Yukon – Page 2 – The MoHo and Other Traveling Tales

Day 11 July 16 Driving the Klondike Highway

When Mo and I first started planning this trip, one of many choices had to do with choosing whether we would leave the Alaska Highway to travel the North Klondike Highway through Dawson and over the Top of the World. We heard varying reviews about the pros and cons, and after we listened to a young woman at Boya Lake who made her husband drive all the way from Ontario because she wanted to see it one more time, we finally decided we wanted to see it. Mo also had some fond memories of Dawson City from her time there as well and thought it would be fun to go back.

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The day started overcast and dreary, but things perked up when we got a 3 percent discount for gasoline for no reason whatsoever. The first impressions as we drove north was that there was so much water, so many lakes. Thanks to our friendly Alaskan guys at the boat launch yesterday, we knew that Fox and Little Fox Lake would be wonderful for kayaking, but by the time we got there, it was still fairly cold and gray and neither one of us was particularly up for stopping so quickly and undoing the kayaks. We passed Lake Laberge, made famous by Robert W. Service in his poem, “The Cremation of Sam McGee”.

The cinnamon buns at Braeburn Lodge are a tradition we didn’t want to miss, so in the dreary rain we pulled over for a bun. The owner of the place ignored me for awhile before he grudgingly got up to sell me a $9. roll that took up nearly half the passenger seat. Mo and I ate on that thing for days before finally giving the last of it to Abby.

We continued north through the broad lush landscape, seeing the only bear of the day as a blur of brown along the roadside. Even though he was brown, it was probably just a brown black bear, but he was a bit bigger than the two cubs we had seen previously on the Cassiar. Again, there was no way to stop on the road, no place to pull over, and when Mo finally stopped and I got out to try to backtrack to where the bear was, he was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t really want to tromp around in thick wet vegetation to find him either! I’m not completely stupid. So once more, no photos of our bear sighting.

Just beyond the bear was the historic Montague Roadhouse, with logs mossy and nearly hidden by the thick vegetation. I loved comparing Mo’s photos from her 74 trip to what the roadhouse looked like today. When she passed, there were no trees around and today it was nearly hidden in the forest. As we continued north, we passed the beautifully colored Twin Lakes, one on each side of the road, with that gorgeous turquoise color so characteristic of glacial meltwaters.

We stopped for the interpretive signs about the community of Carmacks, fully intending to stop in and walk along the river and explore the town. Somehow we missed the turnoff and were on the bridge over the Yukon River before we realized what had happened. We watched Carmacks in the rear view mirrors and decided, Oh Well.

The Klondike Highway is the historic route to the Gold Rush world of Dawson City, and the Yukon River is the heart of the Klondike Gold Rush. I loved this huge river, and our stop at Five Fingers Rapids was the highlight of the day. We hiked down the 218 stairs to the boreal forest along the river to overlook the historic rapids. The Yukon has impressive parks and interpretive signs about the history and landscape of the area. It was gorgeous. It was hard to imagine the old sternwheelers navigating those wild rapids through the channels on their way to Klondike Gold.

Farther north I was thrilled to see deposits of white volcanic ash from the White River ash deposits from 1,250 years ago, the source possibly buried beneath the Klutlan Glacier in the St Elias Mountains in southeast Alaska. The ash covers more than a third of the southern Yukon. I studied volcanic ash soils in the northwest throughout my career, so this was a delight, and of course I had to get out and collect some to take home.

Somewhere along the way, we came to the boundary marking the end of Continental glaciation in the Yukon and the beginning of what is called Beringia, an area of the far north that was not ever under the great ice sheets during the last ice ages. This area under what is now the Bering Sea was the land bridge between North America and Siberia facilitating the migration of animals and humans from Asia to North America. Somehow, even with all my training in earth history and geology, I had missed the fact that all of the north wasn’t under the glaciers.

At the historic Pelly Crossing overlook, we stopped for lunch in warm 80 degree sunny weather, without a single bug to trouble us. The beautiful weather and lack of gnats, flies, and mosquitoes has been quite a surprise. Another beautiful crossing at the Stewart River, and then we started climbing to a large, rolling plateau with scraggly spruce and not much else. It wasn’t until we reached the Tintina Trench rest area, that things started to look interesting again.

This huge trench extends hundreds of miles across Yukon and Alaska and is the largest fault in North America. We also began to see hordes of buses from Holland America, coming and going on the road, and stopping at the rest areas. Up until now, we had been almost alone on the highway, so it was a shock to suddenly have to share a rest stop with 60 people at once! In spite of the crowd, I really enjoyed once again learning about more earth history. That feeling of learning something completely brand new and unknown is so delightful to me.

We decided that rather than going in to the town of Dawson City, we wanted to dry camp at the Klondike River Campground, a Yukon Territory site that was just $12 for the night. Neither of us wanted to fight the music festival crowds in Dawson so it was a good choice. Even on Saturday night, there were plenty of sights and we settled in easily. The storm clouds were coming in, but the rain held off long enough for us to drive to the top of Dome Mountain to see the classic view of the beautiful Yukon. We drove down into town to see what was going on, and stopped in at the visitor center to get our bearings before returning to our quiet dark campground in the evening rain.

Miles traveled today: 331

Road conditions: Almost all the Klondike Highway was good paved 2 lane road, however there were enough rough areas that it required constant attention. There were also several sections of construction and bridge work, but no delays.

The rest of the photos for this day are linked here.

Day 10 July 15 Whitehorse

I fell in love with the Yukon today. It is a magnificent land with a mythical story of Klondike Gold and a legendary river with the longest salmon run in North America. We walked in the rain, viewed the fish ladder in wet jackets, hid from the storm in a great museum, drank perfect cappuccinos, toured a brewery, sampled great beer, walked the downtown shops, hiked in the afternoon sun along the mighty Yukon, did piles of laundry at 5 bucks a load to wash and dry, swept and wiped and shook and polished the MoHo, and it’s still broad daylight at 9:30pm. I am just tooo tired to even think about blogging, but we are going off the grid now for a few days as we travel north to Dawson and the Top of the World Highway. Stay tuned. I think this is what my blogging friend Erin calls a “teaser”.

And to the commenter who asked: Abby is a rescue dog, we think Cocker Spaniel and Blue Heeler Cow Dog

Days driven today in the MoHo: ZERO

Day 9 July 14 The Alaska Highway into the Yukon

Vast. The Yukon is vast, and we have only touched on a tiny part of this huge province. There are only 30,000 people living in all this space, and half of them live in Whitehorse. British Columbia felt big and yet somehow welcoming, but the Yukon feels vast and formidable. This is the true north, a land of hundred mile views and dark boreal forests of spruce and aspen.

We slept all night in intermittent downpours and woke to the clouds parting just enough to let the sunlight paint dancing lights throughout the interior of the MoHo. Mo and I sat in silence with our tea and the light on the lake. I expected to find beauty on this trip, but wasn’t expecting the awesome tranquility that enveloped me this morning. I walked again to the shore of the turquoise lake, trying to capture that amazing color one last time before we buttoned up the rig and drove north.

On the road by 7:30, it was again raining, and in a very short time we reached the dark ghostly spires of burned trees. The fire in 2010 burned for five weeks, and last month the second fire only burned for a week. It’s part of the cycle but still hard to think of the huge numbers of displaced animals and miles of blackened forest. The caretaker at Kinaskan Lake talked of problems with bears who have lost their habitat and are now roaming into new territory to find food.

The road conditions were the worst of the 37, with rough gravel surface, no shoulders, and steep climbs and curves. In the burn area we saw a lot of older cars parked along the road, and couldn’t figure out what it was about until we saw the big tent with a sign on it that said, “Mushroom Buyer”. The shrooms must be thick in all that recent burn.

It was less than 50 miles to the Yukon border and just a few short miles beyond was the Alaska Highway, the mythical ALCAN. We approached the junction with Highway 37 and marked our mileage to zero. Since mileage on the highway starts from Dawson Creek, we have to add 626 miles to our odometer to follow along in the Milepost. We stopped at the BeaverLodge resort for gas, again paying around 5.47 C$ per US gallon to fill the MoHo for the stretch to Whitehorse.

Once on the highway, we were amazed at the road itself. Wide lanes, freshly painted lines, broad shoulders, it was as smooth and good as any highway anywhere all the way to Whitehorse. We have Mo’s photos from her 1974 Alaska trip, and I opened up the files to track her route so many years ago. The entire road was all gravel, rutted and narrow and wild. I think traveling the Alaska Highway in 1974 was much more of an adventure than it is today. We covered in one day what it took Mo two and a half days to cross back then and drove the 300 plus miles from our campsite to Whitehorse in just a few hours.

A small delight in the early part of the day was a short walk to Rancheria Falls, along the Rancheria River. There is an interpretive trail and sign at the stop and its well worth doing. There is a boardwalk designed for access for everyone through the forest to the falls, a nice touch in a wild and lovely place.

The landscape of the Yukon is so broad, and filled with water, huge long lakes along the highway almost at every turn. Maybe because the skies were stormy, it seemed to be a dark and brooding place. I can’t imagine what living here must be like through the long dark winters. It is so beautiful, and so vast, and so empty.

I love that feeling of emptiness. I think being in a world crammed with people and cell phones and computers and televisions has an effect on us in ways we don’t imagine. After several days of an absence of all that, I felt something shifting in me. The north is quiet in a deep way that isn’t found in many places.

Later we stopped at the rest area and information kiosk overlooking Teslin. It was wild, and looking north into the river wilderness I imagined how exciting it would be to put the kayaks in that river and paddle upstream to the wildlife refuge.

When we reached Whitehorse, it was raining, and we decided to stay at Hi Country RV, just on the south edge of town. Again, we had no reservations, but here we were lucky to get a place, and at 3pm we snagged the last full hookup site which also turned out to be a pull through. Didn’t really matter much since we planned to go to town anyway with the car, but it was an easy setup. With our AAA discount, the park cost 34 C$ per night and we took two nights. The laundry room looks big and the WiFi is free and fast, two important factors for our first two night stay of the trip.

We drove down to the information center in downtown Whitehorse, which is quite lovely, and gathered bits of information that we thought we might need. Tomorrow we plan to see a few things around town after essentials are done, including a tour of the Yukon Brewery, and the Klondike paddlewheeler.

Back home, I cooked some supper while Mo checked out the news. Mo usually goes with the flow in almost every situation, but she shook her head and said, “I can’t believe how big and developed Whitehorse has become. I suppose they have even paved the roads at Dawson City!” I guess we will find out. Right now in this very large, very nice RV park it feels like we are just about anywhere USA, not in the wild north of the Yukon on the Alaska Highway. I guess a lot has changed in 35 years.

There is rain predicted for the next few days, but hopefully it will open up in between storms as we continue north to Dawson City and the Top of the World Highway. For now, I will enjoy the cushy comforts of RV life and crawl into my soft bed with real sheets and running water and a toilet nearby that doesn’t require braving hordes of mosquitoes.

Miles driven today: 313

Excellent road conditions, smooth pavement, minor bridge construction, no delays

The rest of the photos are linked here

Day 8 July 13 Northern part of the Cassiar Highway

Our wonderful lake respite just happened to be near the midpoint of the Cassiar Highway. We were on the road again this morning by 7:30, feeling well rested and refreshed from our long afternoon on gorgeous Kinaskan Lake. From this point on, the road conditions began to shift and we started to encounter more and more rough chip seal with sections of gravel, even a section of rough dirt that was in the process of construction, and several construction zones along Dease Lake.

Decided to stop at Iskut for fuel, and paid a whopping $5.40 per gallon (C$) adding $192.50 to the tank to be sure we had plenty of gas to get us to the Highway this afternoon. The scenery north of Kinaskan Lake was again beautiful, with several long narrow lakes parallel to the highway before we climbed into a higher landscape thick with spruce and sphagnum soils and wetlands. We stopped for photos of the lush, green Gnat Valley, with a large beaver lodge along the creek in the distance.

By mile 294 the construction zone took over and the grades were usually 8 percent and the road was very narrow with NO shoulder, dropping immediately from the road surface nothing. No room for an oops on this road! Dease Lake was just a small community but was alongside the brilliantly blue and very long Dease Lake to the west. Again, because of the construction, the rest areas and pull outs were less than inviting, so I didn’t get any shots of Dease Lake. We crossed the invisible summit of the Arctic Divide, and now all rivers that we see are emptying into the Arctic Ocean instead of the Pacific.

Around mile 330 we entered the Cassiar Mountains, and this time I know the name of the range. Again, this range has it’s own unique personality, huge like everything in BC, but dominantly formed in serpentinite rock, the source of the asbestos from the Cassiar Mine, that is no longer in operation. Where there is serpentine, there usually is jade, both rocks hydrothermally altered from old ocean crust rock at great depths and then squeezed to the surface like a watermelon seed. Yeah, I stole that line from an old geology book about California’s serpentine belt, but I love it, because it describes it so well.

Because of the construction, we were in a line of vehicles when we passed a beautiful green marsh to the west, punctuated by a cow moose and her calf. The fifth wheel from Texas pulled into the only available space. I sure hope they are bloggers and got the photo! We couldn’t stop so just kept crawling along the gravel road with the rest of the line of cars.

We are now in the Cassiar Mountains, on smooth gravel, with many lakes and marshes parallel to the road beside us. I managed to make tuna sandwiches with some chips and a pickle while Mo was being piloted at a reasonably slow pace through the construction. The gravel is smooth, but dusty, and every time one of those big aggregate haulers goes by, it takes a bit for the dust to settle. Now THIS is what I thought this trip would be like!

What I have learned so far is that it’s possible to see the beautiful wild wilderness of northern British Columbia without ever touching a difficult route. The Yellowhead Highway all the way from Edmonton to Prince George to Prince Rupert is beautiful, in great shape, and there are state of the art facilities just about everywhere you might need them. You can then drive north on the Cassiar more than half way to beautiful lakes and provincial parks still on great roads. Some folks recently discussed avoiding the Alaska trip because of how hard it might be on your rig. I suggest that those folks check out this beautiful, amazing, fabulous part of British Columbia and the north.

We, however, still want to do the road, The Alaska Highway, even though I am not entirely sure that I haven’t already seen the best part of the trip. It’s now 1 in the afternoon, we are 78 miles south of the Highway, and plan to stop in at Jade City before continuing north. More later

It’s now “later”, 3:30 in the afternoon and once again a pristine northern lake has called us in. After only 180 miles we decided that we needed to take on some water and drove down to Boya Provincial Park. The park attendant at Kinaskan talked poetically about the beautiful turquoise lake that was right on our route north and said we shouldn’t miss it. Our night destination was to be somewhere between where we were and Whitehorse, but we knew we wouldn’t make it to Whitehorse.

Checking the maps for campgrounds along the highway between Upper Llaird and Whitehorse yielded a few spots, but not many. We also aren’t sure of the boondocking options along the main route, and really don’t feel like paying top dollar for a regular crowded RV park tonight. We plan to stop in Whitehorse for a couple of days anyway and will pay the big bucks then for the opportunity to do laundry and get caught up on the internet.

If you look closely, you can see me in the center in the water

Once again we are camped on a lake, and within minutes of setting up the rig, Abby and I were in the water. This time I decided to go for a real swim. Boya Lake is warmer than most northern BC lakes, and the outside temperature this afternoon hit 82 *F! Pretty darn warm, and I needed a good bath. Boya Lake is underlain by white marl and is so clear that you can see fish swimming beneath you. There is an interpretive trail here around the lake that we plan to walk later this evening, but not before I try one more dip in that gorgeous water. Cassiar N Day 8_1026

I think tonight we won’t unload the kayaks, and just enjoy this beautiful place from the beach. Might be time for a bit of relaxation that doesn’t include paddling for several hours. The park information kiosk posted weather information for the days ahead, and if they are correct, we will be driving into rainy wet skies as we approach Whitehorse for the next few days. It will be a good time to clean house, clean ourselves, and do a bit of town stuff before we continue north to Dawson City.

The rest of the photos for this day are linked here

Tomorrow: Whitehorse, Yukon Territories

Miles driven today between stop 13 and stop 14: 180

a mix of chip seal and about 1/3 gravel, with several construction zones, no delays.