, pulling a homemade trailer, heading to Fairbanks with the Lord as his co-pilot. We dropped the MLS for a 2 night stay at Marsh Lake Government campground and drove the extra 25 miles to Whitehorse, a city on the Yukon river that was put on the map during the Klondike gold rush days of the 1900’s. Gold seekers would travel by ship to Skagway, trek over the mountains up the Chilkoot trail to Whitehorse and then up the Yukon river (the 3rd largest river in North America) by any number of means. We visited the “Klondike”, a restored paddle wheel steamship from 1926 that was very busy on the river back then. When I stop and learn what it took to come up here in those days, I can’t help but feel like a wussy driving my Ford up the highway pulling all the comforts from home with me.
Friday, May27th
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| One of the cubs up a tree |
Today we set off on “Super Dave’s Yukon Adventure Tour” as Lori liked to call it. We traveled (without the MLS) on 56 miles of gravel road to a remote little village called Atlin that sits on the shores of 78 mile long Atlin Lake. The scenery was spectacular and we saw lots of wildlife including a grizzly, bald eagles, a wolf and a black bear with her 3 little cubs who we watched climb up trees when we got close. The village has about 400 people, mostly Tlingit natives (plus a few artsy hippies) and lots of its own gold rush history beginning around 1900. The old cemetery was an interesting clue as to how hard and dangerous it was to pioneer this area. Tomorrow we will finally be leaving Canada and entering Alaska, eh. Too bad, we will have to quit talking Canadian, eh?
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| Lori & Spaz on a dock at Atlin Lake |
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