We left Haines around sunset, having first boarded the ferry from the side (a little alarming to realize that one could easily drive straight through into the bay) and taken the car up on the elevator. It made noise disturbingly reminiscent of an MRI machine, but with the directions of the crew and some careful maneuvering, they squeezed all the cars into the two car decks.
Our cabin was cosy but comfortable.
And we left with a beautiful sunset, followed by a northern lights display.
The very first stop was in Juneau, during the night, and the last stop before Bellingham was in Ketchikan on the last day but one (for only a few minutes: we got off and sprinted up a hill next to the dock to get our legs moving). In between those stops we moved between the solarium, dining room, and observation lounge, marveling at the narrow channels the ferry threaded through on its way south.
While most of the stops were either at night or too short to do much with, we did get 4 hours in Sitka on an absolutely gorgeous afternoon and went for a lovely hike on a long boardwalk, across salmon streams and muskeg and through a bit of a forest filled with impressive late berries.
The waters were amazingly smooth the whole way despite a big storm forecast on the outer coast. Saw one more northern lights display and a few whales, and celebrated K’s birthday with a “pumpkin lava cake” (think mild warm gingerbread). We considered a stop at the “cocktail lounge” but when we realized our choices were cans of either “Mango Margarita” or “Strawberry White Russian” we decamped to the observation deck with the scrabble board.
Turning past Dryad Point lighthouse and about to pass Bella Bella.
Arrived Bellingham 8 am on Friday, Oct 3rd. Nice cafe breakfast not far from the ferry dock, and then, because we know how to have fun, Trader Joe’s and Costco before heading home.
Haines sits in a glorious position, with mountains and water on all sides.
We spent the day wandering town, mostly observing things from the outside–I was especially sorry the hammer museum was not open–but did warm up for bit in the very lovely public library.
And around about 5, we put ourselves into the ferry line. Hard to believe our trip is coming to an end.
Our hotel host also told us that, at the nearby state park, a mama grizzly and her 4 cubs had been pretty active. If we drove out in the morning we’d likely catch a glimpse. We debated–didn’t really want to be the people who contribute to habituating wild bears to the presence of humans–but when we got up in the morning the only coffee shop (breakfast place) in town wasn’t open yet. So off to the park we went.
About 7 miles out of town, we started up the road next to the Chilkoot River, which flows into Lutak Inlet at Haines. Signage made us realize that bears might be a regular thing here:
Soon we arrived at beautiful Chilkoot Lake.
well populated with people fishing for silver salmon.
With so many people about we figured that the bear would be a no show. But no, about 10 minutes after we arrived a woman in a parks department sweatshirt rounded the corner calling “She’s on her way. Everybody out of the water. If you’ve got fish, throw them back or take them with you. We don’t want the cubs to learn that people are an easy source of food. Out. Now.”
And sure enough, not 3 minutes later, mama made her appearance, scrambling over the trailer that had been left halfway down the ramp, and into the stream flowing out of the lake. She was followed by the cubs and closely observed by the people now clustered in the parking lot.
She happily entered the water, floating downstream with the current, as her cubs picked their way more gingerly along the shallows and the shore.
As soon as they had passed, all the anglers dropped back into the water.
We spent a few moments marveling at the ease with which everyone made space for the bears, then took a binocular picture of the glacier in the mountains at the end of the lake.
Happy, we hopped in the car in search of breakfast, only to end up following the bears down the road.
When we arrived, our hotel host warned us that there was only one restaurant open in town, an unfortunate combination of end of season and Sunday night. So, after a walkabout, we headed to the Bamboo Room. A quick look at the menu on the window let me know I needed to abandon my hope of having one nice seafood dinner before we left Alaska. Still, it was the only game in town, so in we went for yet more food served with fries–at least they have fish and chips right? Ah, but the joke was on us. Our waitress seated us and handed us menus. When she came back quite a few minutes later to drop off glasses of water she said “We just ran out of food.”
After some (incredulous on my part) conversation (they were going to be closed all week for moose hunting so hadn’t wanted to overstock), we were directed to the bar round the corner where we could get some bar snacks.
The Fogcutter was crowded, with a lively group yelling at the televised football game. (Green Bay Packers drawn 32-32 with, um, someone or other. Pretty tense.) We edged our way in, scored two seats at the bar after some locals made way for the tourists, and asked to see the food menu. Sure, said the one bartender handling the whole place, but “I only have one air fryer and one pizza oven, and they’re both busy. I’ll let you know when I have space in one or the other.”
Just after we order our two beers, some rang a bell quite loudly and the entire room cheered. R was clapped on the back by the guy behind us who informed us we just got lucky. If someone rings the bell, it means they’re buying a round for the whole bar. Probably 60 people there at the time, so we thought this was maybe some sort of tease the tourist move. Nope, shortly thereafter someone dropped off our tokens:
The airfryer freed up first, so we ordered a combo basket (chicken nuggets, cheese sticks, and onion rings) and washed down the grease with a second beer and fun conversation with the guys behind us about fishing and hunting.
We eventually left the bar to the serious drinkers and headed back to our hotel room, where we gratefully ate our one remaining avocado with some whole grain crackers.
Tok to Haines Junction followed by Haines Junction to Haines together add up to a Lifetime Bucket-list sort of drive. With apologies for the oxymoron, this route is almost monotonously awe-inspiring.
We started the day with a surprisingly tasty cinnamon roll from the gas station and a quick stop at Dezadeash Lake to admire the view.
A few k further down the road we went for a truly awe-inspiring hike to Saint Elias lake. It’s a gentle route up a valley, and not much of an incursion into Big Kluane – with its 5,000 meter peaks and giant icefields – but it was heart-stopping anyway, peaceful and still with the water like glass – like walking into a yellow painting.
From here we went on towards Million Dollar Falls–recommended by our host. The falls were too complex to get a decent photo of–traveling more than 60 meters through narrow gaps–but the boardwalk and stairs precariously perched on the rock cliffs were a marvel of engineering. The name comes from small US Army camp built–at a rumored cost of a million dollars–and never used during the construction of the Haines Road in the 1940s.
Back into the car and through more sub-arctic mountain wilderness to reach Haines Pass at 3500 ft.
From there quite suddenly the road plunges for five miles or more all the way to the border post and almost sea level.
At the bottom you follow the lovely, fast flowing Chilkat river. (Chilkat and Chilkoot are two different place names, nto two different spellings.) Yet more huge mountains appear to the right (the northern edge of Glacier Bay NP) and straight ahead (an impressive saw’s edge of peaks that lie across the Chilkoot Inlet from Haines and straddle the border between this narrow strip of AK and the Yukon – big pic below).
And so into town and to our hotel, the old officers quarters of Fort Seward.
The old parade square is surrounded by these old military buildings, many alas in a state of near collapse.
It was nasty after breakfast in Tok, with rain hovering above freezing, and I pretty much gave up on my hope of seeing at least a glimpse of Kluane National Park.
Still, the cloudy landscape gave us views of powerlines suffering from frost heaves/shifting permafrost and snow geese resting before heading further south.
For a couple of hours the rain briefly turned to sleet interspersed with dense fog. But as we made our way SE towards the Canadian border it started to clear, and clear, and with a bit of new snow even the pee stops were scenic:
As Kkuane comes into view, much of the road looks about like this:
At tiny Burwash Landing we almost didn’t bother to stop, but the Visitor’s Center was open and houses a good small museum of local crafts and critters.
The boat was made from moose skin. The sign noted that if stored away from dogs, it could last several years.
By lunch we were getting great views all round. These from an admittedly very chilly beach on huge (160 sq mile, 50 mile long) Kluane Lake:
This btw at a campground where the tent area is completely surrounded by an electrified bear fence.
A few k further on we did at last get to see a 70+ herd of the famous but elusive Stone’s Sheep, grazing on a precipitous mountainside, appropriately named Sheep Mountain.
A strange phenomenon here: as of very recently, the main local river “switched off” almost overnight, and the valley is turning to desert.
Near the Thechal Dhal Visitor’s Center
The explanation: a glacier up to the left retreated just enough that, instead of its meltwater splitting between this and another valley, it now all runs the other way.
Below are views of the mountain with the sheep, from a couple of miles on where the road bends around the end of the lake.
And so past another few dozen snow-capped peaks to Haines Junction, where we booked into the small but very thoughtfully laid out and welcoming Pioneer Motel
… with enough light left for a walk along the river through lovely bottomland woods festooned with alarming bear warnings.
After our walk we went up to the local Chinese restaurant for dinner (it was that, or more burgers and chips), and enjoyed a brief stop at the local Catholic church, built in 1954 from an old Quonset hut.
This was the one stretch of the trip where we retraced our steps. Unlike when we came in towards Anchorage, the clouds were low and we had very few views of snow capped mountains or glaciers. And, nearly 10 days after we came through the first time, many of the trees had lost their leaves.
We did get a few more views of the Matanuska Glacier
and we learned (from an interpretive sign) about rock glaciers.
Yes, a glacier, but with a rock slide all over it.
As we rolled in towards Tok (and once again the dependable, if not exactly fancy) Young’s Motel, we stopped to hike the Tok River Valley Overlook trail. Not much to see (clouds), but I did enjoy the leg stretch and the directional sign in the campground.
And so the return begins. We have to drive from the Kenai through Anchorage to Haines for the ferry home – but, the geography of Alaska and the Yukon being what it is, that’s two sides of a massive triangle. 900 miles, or 500? Alas the 500 would be through (across? over?) the roadless and record-busting expanse of the largest internationally protected wilderness on Earth.
A note from R on that. I once saw a description of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park (by far the largest and least visited of all America’s National Parks) as “larger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Switzerland combined.”
But Wrangell abuts Canada’s Kluane (“Klu-AH-ney”) NP…
which abuts Tatshenshini-Alsek Provincial Park…
which abuts Glacier Bay NP.
Taken together they are almost 40,000 uninterrupted square miles of mountains, ice, and bear poop, containing both Canada’s highest peak, 19,000 ft Mount Logan, and the world’s largest glacier outside Antarctica (the Malaspina – the white blob clearly visible up and to the left from Yakutat. More on this to follow.
K again. The drive through Anchorage was just that, except we made a longish stop at REI so R could try on replacements for his 26 year old backpack–bought at the Seattle REI in 1999 to train for what turned out to be an unsuccessful attempt at Mount Rainier. What was meant to be window shopping turned into a purchase–he found a pack that is comfortable and holds all the water I insist he carry for the two of us when we hike.
We continued north as far as Palmer, really just to make the next day an hour shorter. But it was a good stop – a dramatic location and a small town with a real sense of community.
Pioneer Peak, on the way into Palmer.View from downtown. There are mountains like this in almost every direction.
From the outside, the Pioneer Motel appeared (as one review had noted) to be the kind of place that makes you question your online booking skills or think about Hitchcock movies. But after a very pleasant chat with the woman running the place we checked out our little “cabin” and it was faultlessly clean, very comfortable, with a nice kitchenette; no wonder it has such a great reputation.
We did a walk about town, checking out the interesting historic buildings and admiring the mountains around the edges. One striking building is the Church of a Thousand Trees, an Anglican church built from logs in the 1930s.
Palmer sits at one end of the Matanuska Valley, and in the small museum we learned that during the Great Depression a plan was hatched to move farmers from the Midwest to farm this area. 203 families from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan (chosen from those states because they might be hardy enough to withstand Alaska’s winters) each received (with a long term, low interest loan) 40 acres to farm. The Valley wasn’t as easy to farm as expected (not only did the land need to be cleared, the rubble leftover from the recently retreating glacier made things even harder) and housing and government assistance was slow to arrive. 25 families left before the second month was up, and by 5 years, fewer than half the families remained. Still, the ones who stayed eventually created a successful farming cooperative and the Matanuska Valley is now the primary agricultural productive region within Alaska, with annual competitions for giant vegetables.
We had dinner at a very hip warehouse-become-brew-pub, Bleeding Heart Brewery. So glad we found it.
This slightly cavernous space would have felt right at home in Portland, with random tables and chairs sprinkled around the warehouse space. We ordered and set ourselves up at a coffee table with the Scrabble board. The beer–I had the Mass Appeal and R tried the Grounds for Divorce–was excellent, and the food even better. I loved the prosciutto mac n cheese and R was very happy with his turmeric chicken and rice. Definitely one of our best meals on the trip.
A few bites in (and only a few rounds into Scrabble) we were joined by some locals hoping to use the rest of the sofa space. We abandoned the game to an interesting and enjoyable evening of “meet the stranger.” We had a long conversation and one of them insisted on buying us second beers. So welcoming and pleasant.
Plus the bathroom wallpaper and signage made me laugh.
We took advantage of our time at the cabin to celebrate Declan’s birthday with him, just few days early.
There was some (unsuccessful) fishing followed by some more successful foraging.
A few king boletes (aka porcini) made their way into our baskets. Fried them up with garlic and ate them alongside steaks cooked outside on the fire. Yum.
We also foraged for wild lingonberries. Gathered enough for a modest contribution to Declan and Hannah’s freezer. Might turn into wine, maybe jam, maybe muffins.
The Watkins’ cabin is located on the Kenai River, and the Watkins are well set up for fishing . I borrowed waders and one of D’s rods, and headed down with him to the shore. The sockeye run was in July–the few remaining ones are listless and all spawned out. Nothing you’d want to catch.
But, silver (aka Coho) are running now, plus there are a few kings and rainbow trout in the river.
I got incredibly lucky and caught a small king
and an enormously fat rainbow trout
Both of these were released back–the king with a special encouragement to spawn generously, as that run in the Kenai needs to be rebuilt.
And then, YES!, a great big silver salmon.
Declan very kindly fileted it.
Fish tacos for dinner, plus lox for brekkies. Yum!
Maeve and Stan, Hannah’s parents, graciously allowed us to head to their cabin on the Kenai Penninsula for a few days. We arrived the night before Declan and Hannah (they were celebrating Rosh Hashanah with friends in Anchorage), and so treated ourselves to a beautiful hike the morning before they arrived.
The trail guide noted that bears frequent this trail from late July to mid-September when berries and mountain ash fruit are ripe.
While it was a little past mid-September, the berries were most definitely ripe
Mushrooming with Declan and Hannah in one of their favorite spots near Girdwood, on Turnagain Arm.
Driving up Turnagain Arm, we stopped on the way at Beluga Point and actually saw belugas cruising below us. Too busy gawking to get a picture, but the arm itself was spectacular.
Turned off the highway and up a dirt road towards the forest
and wandered up along a trail in search of mushrooms and wild blueberries.
Alas none of the prized King Boletes to be found but there was a bewildering variety of non-edibles peeking from the foot-deep moss:
This is a couple of specimens seen during another hunt, on the Kenai:
We did manage a small haul of blueberries (might have been bigger if we hadn’t put quite so many directly into our mouths).
Finished up with a stop for pastries on the way home. Lovely day.
After a quiet morning hanging out with Skadi, we met up with Declan and Hannah at the Anchorage zoo. We had the place nearly to ourselves and the animals were exuberantly active. The animals here were all rescued from injury or orphaning, bred here, or brought from other facilities unable to care for them.
A porcupine used its cage wall as a climbing gym until slumping down for a nap.
The wolves played chase–even their play growls were intimidating–until it was time for dinner.
Once they were in a separate dining enclosure, a keeper amused us by wandering through the exhibit with a sprinkle can of herbs and a spray can of whipped cream. “For enrichment,” we were told.
We also got up close with a frenetic Fisher, three wrestling wolverines, a sleepy black bear finding and eating frozen strawberries, a musk ox, and an important non local resident, a magnificent Amur tiger.
But the best thing was the grizzlies. Their enclosure was supposedly off limits because the existing two had just been introduced to a new third – they were said to be not ready for the additional stress of crowds. But a keeper went to check on them as we were standing at the No Entry sign and said “follow me.”
The biggest of these bears was too big to be weighed the last time he was sedated–they guestimate he now tops the scales between 1,500 and 1,700 pounds. At his peak a few years ago (he’s now 16 years old) he ate around 36 pounds of salmon A DAY during the summer.
Sitting on the northern edge of Anchorage, the Alaska Native Heritage Center is located in the traditional territory of the Native Village of Eklutna, a Dena’ina Athabascan Tribe. On the grounds of the Center are numerous replicas/representations of traditional dwellings of multiple Alaskan tribes. Walking in and out of them, I was struck by how warm and cozy they seem. Many of the doorways are small, requiring one to duck or bow before entering. Declan said that on a previous visit he was told that with one tribe the expectation was that visitors would enter backwards, putting their cloaks (with identifying symbols and artwork) on display before coming into the space.
Inside the Center were numerous beautiful artworks showing off carving, beading, weaving, tanning and sewing skills, along with a large exhibit tracing the history of colonization.
The exhibit took a papal bull from 1493, written by Pope Alexander VI, as its starting point.
From here it traced a difficult history of cultural extermination and cruelty in the name of civilization and manifest destiny. It was too much to take in in one visit, and yet so important to see and acknowledge the complex realities lived by native peoples in the US and Canada.
R here: it’s very hard to know how to respond to some of this stuff. What was done to the native people here is just staggeringly appalling. And yet you have to take in the fact that the attitudes of the whites were often quite complex and hard to pin down in any way that is easily intelligible to us. It’s easy to say that they were simply doing what was conveniently exploitative to them, but they were also clearly driven by a sense – almost incomprehensible to us – that they were doing the “right” thing by saving these people from “savagery” and turning their children in the direction of “civilization.” So being self-righteously appalled by how wicked they were is in part a way of missing the point about how and why this kind of thing keeps happening.
I’ve just been reading Octavia Butler’s Kindred, essentially a slave narrative with a sci-fi twist, and so many of the attitudes present in her 1815 Maryland are cruel and self-serving, but complicated, in similar ways. Right now in the headlines there are people who genuinely think that demonizing other people’s religion and way of life, treating them as not fully human, and brutalizing or kidnapping or murdering their children, is the only way “forward” and the right thing to do. Amazing that we never seem to learn.
Flattop Mountain sits on the edge of Anchorage and is a great destination for easy access hiking. After parking, we started up the trail at a modest pace.
Hannah soon got distracted by the blueberries and stopped to forage while we continued up to the top.
There we were rewarded by gorgeous views of downtown and of Denali and Mount Foraker.
Three guys were launching their parasails from the top as we descended. They rode a thermal high above the top, closely guarded – or shadowed – by an eagle.
For most of our stay in Anchorage we’re doing a “Trusted Sitter” – staying in the house of (in this case) Wes and Carrie in order to look after (in this case) Skadi, their 5 year old huskie/ hound mix while they are on vacation. A nice house with a big back yard and it’s great to have an actual kitchen for a few days.
Skadi sings / howls enthusiastically, in true hound fashion, when people show up or the leash comes off its hook. She’s friendly and easy going – loves the walks and wrestling with a toy, but seems to be good at sleeping too, and doesn’t mind being left for a few hours while we spend time with D+H or explore.
It is a little odd to be close to two substantial “city” parks that are in face dense woodland – carrying the bear spray feels essential, though the biggest things we’ve seen are ravens.
Enjoyed taking her for long walks along the Coastal Trail.
Actual rain and a distinct chill in the air yesterday afternoon – had Fall finally caught up with us? Not a bit. The sun came out, and we stopped for a lovely short hike at an “interpretative trail” in an aspen forest.
We then were presented with yet another jaw-dropping series of landscapes on this longish drive south and west.
The Matanuska Glacier.
Took forever to get to Anchorage, not because the road was long, but because there was so much to stop and gawk at.
Late in the morning, Erich dropped us back at the Eldorado hotel and we drove the quarter mile or so to the free ferry that is the only way to cross the Yukon and proceed West.
The ferry is big enough for five or six vehicles. It’s a weird sight, watching it leave the bank and be immediately swept downriver and then have to claw its way back upriver to the opposite bank.
There the notorious Top of the World Highway begins. Actually, although the surface is mostly packed gravel we were amazed by how good it is. No problem at all cruising along at 60 or 70 kph so long as we looked out for the occasional pothole. And the scenery is increasingly wonderful, in a way quite different from anything we’ve seen so far – long vistas of rolling low trees and tundra to a distant horizon ringed by mountains.
Speaking of which, here we are at Castle Rock, our northernmost point on the trip, 64⁰ 13′ 55″ – the same latitude as central Finland, central Siberia, and the southern tip of Iceland, and about 150 miles short of the Arctic Circle:
In the middle of a very remote nowhere you eventually come to Little Gold, two small buildings that form the northernmost international border crossing in the Americas (see at top).
On the other side is the great U.S. metropolis of Chicken (pop. 12, according to one source). It should have been “Ptarmigan” but the gold-panners who wanted to call it that couldn’t decide how to spell it. Now making as much as possible of the simpler name:
Wanting to be a good tourist, I bought a T-shirt at the gift shop.
Round the back of the gift shop is a competing chicken statue.
Fueled with a large cookie, we headed down out of the mountains to Young’s Motel (in not-much-larger Tok); it would not be confused with the Ritz but is clean and has a restaurant attached.
“Tock,” as we have been saying, is in fact “Toke.”
Erich picked us up in his pickup and took us on a long driving tour of the gold mine where he works. It’s (mostly) hidden across the Klondike from Dawson.
A somewhat surreal experience: they are moving a mountain, bucketful by bucketful, to find a few ounces of yellow metal. Crazy – but then gold has value partly because it’s in the products we use. I simply don’t know what to think about this.
K here. Erich was obviously pro-mining, so his explanations of the environmental oversight and remediation requirements may have been overly skewed towards the positive, but I came away from our tour feeling more positive about the mining than I expected. I thought complicated thoughts while watching the trucks that were taking some of the extracted gravel into town to build the new (hopefully stable) rec center foundation, seeing the reserves of topsoil (such as it is there) separately stored for redistribution over the mine when they finish, and observing the finished areas that were already re-growing and virtually indistinguishable from areas that had not been mined.
“Placer mining” like this constantly uncovers fossilized bones. Bison horns are the commonest.
Kerry got to try out a very, very large bulldozer. Zoom in to see her in the cabin.
Upon arrival we took a late Saturday afternoon stroll to where the Klondike flows into the Yukon, and admired the higgledypiggledy historic buildings in town.
The town was built on swamp land and permafrost, so things tend to slip and sink. There is precisely one paved road, and that for only one mile. The plan was to keep dust down. According to one local, they had to bring both a special paving machine and special paving materials over from France to get a road that will survive the conditions. And they specially dyed it to match the dirt roads.
The paved roadA conversation on the regular compacted dirt roads
But bad timing for our only full day: museums etc. all closed because it’s Sunday and the end of the season. (Jack London’s cabin was on the must-see list. Closed too, but it turns out that it’s probably just one of two different replicas anyway.) Still we took a nice walk through woods at the back of town and then after a hurried lunch caught the last Historical Walking Tour of the year.
Our feet were tiring after that, and since the hike up Midnight Dome, overlooking the town, is a nearly 2,000 ft climb over several miles, we elected to drive. In a trip full of landscape superlatives, the view from the top of the Yukon flowing north into a seemingly bottomless landscape of receding mountains was one of the most extraordinary we’ve seen.
At the top we meet a couple in their 30s who had hiked up. They asked for a ride down and we ended up in a bar with them having cocktails to live music. Erich is Venezuelan but grew up in the US, Barcelona, and all over. Paula is from Brazil.
In a slightly surreal turn, after it had emerged that Erich works in a local gold mine, he said he asked if we could delay our departure tomorrow morning long enough for him to give us a tour of the mine. Something so far off the usual tourist track seemed like a great compensation for all the tourist stuff being shut for the season, so of course we said yes.
A long but beautiful drive north on a perfect Fall day – cool and crisp with bright sun illuminating a sea of Fall color in the boreal forest. Hundreds of miles of yellow blaze jewelled with lakes and tinged with a thousand shades of green.
We stopped at Five Finger Rapids on the Klondike, a notoriously tough spot for the sternwheelers. 290 wooden steps down to the forest and a km or two out to the “fingers” – after all day in the car we were grateful for the exercise.
R part way down the stairs
And R going back up the stairs to get our forgotten bear spray.
Going back for the spray was probably wise, as a few hours later we saw (from the car) our first Grizzly, trying to cross the highway. Only a glimpse so no picture.
Our lunch stop was just a wide gravel patch on the side of the road, but the views of the Pelly River valley were glorious.
We drove through about 20 km of road construction – the only significant slowdown on an otherwise good road with a few bad potholes – and admired the work being done by alarmingly huge machines.
Later, not far from our Dawson City destination, we stopped at a breathtaking overlook which turns out to be a view of the Tintina Trench, a major geological rift that runs several hundred miles NW – SE through the Yukon. It’s now a sort of continental super-highway for bird migration.
I’m pretty sure that the very pointy mountains you can barely see in the far distance are Tombstone Provincial Park, a surreal place (from what I’ve looked up) that hikers rave about. Alas it’s 70+km in the wrong direction for us, up the all-gravel Dempster Highway (which leads to the Arctic Ocean) – some future trip, perhaps.
Arrived in Dawson City to a warm welcome from the Eldorado Hotel.
Hunter gatherers, living in Beringia, the land bridge that connected North America and Siberia during the last ice age (which ended about 10,000 years ago), likely burned Mastodon plops for warmth and cooking.
Later Indigenous people burned wood, using it to keep warm, cook, and smoke foods.
The “sternwheelers” (paddle-wheeled river boats, some the size of small ships) that arrived with the gold rush burned 40 to 90 cords of wood per trip. The biggest of them, the SS Klondike, burned 40 cords traveling down river, and 140 cords going upstream.
Today, in Watson Lake, the Visitor Center provides a free EV charger for cars, but the dam is underproducing electricity, so they’ve brought in a diesel generator to fuel the charger.
We’ve been topping up with gas at all opportunities (when it can be hundreds of miles between communities it’s important), and trying to calculate our gas mileage. But having switched the car to metric (to match the road signs), I’m defeated by the feature that doesn’t tell you mpg–or rather, miles per litre–but instead tells you litres per 100km.
R adds: I was defeated too but my electronic surrogate says 27 mpg. Pathetic compared to the equivalent for an electric vehicle; on the other hand this part of the world is not quite ready for EVs yet.
First stop was the SS Klondike. It’s under renovation, so no touring the interior, but exterior signage allowed us to learn more about this chapter in the Yukon Goldrush.
Just behind it, the Yukon it used to travel on flows through town at alarming speed.
My favorite detail came from this reproduction of a newspaper article about moving of the ship to its display location: it was dragged along steel beams lubricated with 8 tons of soap flakes.
Other signs talked about the racism of the gold rush times.
Some more of this history was discussed in the MacBride Museum in town, though we found that it didn’t add much to what we’d learned from other visitor centers, cultural centers, and museums along the way.
I did appreciate this sign:
And learned that the rock I picked up near Muncho Lake (that I thought might be fossilized coral) is almost certainly calc tufa:
Lastly, there was an informative sign about the beautiful beadwork done by the local indigenous communities. While many of the original geometric patterns made with natural materials including porcupine quills have been lost (between the passage of time, the availability of new materials, and the intentional erasure of native traditions by colonists), the floral beadwork and embroidery is gorgeous and so skilled.
An embroidered leather paper holder
We have seen very few of the famed Stones Sheep, but at least there was a metal one outside the visitor’s center.
It’s complicated – though, alas, less complicated than it was.
A web search gives me:
There are eight aboriginal languages used in the Yukon. Seven are from the Athapaskan family which spreads from central Alaska through northwestern Canada to Hudson Bay. These seven are Gwich’in, Hän, Kaska, Northern Tutchone, Southern Tutchone, Tagish, and Upper Tanana. There are also pockets of Athapaskan in the lower 48 states including Navajo and Apache. Tlingit is found mostly along the southwest Alaskan coast. Inland Tlingit is spoken in parts of British Columbia and southern Yukon. Tlingit is very distantly related to the Athapaskan family.
Around here you get many mentions of the Hän Hwëch’in, which means “people who live along the (Yukon) River,” and Kwanlin Dün (“people from where the river passes through a narrow gap”) – i.e. here at Whitehorse.
One source says Hän had six remaining native speakers as of 2020 and is now virtually extinct. But the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in (formerly the Dawson First Nation) are actively attempting to save and revive it.
Tr’ondëk might sound familiar. Klondike is an Anglo attempt at pronouncing it.
We happened to be in town for the opening of new exhibits at the Yukon Arts Centre. One artist in particular caught my eye.
Meshell Melvin started her art career with oil painting, but wanted a less toxic alternative during her first pregnancy. She turned to working with fabric and today, working with a laser cutter and an antique industrial embroidery machine (that can stitch in any direction), she makes magic.
Her framed “painting” type works are somewhere between collage and painting, with layers of carefully cut and stitched fabrics making beautiful landscapes.
Her large work in this exhibition includes hundreds of sockeye salmon, changing color through their life cycle, swimming across the gallery walls.
Outside there is a dramatic overlook down to the town with sculptures by local artists.
After the Beringia museum, we stopped by The Largest Weathervane In The World: a decommissioned Douglas DC-3 plane that sits outside the transportation museum.
The entire plane pivots depending on the direction of the wind.
From there we dropped back down the hill to town proper, where we snacked on a shared Bahn mi sandwich before taking a long wander in a blustery wind. Nothing particularly noteworthy, but nice to see a stretch of the fast flowing Yukon.
Eventually we found the last Farmers Market of the season in Shipyard Park and joined the long queue at Landed Bakehouse.
Wind playing peekaboo with the sourdough loaves
We bought a large multiseed sourdough loaf and two tasty pastries. Late afternoon sun coming out, great people watching, and a young woman busking with her saxophone.
From there, back to the Sternwheeler Hotel. I’m pretty sure this was the hotel I stayed in on my one previous trip to Whitehorse. Floors are still alarming uneven (random up and down slopes between rooms and within corridors), still more gun cases than suitcases being stored at the desk, and still friendly and welcoming.
For a break from restaurants we had a picnic supper in our room with the excellent bread, smoked fish and veggie bits and pieces picked up at the market, with one of the pastries – an unusual and equally excellent orange-cardamom croissant / sticky bun / muffin creation for dessert.
Photo of a photo of staff standing with a life-size recreation of an ice age Short-Faced Bear.
Almost didn’t go; stayed three hours and it wasn’t enough. Thoughtful and dramatic displays on the people, creatures, geology etc. of the gigantic area – now mostly under the Bering Sea – that formed the land bridge between Asia and the Americas 40,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Beringia in green, with Russia and Kamchatka on the left and Alaska on the right.
Mastodon skulls. Mammoth molars. A tour involving a lesson on throwing a spear with the help of an atalatl. Dioramas featuring the terrifying Short-Faced Bear. See above – it makes a modern Grizzly look like an undernourished squirrel. Also a 50,000 year old mummified wolf pup.
– and an 80,000 year old mummified caribou:
Kerry decided to try to frighten the extinct giant beaver.
You think of people and animals walking across a literal bridge when the accumulating ice made sees levels drop by 100 meters. But Beringia existed for tens of thousands of years. Those vanished lands were inhabited for several times as long as separates us from the Pharaohs.
The appearance of Asiatic humans here may explain why we heard an Inland Tlingit woman say in a video clip how weird it was to meet a group of Ainu people, visiting from northern Japan, and think “these people are us.”
Cool fact: Camels evolved in N America, migrated to Asia via Beringia and then became extinct in the Americas, excepting their cousins the llamas, vicuñas, etc. Horses did the same – only to be reintroduced by Hernan Cortes et al, and then mastered by the Plains Indians, about 20,000 years later.
A somewhat uneventful 440 k (275 miles), but in the morning a beautiful drive with Fall color and Tolkien-worthy views of the Cassiar Mountains. In the afternoon, freakishly it seemed, clouds and rain as we approached Teslin.
Alas the much-recommended George Johnston Museum, as if noting the change in the weather, had just closed for the season. (Johnston was an indigenous man born deep in the bush who became both the first local to own a car and for decades a photographer of local life.)
George Johnson’s taxi crew. In winter he charged for rides up and down the almost 100k of frozen Teslin Lake.
Also closed was the Teslin Tlingit (“Klinket”) Cultural Centre, a few k up the road on the shore of mighty Teslin Lake. But a friendly young man let us in, showed us a video about the revival of local indigenous traditions, and let us roam the displays – which were incredible. No indoor photos allowed, but astonishing artwork, including beadwork and carved masks and friezes mostly in birch but with copper sometimes used to dramatic effect for eyes.
An outdoor totem representing one of the 5 clans of the Teslin Tlingit
Watson Lake is perhaps best known for its sign forest. The forest reportedly began when a soldier, recovering from an injury in 1942, was asked to repair the signage in town and on the airbase. He did so, but also added one pointing to his hometown. Today there are nearly 80,000 signs in the forest. We did not bring one (nor take up the visitor center’s offer to buy a board and use their paints) but we did spot one from Dale’s family.
After that stop, we drove out to the airport to see the historic displays in the terminal. It was closed, but following the advice of the woman in the visitor’s center, we walked round the side of the building and let ourselves in. A quick hello to the guy on air traffic control (tipped back in his chair playing a video game) and off we wandered.
The airport was deemed an essential part of the defense of Canada and Alaska durng WWII. Signage explained that more than 100 buildings, paved runways with lighting, and advanced weather and radio communications equipment transformed the remote airstrip between 1939 and 1942. The terminal building itself was constructed out of logs, though the tower has been added to.
The base was an essential stop for the pilots–many of them women–ferrying planes and supplies to Russia as part of the Lend-Lease program.
WASPs (Women’s Auxiliary Service Pilots) at Watson Lake, circa 1943 – one of many historic photos on display.
This was a major staging post for supplying planes to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease program. The airport is still in regular use, though the main hangar looks dilapidated and the departure lounge has a distinctly frozen-in- time feel.
After the war the Canadian Air Force maintained the base until 1957. When they left, many of the buildings were dismantled, moved and repurposed. We stayed in the Air Force Lodge, one of the few that remains in its original shape (though closer to town). Once a barracks for the women pilots, it’s now a comfortable overnight stay.
Before heading to bed we took a gorgeous walk around Wye Lake. This is the lake that’s in town (Watson lake is out by the airport) and has a lovely trail for dogwalking and birdwatching.
The appropriately named Trout River flows out of the North end of Muncho Lake in a gorgeous broad valley – apparently it’s filled with Arctic char, grayling and of course trout. There’s an overlook at Mineral Licks, a strange erosion feature on a bluff where sheep come to lick the minerals. Again no sheep, but great views.
Not much further before an even more obligatory tourist stop at the Liard Hotsprings, where there’s a long boardwalk across a unique warm wetland, downstream from a series of rock pools at 32-36 degrees C = 90-98 F.
Absolutely beautiful facility, developed to the extent of having bathrooms and small changing rooms but otherwise still very natural and surrounded by aspen forest. We paid a few bucks to get in and another few for rented towels. Bliss.
A long drive after that, but lovely country again and we got our only sighting of Caribou – on a steep gravelly rock face – and at least five different herds of wood bison lounging enormously by the side of the road.
We passed the time listening to a very funny novel by John Straley, Cold Storage Alaska, about an ex-con returning – with his temperamentally suspect dog – to the tiny fishing town where his brother is the local doctor.
Oh, and we crossed the 60th parallel into the Yukon.
A great day, if with an unpromising start. After a diner breakfast at G&G Services we drove 10 k back down the road to the south, 10 back north and 5 back again in search of an unmarked side road supposedly leading to a trailhead. When we found it, a mile down there was a washout that was impassable even on foot. No go.
R concluding the Subaru can’t make it across
However, our Plan B was a fascinating couple of hours on part of the “old” Alcan. Context: in 1942, the steep slopes coming down to the lake were a major barrier, so the road was cut (precipitously) up and over the mountainside. Much later they blasted a rocky “bench” at lake level, which is now the road. The old road is still there, just, slowly melting into the forest. Lovely views of the lake.
R starting up the trailLake views R heading back down the steepest section towards lunchLunch
So to an even better hike in the afternoon. It’s called the Stone Sheep Trail and you are supposed to see lots of Stone’s Sheep. (Stone’s Sheep are southern thin horn sheep, like the Dall’s sheep but browner.) Didn’t see a single one. BUT the valley turned out to be amazing – a broad alluvial fan turning into a narrowing vee fringed with cliffs and with a bright, lovely stream running down it in a cascade of pools. Then, further up, an ever more alien landscape of weather-eroded hoodoos. The rock rubble included numerous fossilized algae boulders and K picked up a piece of what might be fossilized coral.
The pictures can’t capture it – that “tilted mushroom” was the size of a small office building. We had absolute silence except for falling water and a little wind, and did not see another person for the whole three hours.
Muncho Lake is about 8 miles long and as beautiful as Lake Louise – a stunning blue-green from copper sulphate that leaches from the rock.
We are staying two nights at the Northern Rockies Lodge, a throwback to the fifties and still a popular spot for those who are flown in from Vancouver for a week of world class trout fishing.
In the afternoon, soon after arriving, we rented a canoe and spent three hours paddling in the sunshine.
Our slightly depressing experience with Fort Nelson – a roadside hotel that seemed to be struggling, in a small bump-in-the-road community that showed a lot of signs of economic distress – wasn’t improved when in the late afternoon thick acrid fire-smoke rolled in and stayed all night. The hotel did have striking concrete hallways.
On the advice of the front desk clerk, we avoided the community hiking trails (bears hanging around that are overly habituated to humans) and instead walked the streets. Tried to imagine what it would be like living here year round. So very different.
We had dinner at Yammy Sushi, a small pan-Asian restaurant that was one of very few options. We were grateful not to be relying once again on “We serve typical Canadian food,” which tends to mean “Would you like the burger with fries, the fried chicken with fries, or the pizza?” But getting back to the hotel afterwards made our eyes sting and felt slightly apocalyptic.
Hence hugely relieved to head back into the mountains this morning – this is the far north end of the Rockies – and find the air clearing on a sunny day.
Speaking of food, K is making excellent salads for lunch out of a small cooler in the back of the car.
This is a hoodoo or erosion pillar we stopped at on the way:
Experimental photo through the binoculars shows the folded rock formations that characterize these mountains.
The scenery on this drive makes the hours pass so quickly. We’ve seen mountains, farmland, burn scars, forests, lakes and rivers. So many times we’ve uttered “wow” or “so beautiful.” We need new superlatives.
Longish drive, punctuated by a stop at the Fort St. John farmer’s market, a brief detour to the Kiskatinaw bridge, and the Tse’K’wa caves.
The sculptures outside the market are huge fire heaters that keep the outdoor space usable in the winter
At the farmers market we scored another garden ripe tomato (having finished the last of granny’s excellent ones), some sweet plums, and a fun conversation with a farmer and his wife about sustainability.
The Kiskatinaw bridge used to be on the Alcan, but the highways been rerouted to a new bridge further down river and the old one is now closed to vehicle traffic.
A 10k detour still took us to see it. It’s the Longest Curved-Deck Wooden Bridge in the Americas. Being dutiful tourists, we went down the gravel road to it and walked across it.
Much more interesting were the Tse’K’wa caves. This area has been used by indigenous people for about 12,000 years and lies down an unmarked road in an aspen grove.
Interesting and rather beautiful interpretative signs made from welded cast iron explain the archeological sites as well as the current usage by the Dane-zaa. Evidence of the presence of Palaeo-Indians include stone tools and animal bones. The open cave itself is small, but one can imagine how welcome this space must have been 10,000 years ago in a harsh and bitter cold climate.
Apparently two ritual burials of crows were found, one from about 10,000 years ago and one from 1,000 years earlier. Also a single drilled bead, apparently from a necklace, which they say is the oldest piece of jewelry known north of the Yucatan.
When we planned the trip, we briefly worried about road closures due to wildfires, but things looked ok. What we didn’t think about was smoke.
We’d planned to hike in Jasper, but the smoke rolled in, rendering the air thick and nasty. Dawson Creek was better, at least the first day, but smoke arrived late on our second day.
We drove to Fort Nelson yesterday through remains of old fires but with mostly clear air. Until about 5pm when the air went from just fine to visibly brown and smelly in about 20 minutes. The whole hotel smells like a campfire and the noisy in-room aircon does little to filter it.
Up super early, but hung out to wait for brekkies (not until 7am on weekends). Now heading to Muncho Lake with hopes of clearer air and some hiking there.
This is a replica of the birchbark canoe in which Sir Alexander McKenzie, eight other men and a dog crossed Canada from Montreal to Bella Coola on BC’s Pacific coast in the summer of 1793.
5,500 miles in a canoe – carrying it, no doubt, for many miles of that distance. It puts our little drive in perspective.
The Alcan was built over a hellacious 9 months in WWII as the US (and, to a lesser extent, Canada) worried about the possibility of attacks by Japanese forces and the lack of a land route connecting Alaska to the lower 48.
There were three possible routes considered; the prairie route, starting from where the railroad ended at Dawson Creek (DC) was ultimately deemed to be the best. (Note that these routes had been under consideration for 10+ years, but before the war, the US and Canada could not agree on an allocation of labor, costs, and ultimate ownership.)
Roughly 6,000 US soldiers arrived in DC to start construction from this end. Many of them were from the South and unused to the extreme cold. Men froze to death in their machines, while others died when poorly stored tnt exploded in the livery–an explosion that flattened a large part of DC’s then downtown. There was also a regiment of Black soldiers who were kept in a segregated unit and not allowed to visit town.
At the famous Mile Zero marker. Note that Fort Nelson, far to the north, also claims to be the “real” Alcan Mile Zero.
DC today is a small town with most of its money coming from oil and gas and agriculture. Taking the excellent self-guided walking tour through the old downtown, we were struck by how many empty buildings and store fronts there are, though the downtown has been made more interesting with a series of historical murals.
On the edges of town are many big box stores with lots of business.
We chatted with a librarian who said that the town is doing well. Young people can get good jobs and buy homes early. A new hospital is being built and the main campus of Northern Lights College is there too.
Our first night we had a tasty dinner at the Juice Five O Noodle Shop–grateful for a Vietnamese noodle bowl and pancit fried noodles that didn’t involve either French fries or griddle grease. Our second night we played Scrabble at the Post & Row Brewery, and enjoyed sitting outdoors in spite of the smoke.
Smokey moon-rise
Its worth mentioning the Pioneer Village museum in DC. Multiple historic buildings have been moved to a park-like site, filled with interesting and appropriate artifacts, and accompanied by detailed and informative readings.
I grew up with two iconic images of Canada. One: the mountains and turquoise waters around the Lake Louise / Jasper area (see earlier). Two: rolling fields of wheat with flocks of vast combine harvesting machines working them. Haven’t seen many of the machines – too late in the season probably. But approaching Dawson Creek, and then north of it, we are certainly in that very different country.
Not to tempt Providence or anything, but we had assumed the roads would get rougher as we went north, and so far they are astonishingly good – endless ribbons of perfect tarmac that looks as if they were laid down last week. How they are all maintained this well, in this climate, is a mystery.
En route today to Dawson Creek, the official start of the Alcan Highway. First stop was the visitor center at Grande Cache. The town is named for the caches created by early trappers to store their furs during the winter before transporting them to Hudson Bay for sale.
Interesting display of local fossils. Lots of coal in the area, massive coal power station outside of town.
Air quality getting better, aspens starting to change color.
In addition to the spectacular scenery, we’ve been enjoying wildlife sightings.
The elk are rutting now, which makes them (in the words of the staffer in Jasper’s art gallery) “scary ornery bastards.” Our closest views have been from the road, but we did encounter several on our walk around Annette Lake. We ended up being “chased” in an amusing slow-mo fashion backwards along the path for a hundred yards before the elk decided it had proved its point.
From the road we spotted a gorgeous black bear.
As well as two Stone’s Sheep (a subspecies of Dall’s Sheep found only in BC).
A quiet day because the whole area is wreathed in fire smoke. Strolled around little Annette Lake, all of which burned in 2024, and from which that should be great views of the mountains. Couldn’t see a thing. An eerie experience.
In the afternoon we wandered around town and went to the museum.
These are a few of the hundreds of temporary housing units in which a significant chunk of the city population is still living.
We are staying in the Jasper East hostel, which is much more like a hotel than the name suggests. Very small single rooms but spotlessly clean and a lovely, well equipped communal kitchen. Travelers from all over the world, including a woman on vacation from France, a woman traveling solo for a year from Vienna, and a guy helping out at the front desk from Santiago, Chile who I managed to speak to mostly in Spanish.
In the 1850s, a gold prospector in Canada got the great idea to use camels to transport equipment for mining. Unfortunately, their feet couldn’t handle the rocky terrain, and horse and mules tended to stampede at the sight of them.
After just a couple of years, the miner gave up and turned the remaining camels loose. Some speculate that these feral camels helped give rise to the legend of Bigfoot.
The icefield parkway running north from Banff and Lake Louise to Jasper is touted as one of the greatest drives in the world, and it didn’t disappoint.
The day ended on a slight down note because as we approached Jasper, and the devastation of the 2024 Jasper fire, the air started to fill with haze from current fires – fortunately far to the East of us – and the mountains gradually disappeared:
But the first 90% was fantastic, and we managed to fit in several excellent hikes along the way, including impossibly photogenic Bow and Peyto Lakes:
(Peyto Lake really is that color. The milky glacial “rock flour” in the water absorbs red but reflects blue light.)
Parks Canada is very fond of that iconic shade of Canadian red and places red chairs like these in locations around the parks. These were 1000ft up the valley across from the Athabasca Glacier:
Alas, the glacier is a shadow of its former self. But the Sunwapta River dropping through a slot canyon was pretty impressive.
It flows into the much larger Athabasca River, a picture of which gives some (a little) idea of the scale of things – though those mountains look 10 times closer and 10 times bigger in reality than in the picture:
Left Revelstoke this morning, drove the 2 1/2 spectacular hours to our hotel in Lake Louise village, grabbed a bus up to the lake, hiked 14 miles with 2,000 ft of elevation gain in some of the most spectacular scenery you can imagine, ate a good dinner with large beers, and now lying on the hotel bed half conscious.
I seem to have repeated “spectacular.”
Kerry dunking her head in a waterfall after along climb:
Not even in the big mountains yet, but the landscapes are already huge and beautiful. Great crags of pale bare rock – different already from our familiar North Cascades.
Revelstoke is a pretty ski- bum town, surrounded by impressive mountains and with lots of mature trees and pretty Victorian houses. Bad meal in a highly touted burger/pizza place, but a pleasant stay in The Grizz (think: grizzly bear), a surprisingly comfortable and inexpensive hotel.
Leaving Revelstoke for Lake Louise to the first sunlight on the glaciers:
Out the door (only 15 minutes late), quick stop at Trader Joe’s, and here we go.
R’s approach to packing was to get his act together last night, get up this morning and go for a short run. Me? I watched the USA v Australia women’s rugby game last night (really good game) and ran around like a frenetic fly this morning. Funnily enough, my fitbit clocked me with over 6,000 steps before we left the house. Good thing, as we have about 7 hours and 320 miles in the car today. And a bag of homemade almond flour chocolate chip cookies.
When we first started talking about this trip, we imagined ourselves flying up to Anchorage and getting a one way RV rental back down. Seemed like an excellent way to have an adventure while testing whether we might be van life people (or at least, RV life people). But as the time drew near, we started to realize that renting an RV comes with far more costs than just the rental. The big companies may say “$134 a day” but what they mean is $134 a day, plus an additional charge for insurance (mandatory), for mileage (mandatory), for generator use, for bedding and kitchen equipment (not mandatory, but probably desirable)and so on and so forth. Then you factor in your gas (9 mpg???) and your campsite fees ($60 if you want hookups), and suddenly the freedom to carry your home with you starts to seem a lot more expensive than just driving and staying in hotels.
Add to those complicated finances the reality of bears and mosquitos, and well, we’re driving the Subaru and staying in hotels.
It would be easier to visit Anchorage by flying up, but in between here and there is a bucket list trip. Incredible wide open spaces, huge mountains, spectacular lakes, miles of roads, quirky towns and lots of history. What’s not to like?
Kerry & Richard drive the Alcan 2025 