Skagway, Alaska

World's smallest desert

Murray, Eric & Marie take photos of beautiful Emerald Lake

Passing scenery

Leaving the Yukon - momentarily

More scenery...Marie driving ahead

Glacial ice on the roadside

Three little bears in Carcross

Princess Liner out our front window

Princess to the left, Holland to the right

Taken of our campground at midnight

Whitehorse to Skagway. We thought the scenery of the last few days was wonderful, but the 180 km (112 miles) drive south along the Klondike Highway from Whitehorse, Yukon to Skagway, Alaska today was breathtaking. Obviously my photos will not do it justice, even if you do click on them to enlarge them. For those driving this route in the future, you will want to have your camera fully charged and with lots of memory available for this drive - you will need it. As I clicked away merrily, I thought back to the days when we had to buy a 12, 24 or 36 film for our cameras, and then wait to have the film processed. We had no idea how many good photos we had until they were developed. Now, we can take multiple shots of the one scene and select the best ones and delete the rest, all done as we are driving along if we wish. When we pull up for the night, I download the photos to the laptop, clear the camera card, recharge the camera battery, and it is ready for the next day. We get a lot of pleasure looking at the photos at the end of each day.

As well as the amazing scenery, we did some unique things en route. We stood in the world's smallest desert just north of the town of Carcross (previously known as Caribou Crossing - although the caribou herds were decimated by the Klondike Gold Rush), and visited a store that is the longest running established business in the Yukon - also at Carcross. Carcross is the home of Bennett Lake, one of the lakes famed as the headwaters of the Yukon river. It was from Bennett Lake that prospective Klondike gold miners (who had caught a ship to Skagway and crossed the mountains) bought or built rafts to ferry themselves and their goods down the Yukon River to Dawson City to make their fortune. The history of this place!

Make sure you have your passports ready (and sunglasses off) as you leave Canada (Yukon) and enter the USA at White's Pass - about 7 miles out of Skagway. We also turned our clocks back one hour at this point. The road surface was good, although with quite steep grades as you approach and leave the US Customs point of entry. In fact, our brakes and Marie & Eric's were starting to smell hot, so we had to pull over and let them cool down. You drop 3,000 feet in 14 miles or something like that.

About 25 miles out of Skagway, Eric took his bicycle out of his car, and rode it the rest of the way and met us at our campground, right on the Skagway port. In fact, our RV looks out to huge liners parked in the bay - we are less than 0.2km from them. In the photo I took, the cruise ship on the right is a Holland of America, and the one directly in front of our RV is a Princess. This little port is simply buzzing with activity and our RV park (Pullen Park - make sure you ask to be parked on the asphalt facing the ships) is in the perfect location to watch all the action. We are loving it. The town is only metres from our campground, and within a few minutes stroll, we were mixing with the cruise ship passengers in the main street shopping area. The horn of the Princess liner has just sounded as it is about to pull out of the bay. Murray is visiting the Gold Rush Cemetery, so he will miss the exodus of the liners. It is 8.30pm and still light. I took a photo at midnight last night to show how light it still was then. You certainly wouldn't need a torch/flashlight at night here in summer.