11-22 July 2016 - Liard River Hot Springs, BC to Whitehorse,
YT
The drive from Liard River Hot Springs to Downtown RV Park
in Watson Lake, Yukon Territory was, like the drive from Dawson Creek to Watson
Lake, fairly boring. Traffic was almost non-existent - fewer than 10 vehicles
passed us during the 129 mile drive, although quite a few more than that were
heading the opposite direction. Every vehicle that came up behind us did pass,
as we were going about 12 mph below the speed limit due to the washboard road
condition – we felt like we were being shaken, not stirred.
Downtown RV Park is just a gravel parking lot with
power/water/cable posts every 15 feet or so. Watson Lake is a very small town,
with its main claim to fame the signpost forest that grew up after homesick Carl K. Lindley, a US Army soldier working on the Alaska highway in 1942, put up a directional sign giving the mileage to his home town of Danville, IL near the
barracks. The forest is now maintained by the city of Watson Lake, and has more than 77,000 signs.
We hadn’t
planned to post a sign, but decided to do so after seeing the many varied signs
posted by people from all over the world. We got a board and some paint at the
local hardware store, and made our sign. The top line is messy because I was
using a paper template that I’d cut out, and the paint wicked under the paper.
For rest of the sign, I used the template to pencil in the letters, then just
painted them without the template – much neater! Tom hunted all over for an
empty spot to hang our sign - we looked for, but did not find, any of the signs posted be NKK members who did last year's Alaska caravan.
The other Watson Lake attraction is the Northern Lights
Centre planetarium. Two films are shown, one somewhat dated film (2004) tries
to explain just how big the universe is. Some interesting shots from various
probes and the Hubble space telescope were shown, and it did get across just
how puny and insignificant our world is in the vastness of space. The second
film shows the northern lights in full glory, although the red and blue colors
mentioned in the narrative weren’t really visible on the screen; still pretty
impressive.
Internet access is rationed here, as it’s all via satellite
links which are apparently expensive. We got two half-hour sessions from the
park, and 1.5 hours each at the Watson Lake town library. That enabled me to
get the previous post in this blog published, but I didn’t have enough time to
send notifications - that had to wait until we got to Whitehorse, where we also
get just half an hour each from the RV park – I did a few necessary chores and
checked e-mail and Facebook and was done.
The 268 miles from Watson Lake to Whitehorse was one of our
longest legs to date, but the road was generally in better shape than the last
few legs, and we had only one short construction delay. No photos from today,
as Tom didn’t put the memory chip back in the camera after downloading the last
set of pictures. No huge loss, as we mostly saw miles and miles of spruce and
pine forest, with a few scenic mountains and lakes thrown in.
13-15 July 2016 – Hi Country RV, Whitehorse, YT
Hi Country RV Park is huge, but with lots of trees and shrubs so that even if we don’t have complete privacy, we do have shade. Our first night in Whitehorse, we visited with Gord and
Linda Mckenzie, the secretary/treasurers of the BC Dogwood chapter of the NKK.
Delightful people who like wine as much as we do. They gave us a number of tips for the road ahead. We look forward to seeing
them again in Pueblo, CO at the NKK International. On the McKenzie’s recommendation, we had lunch at the
Klondike Rib and Salmon restaurant, in the oldest operating buildings in
Whitehorse. Tom’s ribs were the best he’s had in a very long time – tender and
juicy, with crispy bits on the outside. Barbara’s spinach salad with dried
cranberries, golden raisins and all kinds of nuts and seeds was complimented
by a grilled salmon skewer – cooked perfectly.
Because the bugs have been keeping us cooped up inside way
too much, we patronized Canadian Tire and bought an 11 x 11 foot screen room to
use as we go forward. It was even on sale! We went to the very nice visitor’s center twice, once just
to access the internet, and again to download geocaches into our GPS, and also
to snag the cache there at the center.
We visited the Whitehorse Fishway, the
world’s longest wooden fish ladder, that allows returning salmon to bypass the
Whitehorse dam. Unfortunately, we were about 2 weeks too early to actually see
any chinook salmon using the ladder. All I saw was a very tiny (2 inch) fish
that seemed stuck in the holding tank. Still, the displays were informative,
and the ladder quite impressive.
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| Lower portion of the Fishway |
From there we hiked up the steep hill above
the ladder to retrieve two geocaches. As usual, Barbara got overheated and had
to rest a bit, but we did get both caches, and Tom took some really nice photos
of the dam and surrounding area.
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| The fish ladder is the brown structure that parallels the road - this picture only includes the upper part of the ladder. Miles Canyon is at the end of the lake above the dam. |
We then drove the Miles Canyon
road, logging a cache along the way. From both the overlook and the lower down
pedestrian suspension bridge, the river through the canyon was impressive. We
could well imagine how daunting the rapids in the narrow, straight-sided canyon
would have been to the gold rushers trying to get to Dawson’s Creek before the Whitehorse Dam was built and flooded the canyon.
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| View from the road above the Miles Canyon - the pedestrian bridge is about 2/3 of the way to the top of the photo. |
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| Barbara and Shelby near the pedestrian bridge. |
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| Basalt columns that form the walls of Miles Canyon - they extend for about 30 meters below the water level. |
After a bite of lunch and a
cool down back at the motorhome, we visited the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre,
a very nicely done exhibit of the land bridge that covered the Bering Straits
thousands of years ago, and allowed the woolly mammoths, giant sloths,
mastodons, giant beavers, and other prehistoric creatures to flourish,
alongside the earliest human immigrants from Asia to North America.
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| American scimitar cat, and its skeleton - these cats weighed about 200 kg (440 lbs). At the lower left is a saber tooth tiger skull for comparison. No saber tooths lived in Beringia. |
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| A woolly mammoth skeleton |
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| SS Klondike, now a national historic site, that ran freight along the Yukon River between Whitehorse and Dawson Creek from 1937 to 1950. |
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| The galley of the SS Klondike, with the formal dining room visible through the door. |
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