Deception Bay, Yukon

In line for ferry - 6am

Much happier AFTER caffeine

Driving off Ferry coming into Haines

Three wise monkeys (Marie, Trish, Eric) in front of Kathleen Lake

Yukon Lupin

On the right road

View out of our window at Cottonwood Campground

This sign in Campground office - agree with that!

Skagway to Deception Bay: To experience different scenery, we took a 7am ferry from Skagway to Haines. After a 6am line up for the ferry, we were glad to get aboard and avail ourselves of our first of two (& most vital) caffeine hit for the day. The ferry ride was only 1 hr, and we drove into picturesque Haines. Sadly the photos were dismal due to the overcast and dreary morning. Thankfully it was fine & sunny by afternoon, but we were at Deception Bay by then.

We saw a few bears, another porcupine and a coyote. We also saw what seemed to be lots of prairie dogs, but didn't see their usual holes, so perhaps they were a different animal. All in all, not a bad day's viewing. The scenery changed quite dramatically from majestic snow-capped mountain peaks with no trees on the ground, to majestic snow-capped mountain peak with pines, fir etc. This is a glacial area and the lakes are freezing but a beautiful aquamarine colour.

Our current campground here about 15 miles south of Deception Bay (Cottonwoods RV) is delightful. Only 15amp power, but there is a beautiful 360 view. The lake to the front and snow capped mountains all around. The lake had 6' of ice on top during winter, and the last of the icecap melted 5 days ago. Two summers ago a mother bear strolled through this campground with her 2 cubs, then last summer just the cubs came, and this year, just a single bear again. We have yet to see any bears in this campground, and we will be pulling out in an hour. We cross into Alaska this afternoon, and will be there for the rest of the month before starting our way back through Canada visiting Lake Louise, Bamff & Calgary.

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.

Whitehorse, Yukon

Here we are in the Capital of the Yukon - that is the river beyond

The path along the Yukon River

I found the 'bonanza gold' - hurrah!

The locals were wearing Tshirts

Local Number Plate

The Yukon porcupine

Our route for the next 2 days

"Big Sam left Seattle in the year of '92,

With George Pratt, his partner, and brother, Billy, too.

They crossed the Yukon River and found the bonanza gold.

Below that old white mountain just a little south-east of Nome. "

We're still a real long way from Johnny Horton's 'Nome', in his song North to Alaska, but we did cross the Yukon river again today here in downtown Whitehorse, and you will have seen my bonanza gold in the photo above. We had bright sunshine for most part of the afternoon, but until the sun came out, we were still wearing our jackets. Of course the locals were walking around in TShirts!

You may recall from the blog yesterday that we saw an animal and wondered if it was a porcupine. Turns out I found a photo which looks just like what we saw, and it was a Yukon Porcupine. By the time Eric & Marie came to the same place, they think they saw a wolverine chasing the porcupine. I had radioed them to be on the look out on the right hand side. Wolverine sightings are very rare.

For those of you following our travels on maps, tomorrow we will drive south down from Whitehorse (see red oval) on Klondike Highway 2 to the town of Skagway for the night, and then catch the 7am ferry across the channel to Haines. From Haines we will drive NW up Hwy 7 then Hwy 3 and rejoin Hwy 1 (Alaska Hwy) to Destruction Bay (note blue X). We will stay there the night. Once we get past Beaver Creek, you will see we enter the brown zone which means we will be back in the USA ie Alaska.

Eric & Marie who are travelling with us also have a travel blog. Just click here.

The Yukon

Healthy specimen

Gateway to the Yukon

Double click on this photo to read the blurb

Just one view of the Signpost Forest

Breathing in the fresh air

That's us about to cross that bridge in front: the Yukon River

Liard Hot Springs to Whitehorse. Murray & I had to pinch ourselves today - we were actually driving along the Alaska Highway in the Yukon! How amazing is that? Every turn in the road opened up another stunning vista on both sides of the road, and in front as well. It was hard to know which way to look. At the end of each day our eyes are exhausted after continuously scanning the roadside for animals and taking in the views. As well as the vistas, we were well rewarded today as we saw lots of bison, black bears, a brown coloured bear, a red fox, a coyote, a bald eagle, and another animal we are having trouble identifying - looked like a porcupine but without the needles. Hmmm.

We stopped in at Watson Lake to see the Signpost Forest. It is one of the best known attractions between Dawson Creek & Fairbanks. See the blurb to know the story of the 'Forest'. As we had a 7.5 hour drive today, we made a few stops to take a break, including a nice walk along a boardwalk into a viewing platform over a waterfall. The air was so clean and fresh. Exhilarating.

At the end of a long day, we crossed the Yukon River and are now in a nice campground (Hi Country) in Whitehorse, Capital of the Yukon. Thankfully the wifi works well, so I have been able to do the blogs for yesterday and today. Susanne, this is a great RV Park, but we were lucky that we booked ahead, as it was full when we arrived at 7.30pm. Also, plan to stop in at Johnsons Crossing (north of Teslin) - the food is wonderful. They had just put out freshly cooked ribs, sausage rolls, apple fritters, blueberry, cherry & apple turnovers and of course their world renowned (and I mean world renowned) cinnamon rolls. We tried a bit of everything and it was all very, very good. They have a public phone there and it is a free phone call to this campground to book ahead. Good Luck!

Alaska Highway: Day 2

Scenery at every turn...

The bobcat/lynx

Beautiful Muncho Lake

Stone Sheep (Rams)

Black Bear

Liard Hot Springs

Liard Hot Springs campsites: Marie & Murray

Still light, at just after 10pm

Fort Nelson - Liard Hot Springs: What a fabulous day of driving we had yesterday. Beautiful scenery and some interesting animals – two that we had never seen before. We left Fort Nelson at 9am, and an hour later we were up a mountain driving into thick fog. Thankfully it didn’t last long. However, just minutes after we entered the fog, we saw a cute roly poly black bear cub only a few feet from my window. It was climbing from the edge of the road to the mountainside. It all happened so fast and we were so excited, yet despite having my camera switched on and ready to go, I didn’t get a chance to take a photo! We couldn’t stop due to the fog and the danger of Eric running into the back of us. Not to worry, within 12 minutes the fog had cleared and then we saw a bobcat or lynx. Apparently a rare event. That was the first sighting of an animal we had never seen in the wild before. You can pick them by their dark stubby tail – see the dark blob of a tail in the photo. Next we came across a single Stone Sheep (the second animal that we had never seen before), and later saw 3 rams of the same species right on the edge of the bitumen. Ten minutes later we saw a black bear ambling along the tree line beside the road. We were able to pull over and get several photos of him as he wandered away.

Eric needed to fill up with fuel, and the next stop happened to be the Muncho Lake Lodge, the newest log cabin building on the Alaska Highway. As he was filling up, his wife Marie decided to check out the log chalet and discovered it had a nice restaurant overlooking Muncho Lake. We quickly followed her in and enjoyed a soup and sandwich meal with a hot coffee, then wandered down to enjoy the aura of the lake.

By 4pm we arrived at Liard Hot Springs Provincial Park, and checked into our adjoining campsites in amongst the trees. So tranquil. Our first campsite of the trip with no hook ups. That's right folks - no power, no water and no sewer. We donned our bathers and walked 700 metres along a boardwalk to the natural hot springs. The first natural pool was too hot, as was the middle pool and we ended up in the furtherest pool from the spring. It was so nice to be in warm water while the outside temperature was quite cool. As we walked back to our campsite, we chatted to a man who had visited here twice before, and both times he had seen moose as he walked along the boardwalk – moose love the swamp environment. We searched and searched, but no moose to be seen. We each prepared our dinner (turned on the generator to use our convection microwave to cook our pizza), and sat together at the outside table to eat. We then pulled our chairs up around the campfire and toasted some marshmallows and tried to come up with a few campfire songs. After Eric & Marie left I took this photo at 10.10pm – the photo is not doctored in any way, so you can see how light it is. I woke at 4.20am the last 2 mornings and it was just as light…getting closer to the land of the midnight sun! Next stop - the Yukon.

Alaska Highway: 1

Murray filling up amid snowflakes

A few snowflakes build up...

Boy, it hasn't stopped snowing

A nice rustic scene - quite bucolic really Gem

The day cleared to fine & sunny

Marie took this photo of us ahead of them en route to Fort Nelson

Uh, oh - they warned us some parts of the highway would be like this

A female elk on the side of the road

Day 1: After a glorious day yesterday, we were stunned to be greeted by snowflakes when we awoke in Dawson Creek this morning! Undeterred, we filled up the petrol tank - all 75 gallons worth - and headed North to Alaska. Marie & Eric were following behind us, and took some photos of us on the road which we have never had before. One of the advantages of driving with friends. The snowflakes were only flurries as we left Milepost 0, but the snowfall got heavier as we went north, then cleared up. By the time we pulled into our stop at Fort Nelson around 4pm, there were patches of blue sky & sunshine. However, it is supposed to get down to below freezing tonight.

Betsy, for your information, remember to top up with gas when you can. Several gas stations are marked on the maps, but when we passed them today, they were closed. I think the financial crisis & high gas prices may have resulted in the reduced Alaska highway traffic, and consequently we have noticed several businesses en route to be closed.

The only moose we saw today was a dead one on the side of the road, but we did see a coyote and an elk. The snow on the landscape made for a very pretty route. We enjoyed the whole drive today, and look forward to lunching at Muncho Lake (appropriate place for lunch) tomorrow, and then spending the night at Liard Hot Springs.

Milepost 0 of the Alaska Highway

Hard to believe we are here

Here are the 4 of us at the start of the Alaska Highway: Milepost 0

Revised route taking us up to the next few days

Beautiful scenery getting to Dawson Creek

One of our pit stops - that is Marie & Eric's trailer behind our motorhome

Moose on the loose

For those of you who have already travelled Alaska by road, or have looked into it, you will be very familiar with Milepost 0. It is the historical start point of the Alaska Highway - known as the ALCAN highway until 1943. The first 613 miles/km of this highway are in British Columbia, the next 577 mi/929km are in the Yukon, and only then do we enter Alaska itself. From Milepost 0 here in Dawson Creek direct to Fairbanks is 1500 miles/2,414 km.

For those of you interested in doing this trip next year, the last gas fill up we did in the USA cost us $3.73/gal. Our fill ups in Canada have been around $5.19/gal ($1.32/litre). I'm glad we saved our pennies in the lead up to this trip! If you want a nice RV park in Dawson Creek, you should be happy with this one: Northern Lights. Full hook-ups, wifi, cable and although they take no club cards, they are cheaper than those that offer Good Sam etc. Their toilet block is brand new and has 5 showers/toilet/sink ensuites, and the laundry has 6 washers & dryers. Tammy & Annette (owner) were very friendly & helpful.

We were so excited to get to this point that we decided to have an early start yesterday, and drive 10 hrs. It was 480 mi/773km. The scenery was beautiful, and as one chap wrote, the route getting to Milepost 0 is an adventure in itself. There sure were some pretty sights along the way. Marie & Eric saw a moose close to the highway, but we missed that so took a photo of the next moose sign, then stayed on the lookout. To no avail! We had a few rain showers along the way, but by lunchtime the weather was glorious and has remained that way. We awoke to a fine, warm & sunny day today. Yippee. Murray walked about 5km walk into town and Eric rode off on his bike for a 15 mi/25km ride. Marie & I drove sedately into Dawson Creek, no sooner parked the car and ran into Murray! Eric joined us and we had lunch in town together. Tomorrow we will head to Fort Nelson, stay one night, then make a beeline for Liard Hot Springs. Watch this space...