Travels with Gunther and Kara

Days 24 and 25 (Wednesday and Thursday July 22/23) were pretty much devoted to transiting from Fairbanks down to Alaska with a stop overnight at Willow AK right near Talkeetna.

Wednesday morning the weather was pretty clear albeit a bit cold for us as it was in the 40s. We knew that the clouds around Denali would pick up later in the day so planned our first couple of stops for views of the mountain before the visibility went to heck. Good thing we did. We headed south along AK-3 towards Willow and stopped at a couple of places where the mountain was visible and got some nice shots. Our plans included stops at the marked North and South Denali overlooks…but the weather was turning bad at the North one and completely bad by the south one so our best shots were from about 45 miles away along AK-3 near Cantwell AK and the northern viewpoint.

After arriving at the park at the end of our 147 mile drive we got setup and unhitched…then drove into the little town of Talkeetna to see the sights. Talkeetna…for those of you who’ve watched Railroad Alaska…is the little town that the whistle stop train stops at after it picks up all of the off-gridders south of the town…for them Talkeetna is the big city where they can get parts and other store bought items…for Connie and Neil it’s a small quaint little town with a very nice bar in it and a couple of tourist attractions.

Our first view of Denali today…about 60 miles away at this point and still have a few clouds in front of it…we hoped they would blow by in a little while as we got further south.

Couple of shots of the Talkeetna Mountains which are on the other side of AK-3 from the Alaskan Range which contains Denali. AK-3 runs roughly northeast to southwest and splits the plain between the two ranges.

A closer view from near Cantwell AK…about 35 miles away at this point.

What we think is the best shot of the day of Denali…maybe 33 or so mile away and about as close as we got. I am pretty sure this one was taken at the northern viewpoint…you can see the clouds starting to build around the peak at this point in the day. The southern summit is the higher of the two and the most common climbing route is from base camp which is located behind the saddle in the loser mountain right at about center frame. From there the route extends upward and southward until just about directly below the higher southern summit then up it mostly directly away from the camera position with the final approach to the summit being up and to the right on the ridge just to the left of the summit. Total distance from base camp to the summit is about 14 miles and the climb typically takes about 3 weeks with time to get acclimated to the altitude.

Denali…unlike most of the other tallest peaks in the world…is in the arctic instead of being pretty close to the equator…hence it’s weather-wise even harder to climb than Everest. Temperatures at the summit in summer average -40F…which is about the same as the temperature at Everest’s summit in the middle of winter…and the winds frequently blow to 100 knots as well. Climbers have been literally blown off the mountain by the wind. The rangers talked about whether it was the hardest mountain to climb due to the weather and said that a good training run for it would be to climb Mt. Ranier in Washington state in the middle of winter and you would have a decent warm up for Denali in the summer.

The climbing season lasts just 2 months June and July…after that the snow bridges over the crevasses in the glaciers get too soft to be safely crossed…with about 1500 climbers attempting the ascent annually; only about half of them succeed. Making it a bit easier than Everest no oxygen is necessary…but making it a bit harder than Everest is the fact that Denali is a clean climbing mountain…everything packed in must be packed out including human waste which gets put in cans carried by the climbers and flown out at the end of the season. With about 750 climbers reaching the summit in 60 days and with only probably a third of the total season having good enough weather for a summit attempt…that’s 30 or 40 climbers reaching the summit on every decent weather day…more like rush hour than mountain climbing I’m guessing.

This is the view at approximately eye magnification from the northern viewpoint…a mighty darn impressive mountain I’m tellin’ ya.

We didn’t take many photos in Talkeetna…but as seen on TV here’s the Alaska Railroad locomotive.

 Day 25 (Thursday July 23) we traveled from Willow AK to Anchorage AK…about 100 miles total. It was a pretty uneventful day…nice roads and good weather and we arrived at Golden Nugget RV shortly after 1200 and got parked in site 162. It was a bit tight getting in next to Bill and Linda’s rig…Bill and Neil were working on jacking the truck back and forth to get the rig turned into the site without hitting either the tree or the big rock when Connie (being alert to the big picture) offered us a much simpler solution. They were just trying to solve the problem while she saw the really easy solution which was to make a turn onto the next row and cut through a site across from ours. That was a much easier turn into the across the street site and allowed us to miss the tree and rock easily.

On the way we stopped by something called the Iditarod Trail Museum…apparently it commemorates some sort of dog race. Doesn’t sound nearly as interesting as say a bear race to me…but ya gotta wonder about those people. We did get a few shots and watched the movie…but mostly it was about dogs and dog sleds…go figure.

Here’s a status of the guy that invented the race.

After parking we headed out to the local greenhouse/botanical garden and Connie got some pictures.

Neil thought this was a cool cactus.

Once that was done…we came home. Bill and Neil went out hunting keys with no success then we had another wonderful dinner. Linda grilled some salmon for the three of them and some halibut for Neil since he doesn’t prefer salmon. Neil made a curry rice concoction to go along with it.

Tomorrow will be chores day for us…we need to get BAT’s oil changed and get some groceries and beer. The only scheduled caravan activity for the day is a trip in the late afternoon to the local chocolate factory (gee, I wonder if they’ll give free samples) then dinner and a show. 

Cyas.

Days 21 through 23 (Sunday July 19 to Tuesday July 21) were devoted to Denali National Park.

Sunday we drove the 128 miles from Fairbanks to Denali Park AK which is just outside the entrance to the park. Denali National Park and Preserve encompasses over 6 million acres of which 4.7 million are federally owned for the park and another 1.3 million acres in the preserve. They are located in south central Alaska and contain mostly completely undeveloped wilderness…along with the peak in the Alaskan Range Denali or as you might know it Mount McKinley. This is the highest mountain in North America at 20,237 feet high and was given it’s name in 1896 by a gold prospector in honor of the then president. Alaska and it’s citizens do not recognize this name and call it Denali…which comes from one of two Athabascan Indian words Dinale or Denali meaning “the high one” or “the great one” respectively. There are an additional 5 names for the mountain in other indigenous Alaskan languages. It’s their mountain so I’ll just stick with Denali.

In addition to being the highest peak in North America…Denali’s approximately 18,000 feet from base to peak is the largest of any mountain situated entirely above sea level. It’s also the third most prominent peak after Everest and Aconcagua in the Argentinian Andes based on topographic prominence (the vertical distance between the peak and the lowest contour line which entirely surrounds the mountain…essentially the height above the surrounding valleys). The first verified climb was in 1913 with an Alaskan native named Walter Harper being the first to reach the summit of the taller southern summit…the slightly shorter 19,470 foot northern summit is rarely climbed.

Other than the drive…which pretty much sucked as it rained during the entire pack/move/setup sequence once we got here in site 76…with our sole exception being dinner and the show at the Cabin Night review. There was a slight mixup with this as our fearless leader David thought it was just across the street and downhill from the RV park…it used to be there but moved 9 miles away a couple of years back. He quickly scrambled around and got them to send a bus to take us over and bring us back…and they even held the show until our arrival. Dinner was OK but not anything to write home about…and the show was similar to the vaudeville type shows we’ve seen a couple of times already albeit it with a history of Denali bent.

Monday July 20 was the big scheduled event for our 2 day stay here in Denali Park…we were all booked for the 8 hour 120 mile round trip shuttle into the park for wildlife viewing and Denali viewing (weather permitting). The park doesn’t allow private vehicles into the park other than the first 14 miles of the park road…after that you have to take the shuttle which (a) cuts down on the traffic and (b) undoubtedly save many lives each year as the road is narrow, dirt, and frequently perched with drop offs of 1,000+ feet just 2 or 3 feet away from the road. Connie didn’t like it much on the way out to the visitor center…and she was sitting on the inside side of the bus on the way out. She really didn’t like it on the way back when she was perched on the outside edge and frequently lost sight of the edge of the road out her window…all she could see was air and rocks far below. Add in the fact that Lee our driver spent way too much time searching for animals with his eyes not on driving and well, let’s just say she’s glad to be back down.

Okay, enough blathering on already…let’s get to the photos…captions where they seemed right. Just be glad I didn’t let Kara write this blog or ya would be learning all about tectonic movement, the Pacific and North American plates, subduction, and granitic plutons.

 A female grizzly bear…ya can tell because all the wimmen grizzlies are blondes.

A different female grizzly.

And a male grizzly…they’re mostly brown. All three of these were pretty far away with the male being probably 500 or 600 yards out…even cropped pretty close in they don’t fill the frame. 

Neil and Connie standing in front of Denali…I promise ya it’s there but unfortunately they weather didn’t cooperate. Only about 30% of the visitors to Denali National Park actually see the mountain…we’ve got 2 more days with supposedly better weather so hopefully I’ll have something for ya later. Donald is about 30 or 35 miles away right over Neil’s right shoulder and if the darned clouds weren’t there the summit would be about 1/2 way from the top of his head to the top of the frame.

Caribou…know what the difference between a caribou and a reindeer is? It’s a fence. The ones on the outside are caribou and the domesticated ones inside the fence are known as reindeer. Want to know another strange caribou/reindeer fact? Both sexes have antlers but only the female keeps them throughout the winter…males drop theirs in the fall right after the rut. Following this to it’s logical conclusion…it means that all of Santa’s reindeer are females. Following this to it’s logical conclusion…Rudolph is “faaabulous” and wears tights?

Another caribou…no telling whether it’s male or female but it’s smaller than the one above so likely the first is a bull and the second a cow. Notice how the antlers are much less mature on this second photo…and also much more similar to the antlers that Santa’s reindeer are typically depicted with. In any event…it’s likely from a different herd that lives at a lower elevation and hence grows antlers and has the rut later in the year.

Neil saw these two and was immediately reminded of the story about the meanest animal in the jungle…the wild African Duwalley.

Denali’s northern (left) and southern (right) summits. They’re there…honest. The etchings on the window show you where the peaks would be if the weather wasn’t so darned cloudy. As to the eerily similar set of outlines on the lower left that are not being pointed to by the conveniently located black arrow……those aren’t the outlines you’re looking for. You have to stand in a different place in the visitor center and be 4’6” for those to look right. There are places to stand inside the lobby of the center that are marked by your height and each has a set of outlines that outline where the summits would be if you were that height. The arrowed ones are for Neil’s 5’9” height.

This looks strangely like a glacier…but it isn’t. This is a series of valleys that serve as washes during the spring thaw…they’re filled with gravel and silt that washed down from the mountain over the millennia. For scale…this was taken at a pretty hefty zoom with Neil’s bird lens and the V-shaped wash in the middle is about 6 or 7 miles away…the gravel/silt filled legs of the V are probably 200 or 300 yards wide each. From the top of the frame to the bottom is probably 1,500 feet vertical distance.

And another female grizzly…this one still has some of her winter coat left after coming out of hibernation. As compared to the first 3 bear shots above…no zoom really necessary for this one…she’s about 30 yards in front of our bus.

Connie’s version of the shot of the same bear as above.

Another of the same specimen after she crossed the road. Why did the grizzly bear cross the road? To get to the berries of course…she’s chowing down on chokeberries and…at least according to our bus driver Lee…a bear will eat 200,000 chokeberries in a day. Of course…he also said that the entire park only has 300 or so bears. We saw 6 of them today so the odds that we saw 2% of the entire bear population in the entire 8 million acre or 12,500 square mile park during our 120 or so miles or road travel is essentially zero. I don’t know how many bears the park has in it…but then the Park Service doesn’t know either…but it’s gotta be many thousands.

And still another female…this one is probably only 2 years old max as she was much smaller than the other ones we saw. She was pretty skittish so the bus couldn’t get very close.

A view through the mountain pass of Denali…again you can’t actually see the mountain but the first shot with Neil and Connie was looking pretty much due south and this one was taken a couple hours later and 40 miles to the east so it’s looking pretty much due west. Still no mountain though…although Denali rises in the background about halfway from the top of the snow capped peaks you can see to the top of the frame.

A slightly closer up view of the same peak/pass as above but a couple miles later on the road so the view here is more southwest than west.

The view from the road at the top of one of those steep cliffs that Connie was skeered of. It’s a long way down, ain’t it.

Looking at one of those cliffs from the side…this was one of the less steep ones. The road is just visible at the top of this drop-off…the road was literally blasted out of the side of the mountain. It’s like 2 feet from the road to the cliff and although it doesn’t look like it in the photo you would not be able to climb down this even on hands and knees…and it’s probably over 1,000 feet to the bottom.

These on the other hand…are glaciers on the flanks of Denali…both of them are probably a mile wide and 300 feet thick at the lower edge.

Since we missed seeing Denali Neil checked with the RV park desk and the guy in there said that driving 11 miles into the park would get us to a nice viewpoint assuming the weather cooperated…which it was supposed to on Tuesday. With that in mind…he said to get up early in the morning and look over the mountains across the road to the west and if we could see blue sky down to the tops of the mountains the Denali viewpoint should be clear as well…but to go earlier in the day vice later. He also gave us a couple of places we’ll stop by and look at on the way down to Talkeetna AK tomorrow…again assuming the weather cooperates as it’s currently forecast to do.

So…Day 21 (Tuesday July 21) we got up about 0600 and took a look…blue sky abounded to the west so we grabbed a cup of coffee and a couple of granola bars, our cameras, and headed out. Driving into the park the weather was in the high 30s so we bundled up a bit and drove westward on a beautiful early morning day. Sure enough…11 miles in we got to the viewpoint and discovered this wonderful sight. The first shot is zoomed in a bit to show you the details and the second one was taken with Connie’s “normal” lens so it’s essentially the same field of view and magnification as the naked eye. Denali…in case you’re not sure…is the snow capped mountain in the distance and it is 73 miles from the point where we were standing. Pretty impressive that you can see as much detail as this from that distance.

A few more shots from our morning…some of Denali plus others.

A pano shot of the entire tundra area we were overlooking for the above shots…about 150 degrees field of view in this shot and Denali is at right center. This pano doesn’t do the actual “with the eyeball” view justice because of the extremely wide field of view, to the naked eye the second shot above is pretty much the way it looked…pretty magnificent.

The view from the Savage Creek parking lot…this is as far as personal vehicles can go at 15 miles into the park. Yesterday we went an additional 48 to the Eielson Visitor Center on the shuttle before turning around…and there are an additional two tours that go past Eielson to Wonder Lake and Kantishna Lodge…our trip was 8 hours to Eielson but the latter two are 11 and 13 hours respectively…and you have to carry all your food and water with you as the only services provided are pit toilets every hour and a half or so. Savage Creek is the water in this shot and it runs left to right (westward). The shuttle crosses a bridge just to the right and out of view in this shot then climbs over the ridge at the top right then continues westward towards Eielson and beyond.

Climbing down from the Savage Creek to get a shot downstream from the gravel bed.

A couple of what Connie called artsy-fartsy shots…she wanted to capture the sun flare coming from behind the rocks (these were taken 180 degrees from the Savage Creek shot 2 photos back). Her original shots were way underexposed (naturally) due to looking into the sun with the camera but since they were shot in RAW mode instead of jpg mode on the camera he was able to duplicate the image, adjust the exposure in one to get the rocks to have a little detail, then layered them together in Photoshop for the finished shot. The first one has better lens flare but the second one has better composition since it doesn’t have the parking lot and cars in it.

Savage Creek looking upstream.

The Nanana River which runs on the park boundary and is about a half mile from the campground…in this shot if Neil had rotated the camera about 30 degrees to the right you could see the hotel/tourist trap district here in Denali Village.

Here’s the Grande Denali Lodge and Hotel…Connie rotated the said 30 degrees to the right from the above area and got this one. The RV park is just out of sight to the lower left in this shot…we’re walking over to the tourist trap area in a bit and we’ll get some shots of it and our site in the park and add them before I post this.

Ok, 2 more Denali shots for ya before I stop for today…since we actually saw the mountain the second photo is justified. As you recall from above here are Connie and Neil standing on the patio at Eielson Visitor Center.

Here’s a photo taken in 2010 by our friends Bill and Linda from pretty much the identical spot…except it was clear the day they were there. From here Denail is 33 miles away…and I was careful to pick a shot with about the same field of view as the one of Neil and Connie.

 As promised…here are the campground and tourist area shots…they’re iPhone shots though as Neil was too lazy to carry the camera back down there when we went on our walk.

Our site 76…a little cramped when there are rigs parked next door but not the most cramped we’ve ever been in or even the most cramped we’ve been in on the Alaska trip…that would be Pioneer RV in Whitehorse YT so far where we had to park nose to tail with the adjacent rigs for access to the utility connections…and we also needed to make sure that our sides wouldn’t conflict when they were extended. We do have woods behind us…but both the site and the roads are gravel and full of pothole but then this _is_ Alaska so such things are to be expected. It’s not what you would call an “it factor” campground by any means…but again this is Alaska and mostly the RV park is a place to park.

The RV park entrance between the two halves of the shopping/tourist trap area. Neil tried to get Connie to do the whole Vanna White thing and wave her hand at it…but she’s a party pooper so declined (to be fully honest though she did wave but Neil wasn’t able to get the phone up fast enough to catch it and she said “you snooze, you lose” when he told her to do it again).

The tourist area in front of the RV park. Denali Park consists of a single row of hotels, restaurants, gift shops and the like about a block deep on each side of the highway (AK-3) and extending for about 3/4 of a mile tops. We did walk over to the Prospector Pizzeria and Ale House for dinner last night with Bill and Linda…all was good. MacNCheese for Connie and Cheddar Ale soup and an Elk Meatball Sandwich for Neil…both with leftovers we had for lunch today. Brews were McKinley Stout then a Chiula Stout for Neil (first was more chocolate with hints of coffee and the second was the other way around…both were good but theMcKinley was superior)…and Dolly Varden Nut Brown Ale and a Smoked Porter for Connie, the porter was smokey but was more like a brown ale in color rather than a porter which is typically very dark like a stout and thick.

Tomorrow we’re off to Willow AK which is about 150 miles south then after parking we’re carpooling 22 miles back northward to visit Talkeetna AK…which for those of you who watched the Railroad Alaska TV show on Destination America (a Discovery channel) is a prime spot seen in the show. Then Thursday we’ll be off to Anchorage.

That’s it for now…hopefully we’ll get some more Denali photos on the way south tomorrow as the forecast has changed and is supposed to be great.

Cyas.

Day 19 (Friday July 17) was one of the days we were especially looking forward to…our visit to Gates of the Arctic National Park and Anaktuvuk Pass up at the north end of the Brooks Range of mountains here in Alaska.

Our schedule was to catch a flight on a twin engine Piper 8 passenger aircraft out of Fairbanks Airport, fly north to Anaktuvuk Pass…a small native settlement…for lunch and a tour of how the native people live then return to Fairbanks about dinnertime.

Things started off pretty well with takeoff from Fairbanks with our pilot John…who it turned out worked for a different part of the Warbelos Arctic Tours company and had only flown into Anaktuvuk Pass by himself once before our flight…I’m sure he flew there while getting approved by his company to fly there but Connie thought it was pretty grim when he pulled out his map…although he was actually checking frequencies and such and not trying to navigate…he was using GPS and Visual Flight Rules (VFR)  for that part…which meant that you watch out the windows to keep from hitting other aircraft or mountains instead of relying on the air traffic control system to route you.

We got some nice photos on the way up and John tried to stay low enough to fly through the pass in the Brooks Range…when we got to the close part he kept circling lower and lower looking for a way through that we could see. Eventually we got to about 500 feet above the ground and looking through the pass it looked like even less than that of clear air…under VFR you don’t want to fly into the clouds and if we switched to Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) we would be much higher. Eventually he gave up…Neil was about to ask him if he really wanted to fly through there…and we started climbing as we headed south away from the mountains. We checked in with the air traffic control folks and got cleared to 10,000 feet which is well above the mountain heights for a direct route to Anaktuvuk Pass. Once north of the range we looked around and eventually found a way to get below the clouds into the valley at the village and after a quick approach we touched down on the gravel runway at Anaktuvuk Pass.

Our plane for the day.

Aerial view.

The Yukon River.

Our pilot John hunting for a way through the clouds and mountains.

First view of Anaktuvuk Pass once we got below the clouds and into the valley.

So…Anaktuvuk Pass…what is it. It’s a village/city with a population of just over 300 people…almost all of which are native Alaskan people…these are members (mostly) of the Nunamuit tribe of Indians…very similar to the Innuit or Eskimo people that live over in the coastal areas but the Nunamuit live inland. The Nunamuit were nomadic people back before contact with non native people and followed the caribou herds as they migrated. Anaktuvuk Pass comes from a Nunamuit word that roughly translates to “Place with Caribou Poop”. The climate ranges from -40F or -50F in the middle of winter up to mid summer highs of the mid 50s. Most of the native people living in the village work for the native people corporation that manages the resources of the area owned by the tribe…most of the public land in Alaska including the mineral rights is owned by the various native people tribes. We met several natives…our guide Francis Hugo and also Ben who is probably 70 years old and sort of a local celebrity.

The runway at Anaktuvuk Pass airport.

Overlooking town.

Our guide Francis.

The medical clinic.

Main Street…USA.

After a tour around the village to see some of the buildings…at this point almost all of the inhabitants live in government constructed 1 or 2 story houses and within the past few years all have running water, sewer connections, and electricity…we hopped onto an Argo ATV…an 8 wheeled waterproof sort of vehicle that is optimized for travel both on wet, mushy tundra as well as the many muddy roads and areas that the natives travel to…for a trip out into the tundra. We went with Ben who looked for some bears to show us but the local grizzly was nowhere to be found…so we checked out their cemetery and went a mile or so out into the tundra for a walk around. We discovered that tundra is quite spongy in nature…sort of like walking on a very firm mattress but with sticks and rocks mixed into it so it’s not smooth at all. Very strange feeling.

The mountains surrounding the village.

Riding the Arto.

Lichens on the tundra…these are about a half inch in diameter.

Neil walking around…by this time it was raining pretty steadily and the wind was blowing about 30 knots…mighty darn chilly for July I’m tellin’ ya.

Francis at the post office.

Heading back home to Fairbanks…we had to make a brief unscheduled fuel stop. John had burned too much looking for a way through the mountains so as to give us better views so although we could have gotten home he wasn’t happy with the amount of fuel we would have had left. So…we stopped about 1/3 of the way back at a smaller village named Bettles for some fuel then continued our journey home…luckily the weather had gotten much better and we were able to remain under the cloud cover and VFR all the way back to Fairbanks…in fact the weather got pretty nice the last 80 miles or so.

The John River valley…this is the river that runs through Anaktuvuk Pass southwards and we were able to follow it all the way to Bettles.

The Bettles Lodge.

The Yukon River bridge on the Dalton Highway between Fairbanks and the town of Deadhorse up at Prudhoe bay on the North Slope where the oil fields are. This is the fourth vehicle capable bridge over the 2000 mile length of the Yukon and the only one we didn’t get to drive over…the other three as well as both pedestrian bridges were featured in earlier posts.

Day 20 (Saturday July 18) was devoted to two major activities…a visit to Santa Claus’s house in North Pole AK and a trip out to Dredge #8 which mined Alaska gold up until the 1950s.

Here’s where the jolly old gentlemen lives…110 Saint Nicholas Lane, North Pole, AK.

He’s even got a large statue of himself erected in the back yard to help guide Rudolf and the team home after delivering presents on Christmas. Connie’s standing next to it in the lower right to give you a sense of scale.

We went inside his workshop…and there might be some stuff that we picked up…but you’ll have to wait until later on in the year to find out.

After the trip over to Santa’s house we came home and had lunch…then left for our tour of the Dredge #8 and some gold panning to see if we could strike it rich. On the way we stopped by the Alaska Pipeline over look and got a nice shot so I can ‘splain to you how it works.

Over it’s 800+ mile length the pipe is constructed either above ground or as a standard buried pipeline…the difference being that in areas that are melt stable…which means that they remain stable geologically whether frozen in the winter or thawed in the summer… the pipe is buried. In areas that are not melt stable…essentially permafrost areas that turn into mud bogs when they thaw…the pipe is constructed above ground with some ingenious mounting hardware.

In these areas the pipe is supported about every 40 feet on pairs of hollow pipes driven about 30 feet deep into the permafrost. Between each pair a beam is installed and the pipeline is mounted on the swear black piece you see in the above photo so that it can slide back and forth a little for thermal expansion and in the event of earthquakes. To help keep the permafrost frozen (since it isn’t melt stable) the vertical pipes are hollow and have an antifreeze type liquid circulating within them…the gray things on top are radiators which help transfer cold from the outside air to through the circulating antifreeze to help maintain the ground frozen. This ensures a stable platform for the pipeline which is carrying heated oil while keeping the ground frozen.

The pipeline carried about 16 billion barrels total of crude oil between 1979 when it became operational and 2010. The flow has slacked off a bit since 2010 and oil now takes about 16 days to travel the entire length of the pipeline down to Valdez for trans-shipment on tankers. With an estimated 40 billion barrels remaining in the North Slope oil fields…the pipeline won’t reach it’s end of life anytime soon. The pipeline cost $8 billion when it was finished in the late 1970s.

Continuing on to the dredge site we did our tour in a pretty much constant rain. We had a nice train ride…well, as nice as it could be in the rain…looking at some of the old equipment then got to the dredge itself.

This is Earl…he entertained us on both guitar and fiddle on the train ride and was quite a character with lots of stories to tell. After 20 years of being in the band for Don Ho and Johnny Cash he came up here and went to work for the tourism industry

Here’s the dredge itself…with some explanation after the photo.

So…how does this thing work? It’s a multi year process actually…first the land owners went around and took thousands of core samples to determine where the gold bearing gravel was and how deep it was found. Once that was finished the dredge company planned where to start the dredge. Next…all of the dirt overburden was stripped off down to the gravel layer…essentially using high pressure water cannons to wash it away. Once that was complete the permafrost was thawed and by the time that was completed 3-5 years had passed.

Next…a large pit was dug at the beginning of a dredge area and the dredge…which was built in Pennsylvania and then shipped via rail to San Francisco then north on a ship to Seward then again via rail to it’s final location where it was assembled in the pit. Finally the pit was flooded and the dredge started it’s work.

Starting from the left side of the photo…the dig arm is essentially a giant chain saw that rotates clockwise as you’re looking at it…only instead of teeth it’s bot buckets that dig into the gravel and bring about 6 cubic feet of gold bearing gravel per bucket. The dig arm speed was about 22 buckets per minute and ground to gravel into the upper level of the dredge.

Once there…it was dumped into a trommel which is a long rotating pipe about 8 feet around and 50 feet long, it’s also angled down about 2 inches per foot from left to right. The gold bearing gravel is dumped into the trommel which rotates slowly and works the large rocks down to the aft/low end…washing it down with water the whole way. The cleaned large rocks are expelled from the trommel at the right end of the barge then dumped out on the tailings conveyor that you can see rising behind the trees on the right side of the photo.

As the trommel rotates the finer gravel along with it’s gold falls through holes in the trommel that are a couple inches around onto another conveyor. It’s then fed into a series of sluice boxes which are angled troughs with a fibrous rug like material on the bottom. Gold…being much heavier than either water or rock…falls into the material while the gravel and dirt continues out the end of the sluice box.

Every 2 weeks the dredge was shut down and the material removed from the sluice boxes…it was then washed to remove the gold and fine dirt which was then again washed to remove the final dirt using an angled vibrating table…this dredge usually pulled about 4000 ounces of gold each two weeks. The dredge master swung the dig arm back and forth and also moved the dredge forward or sideways as necessary to essentially chew through the gold bearing gravel strata that was originally found using the core surveys.

Here’s a shot of Connie panning for gold and also our take…we each got a poke (small sack) of pay dirt to pan and we ended up with about $19 worth of gold flakes by the time we were done.

Pretty cool huh…although it seems like a hard way to make a living to me.

With that our day was ended so we headed first off to Mass at the cathedral in Fairbanks and then home for taco nachos with Bill and Linda. While we were looking at the bulletin in the cathedral…we noticed the following advertisement on the back page.

This Villa is only about 5 miles from Seminole Campground where we winter over down in North Fort Myers…we thought it was funny that we came 7000 miles to Alaska and found an add for a retirement center that close to us.

We’ve now completed 1/3 of our Alaskan adventure…tomorrow we’re off to Denali National Park where we just might be able to see Denali…or Mount McKinley as it was renamed to the dismay of the Alaskan citizens…but with the weather forecast we’re doubting it. We’ll be in Denali 2 days and have only about a 30% chance of seeing the mountain on any given day…maybe it will b e nice enough at least 1 day that we can get some shots of the mountain itself.

Cyas.

Day 16 (Tuesday July 14) our scheduled activity for the day was a ride on the riverboat Discovery III…which Connie thought was cool and Neil thought was way, way over the top. It’s like Disneyworld of the North with the exception of not having any animatronic puppets. Our three hour tour consisted of an hour boat ride maybe 2 miles downriver with a couple of stops at places where we  happened to be just in time for a sled dog demonstration by the family of the late Susan Butcher (who won the Iditarod race several times)  and a native Athabasca Indian who just happened to be filleting a freshly caught chum salmon.

After the short ride we stopped at the Indian village for several other pretty contrived demonstrations along with about a thousand of our closest friends from the boat…then had a short ride back to the dock. We had many opportunities to spend more money at this attraction…buy their book, buy their canned salmon (at $13 bucks for a can the size of a tuna can), have dinner at their dining hall, etc.

It was way, way over the top…but Connie liked it so I guess it was OK.

A few photos we got today.

A float plane landing sequence…again, this friend of the captain just happened to be landing nearby just as we left the dock.

After a short conversation between the boat captain and the plane pilot…along with video over the boat television system the plane took off and headed home.

A couple of multi-million dollar homes right alongside the river…most are fairly recently built on land the family has owned for several generations.

Our impromptu sled dog demonstration including some puppies, the dogs pulling an engineless ATV, and a post run swim by the dogs.

Some shots from the Athabasca Indian village.

Village hut…these were lived in full time.

Birchbark canoe.

Women’s winter parka…caribou skin with ermine around the face/hood, beaver at the cuffs, and wolverine decorations.

Fish wheel…used to catch salmon on rivers upstream…nearer to the ocean nets are used. The wheel faces downstream and is turned by the current scooping fish out of the water then gravity dumps them into a catch bin.

Salmon drying in the smokehouse.

Trappers hut…these were built about a day apart on the hunter’s trapline for winter overnighting…thus allowing a trapper to cover a larger area and still have a safe/warm place to spend the night or shelter from unexpected storms.

Sled dogs in the yard.

That was it for day 16…we came home and then ran over to the army base commissary for some groceries in the afternoon. Dinner was pot pies at home…Linda was making smoked salmon soup…and since Neil doesn’t care for salmon we each did dinner on our own today.

Day 17 (Wednesday July 15) we took a trip to the Botanical Gardens and the Alaska History Museum at the University of Alaska Campus.

A really huge cabbage…over 3 feet across the leaves and a basketball sized veggie in the middle.

Flower photos by Connie.

The master at work.

We moved over to the museum which was actually pretty cool…although we did pass on the art gallery museum upstairs and stuck with just the history portion.

Mastodon fossil.

Polar Bear.

This is Otto. He’s a coastal brown bear taken in 1950. 8’9” tall and weighs 1250 pounds. Interesting bear fact…brown bears, grizzly bears, and coastal brown bears are all actually the same bear…species is Ursos Arctos. They vary enough in range, characteristics and color to be classified as sub-species but are genetically the same. He’s a lot taller than Connie is even though he’s standing on a platform about 14 inches high…mostly bears stand up to get a better look at things as they have poor eyesight.

After an hour or so at the museum we came home. Neil grilled some Italian marinated chicken breasts and onions and Linda brought over some buns, tomatoes and tortilla chips and we had grilled chicken sandwiches for dinner…followed by an ice cream dessert social over by the river for which Riverview RV Park is named.

Day 18 (Thursday July 18) was a work day for us…Connie did a little work for NVCC and Neil did laundry and a couple minor repair jobs around the house…the only scheduled event for the day is dinner and a show over at the Pioneer Village 

Tomorrow Day 19 we’re off to Gates of the Arctic National Park and Anaktuvuk Pass for a visit…it’s about a 90 minute flight north of Fairbanks and will make for a long day. After that we’re headed over to the northernmost Elks Lodge for dinner and a brew…maybe they’ll give us an award for coming just about the absolutely farthest you can to to get to an Elks Lodge…there are a couple down in the Florida Keys that are actually a couple hundred miles farther but it’s pretty close to the farthest…that’s my story and I’ma sticking to it I tell ya.

Cyas.

Days 13 through 15 (July 11-13) were strictly travel days…so not really that much to report although we did have a couple of scheduled activities.

Day 13 we traveled from Destruction Bay YT to Beaver Creek YT about 30 miles from the international border.

Day 14 we traveled to Tok AK after crossing the border and then had a scheduled visit for a talk by a guy that drove in the first Iditarod Sled Dog Race back in the 1970s and a visit to a gold shop where we got to hold a 57.something ounce gold nugget. The owner’s husband was prospecting up in the 40 Mile River area in Alaska about 40 years ago and they were stripping off some overburden…overburden is the non gold bearing dirt that sits on top of the gold bearing gravel underneath and is typically stripped off late in each summer mining period up here in the north. That way the permafrost containing the gold bearing gravel will melt in the spring and hence be mineable next year. Anyway…while stripping the overburden off some mining operations go ahead and run it through their sluice box (the part that separates the gold flakes from the gravel) since the plant is running anyway. So he ran the overburden through and found the nugget we got to hold in the top six inches of dirt that was removed. While not the largest nugget ever found by any means…it is worth about $65K or so based on it’s weight and the price of gold but as a large nugget is worth more…the owner has been offered a quarter million dollars for it but says she’s going to will it to a museum on gold mining here in Alaska.

Day 15 (Monday July 13) we traveled from Tok AK to North Pole AK…which is about 13 miles east of Fairbanks and we’ll be here until we leave for Denali National Park on Sunday.

So…on the the pictures we got during our three travel days…along with a couple more words later on when I get to the sled dog and gold nugget on Day 14.

A shot and pano of the Tanana River which parallels the highway for miles. This river doesn’t have a very well defined channel for most of it’s length…but is what is known as a braided river for the many seasonal paths it takes with sandbars and gravel bars moving almost weekly.

A couple of lake reflection shots.

The Catholic church in Beaver Creek YT…we missed Mass as it only has services every third week and this wasn’t it.

Wildflowers.

Day 14 (Tuesday July 12) we traveled to Tok AK and changed our clocks back to Alaska time for almost the next month. 

A cache at the Tallin NWR. Caches are used to protect food from both the weather and bears up in the north.

The visitor center at Tallin…one of the chores you have at this NWR is to mow the roof. The sod actually serves as insulation for the roof of the building.

The obligatory “we were there” shots at the Alaska border. Our friends Bill and Linda Napier are on the left side…they’re the ones with the New Horizons with the suspiciously similar paint job to our home.

A couple of shots of the border itself…the first is where the line passes through the parking lot next to the sign and the second shows the cleared (by the International Boundary Commission) but un-fenced and un-patrolled border. The cleared section goes completely across the border from the Arctic Ocean to the south…you can see it faintly on the far ridge…it’s the little notch in the tree line just between the top point and left side of the marker.

A swallow nest at the Tallin NWR visitor center…complete with swallow.

The far dog sled was used in the first Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. This race happens in early March each year from Anchorage  AK to Nome AK and commemorates a high speed dog sled run between the same places in 1925. A diphtheria epidemic had broken out in Nome and native children had no immunity. The nearest supply of vaccine was in Anchorage and no planes were available to deliver it…so it was  put on a train up to Nenana and then passed on to the first of 20 mushers who delivered it the last 674 miles to Nome in five and a half days. Each musher can start with a maximum of 16 dogs and must finish with at least 5…no replacements are allowed…and each must visit various checkpoints where both musher and dogs are checked for health and supplies before being allowed to continue. Racers set off from Anchorage at 2 minute intervals and total elapsed time on the trail between checkpoints is used to determine the winner…the race record is a bit over 8 days and 13 hours.

Dog teams are composed of the leader, two wheel dogs at the front of the sled and various pairs of dogs in between them. Mushers typically have several dogs that are capable of being the leader and rotate them through the day depending on what characteristic the lead dog needs at the moment…good at running in a blizzard, good at finding faint trails, or good at setting a fast pace.

Our talk was given by the musher who drove the far sled in the first race.

Three sled dog puppies…they’re for sale, and only $500 each.

Sign on the gift shop next to the sled dog demonstration.

Connie holding the ginormous nugget and then a closeup of the nugget itself. It’s gold which is pretty heavy…this nugget weighs almost 4 pounds.

Day 15 we set off from Tok AK to North Pole AK right outside of Fairbanks.

We did see…finally…a couple of moose on the last leg of the trip but both were while we were at speed on the road with no place to pull off…and both cows were hightailing it for the woods anyway so no photos were possible.

On arrival at North Pole…we were ready to sit for a few days…arriving on Monday about noon with departure not until Sunday. Neil helped Bill troubleshoot and achieve temporary repairs on his door latch until the replacement parts arrive in Anchorage at our stop there mid next week. After that Neil asked Bill to help him figure out why our basement doors were not shutting properly…Bill’s response was “You need to water your doors.”

Turns out that he was exactly correct. Most RV doors are made by the Challenger Door Company and the hinges are essentially 2 long C shaped tubes. One is fixed to the side of the rig and the second to the door with the 2 C shaped cross sections mating and one slides inside the other. The problem is that the fixed tube on the rear basement door actually faces forward…and with all the dusty roads in the Yukon it just gets filled up with this almost talcum powder fine dust which prevents the one on the door from sliding inside it. Sure enough…Neil got out his skinny/flexible water heater cleanup wand, attached it to a hose and rinsed the intersection area of the tubes while wiggling the doors up and down…and voilà the problem is solved. The basement door now works again…so he went ahead and rinsed out the hinge areas of all our outside doors. We’ll probably have to do that again once we get down out of the dusty road conditions I guess.

I’ll post again later this week…we have some scheduled activities in the Fairbanks area the next couple of days…then on Friday we are off for an optional part of the trip…a flight up to Gates of the Arctic National Park and Anaktuvuk Pass about 150 miles north of here.

Fairbanks is the farthest north that we’ll take the rig…from here we head south about 300 miles to Anchorage then meander eastward along the SE coast through Homer, Seward, and Valdez before heading back up to Tok again in a couple of weeks…then northwards to Chicken AK (albeit it not quite as far north as Fairbanks is). After that it’s slightly south of East to Dawson City YT then southwards through Whitehorse again (we saw a weather vane there at the airport made out of an entire DC-3 airplane…gotta go back by and get a shot of that for ya…then southwards through YT and BC with a trip back into the far south part of Alaska at Hyder before the trip ends in Prince George.

Cyas.

Day 11 (Thursday July 9) was reserved for our all day boat, bus, and walking tour of Juneau, the capital of Alaska. We boarded our boat…the Fiordland…which is a 70 or so foot high speed catamaran excursion vessel and set off on our 75 mile boat trip leg…arriving at the dock about 20 miles north of Juneau in just a bit over 2.5 hours…we averaged about 28 or 29 mph for the trip even including a half dozen stops to see stuff. The boat served muffins with juice, coffee or tea as well as apples to keep us going.

Along the way down the Chilkoot Inlet we viewed a number of glaciers, mountains and various wildlife. Suffice it to say that the views were pretty excellent…a nice calm day but there was a bit of cloud cover drifting around the peaks so you had to get photos when you were able and a lot of them ended up with what Neil calls mood photos.

Anyway…on to the views for the boat trip.

This eagle was sitting right outside the boat harbor where we boarded the boat so we grabbed a few photos of it.

A couple of miles down the Inlet we spotted another eagle and then a group of sea lions resting on a rock ledge.

A mother nursing her pup.

This group came over to the boat…they thought we were gonna feed ‘em I guess.

Some of the many glaciers and waterfalls we passed on the trip.

Another eagle and a restored 1930s era fisherman that is now a yacht…both of these were right as we got to the dock to get off the boat.

We debarked the boat and boarded our bus for a 20 mile ride to Juneau…our driver talked about some of the sights on the way nut it was mostly just a bus ride. Once downtown we had lunch at a place called TheHanger…crab sandwich for Connie and a halibut sandwich for Neil/Bill/Linda along with some Alaskan Red Ale. After lunch we got back on the bus and headed for the Mendenhall Glacier which is about 5 miles from downtown…got some very nice photos of both the glacier itself and Nugget Falls which is about a 30 minute walk from the visitor center at the glacier…we only had an hour so had to settle for distant pictures of the falls rather than closeups…you an see some folks standing at the base of the falls so have a little sense of the scale of it.

A duck we spotted on the way back from the glacier overlook.

Hopping back on the bus…we arrived at a different seaport and rebounded our boat for the 2.5 hour trip home…although actually it was a little longer than that since we boarded closer to Juneau than we got off. Along the way we spotted more glaciers and wonderful views.

A couple of the lighthouses helping mariners navigate the Inlet.

A brief and far away glimpse of a humpback whale…this is a mother feeding a calf which sounded before we got this shot. She’s swimming away from us and a little to the right and is displaying the humped back just before they sound (dive deep to feed) that gave the whale it’s name. The mother is almost exclusively eating and nursing her calf at this point in it’s life…it’s gaining about 8 pounds an hour so growing pretty quickly. 

Another of the many glaciers…the water in the fjord is as much as 2,400 feet deep and the fjord is about 5 or 6 miles wide at this point..

Arriving back home we were full from the fish chowder and cookies served on board so we just skipped dinner and got ready for day 12’s travel period.

Day 12 (Friday July 10) we had breakfast and coffee then got hitched and hit the road for our 200 mile drive back into Canada to Destruction Bay YT where we’ll overnight. Reentry into Canada was pretty easy this time at customs…probably a 2 minute stop and we were on our way. After a long grade back up out of the sea level Haines AK area to the top of the plateau at the north end of all the glacially carved fingers of steep mountains in between the inlets here we pretty much had a very nice drive to Destruction Bay which is on Lake Kluane in the Yukon.

The only decent photos we got on the way were of this big ol’ grizzly bear right on the side of the road…we pulled over and got these from inside the car as he was only about 10 yards away at the time. It was eating the fireweed flowers…the little purple ones you can see…but kept eyeing us like he was reconsidering his breakfast choice and might like to have us instead.

We briefly spotted a black bear a couple miles later but it was gone before we could get a shot.

Arriving at Destruction Bay…we got situated in site 20, a nice pull through level site…but we only have 15 amp power here so we’re almost boondocking. There’s water at the site as well and no sewer…but we put water in our tank yesterday so Neil didn’t bother hooking water up at all. Here’s a few shots of our view…note how clear the water is in the last one.

That’s it…we’ll just laze around for the evening with a campfire and then head off to Beaver Creek YT tomorrow…only 100 miles so it should be an easy day.

Cyas.

Day 9 (Tuesday 7 Jul) of our caravan was our transit day from Whitehorse YT over to Haines AK…about 250 miles total but about 150 of those were south. We went west in YT until we got to Haines Junction…named for it being the junction of the Haines Highway and the AlCan. Over to Haines Junction the road got a bit bumpy…lots of frost heaves and construction areas and the scenery was just so so. However…once we turned south the 150 miles through YT, a bit of very northwest BC, and AK the scenery was the most spectacular we’ve seen so far. Too bad it wasn’t a bright sunny day…it was fantastic even in mostly cloudy conditions but would have been even better under clear.

On the way over we got an alarm on one of our rig ABS brake sensors…it said it was disconnected. Once we arrived in Haines and got set up in Site 17 at the Haines Hitch-up RV Park Neil put on his coveralls and jumped underneath with Bill. Cleaned the contacts in the sensor cable connector and popped it back together…it says it’s fixed now but we’ll see later on I guess.

Tonight Neil is making shish-kebabs on the grill for dinner…Bill and Linda are coming over in a bit. Tomorrow (day 10) is a free day in Haines and Connie will be picking out some Fun Stuff™ for us to do.Thursday (day 11) we take the ferry down to Juneau for whale watching, glacier watching I think, and orca watching maybe…followed by some time spent in Juneau for the afternoon then we get back on the ferry to come home…so Thursday will be a long day.

OK, on to the pictures.

First a few catchup ones…these are actually from day 8 but if I go back and edit that post anybody that’s already read it won’t see the new photos.

Yesterday we wandered around Whitehorse a little more and got a few nice shots for ya’.

We kept hearing and seeing float planes overhead at Pioneer RV…so we looked around and just down the road from Miles Canyon where we visited the other day look what we found.

A plane at a privately owned dock.

The float plane airport.

The runway at the base.

And the runway decorations.

Afterward we went out to eat with Bill and Linda at the Klondike Restaurant downtown…had some great food and Yukon Red Ale on draft. On the way home we spotted an eagle flying and then landing in a nest right near the road…so we stopped by and got a few photos. There was at least 1 eaglet and both mom and dad brought home a seagull for the family to feast on.

The other adult flew off with it’s catch and the eaglet was down in the nest…so you’ll have to settle for shots of (I think) the female ripping the gull apart.

On to today’s photos. First stop was the Canyon Bridge overlook where we got some shots of one of the few original bridges from the pioneer road that became the AlCan. It’s still in sort of serviceable condition at least for walking across at your own risk. 

Some  wildflowers near the bridge.

We spotted this little guy alongside the road and Neil got a few shots…he was eating flowers like they were on sale.

Kluane Lake and the Kluane Mountains behind it.

This pretty sheer and vertical rock wall was just a couple hundred yards from the road and probably 2,000 feet higher than the road elevation.

Pano shot of the Kluane Mountains.

More Kluane Mountains

A shot of the Saksaia Glacier that we spotted once we came across the border back into the US. Three photos so as to give you both a view of how it looks from the roadside and then zooming in for a closer look.

Overall…day 9 was the best so far…still not too much wildlife but the scenery today was outstanding. Once we turned south at Haines Junction you could literally see for miles in pretty much any direction and all you could see was mountains, rivers, and valleys…very little sign of civilization and very few cars. They did take our eggs away on reentry into the US though…they’re worried about bird flu so any eggs from Ontario get confiscated:-(. We’ll have to buy some more tomorrow and we’ll hard boil whatever is left before leaving Friday as they don’t care about cooked eggs.

Day 10 (Wed 8 July) was devoted to stuff around Haines and errands. After breakfast and coffee we set off for the half mile walk down to town from the campground and then did the walking tour around historic Fort Seward…just don’t ask me what’s historic about it other than being old. It’s your basic frontier army post…not any sort of fort like down in the old west where they had to defend against Indian attacks but more of a non-enclosed base type arrangement. We got some good photos of both the port area and the Fort during our walk about.

Haines sits at the north end of the Chilkoot Inlet…more of a fjord really…about 80 miles upstream from the Pacific Ocean. Just past Haines heading inland the Inlet splits and the right fork goes up to Skagway while the left fork becomes the Lutak Inlet for 7 or 8 miles with a short stream up to Chilkoot Lake. Haines is about 5 miles as the crow files due east to the BC border but it’s about 40 miles northwest to the road border crossing…that’s the only way in or out of here by land. There’s also a road to Skagway AK which is about 10 miles north as the crow files but there are no roads between Skagway and Haines due to the mountains in between…although there is a ferry but I don’t know if it’s a people only ferry or if cars and/or RVs can travel on it.

A shot from the campground itself…pretty nice back yard, eh?

A gold mining drill. Used back in the day to figure out where to dig the pit mine for gold…worked by being picked up and dropped repeatedly to fill a hollow pipe with a core sample…analysis of the core told you that the gold bearing rock was 30 feet down or whatever and estimate how many ounces of gold you would get per cubic yard of dirt.. Once that was known you could decide whether it was worth digging down to get it out. No longer used for active mining. 

Pano shot of the boat harbor, inlet, and cruise ship dock at the water’s edge.

A visiting cruise ship at the one and only parking place…fairly small as cruise ships go, maybe 500 feet long tops and 600 or 700 passengers plus crew. Anything bigger would find it hard to get into the ports along the Alaska/Vancouver Inside Passage as Haines is a fairly large port for these parts.

Boat harbor and inlet closeup shot.

A carved totem near the waterfront.

Several shots of the fort buildings…officers quarters, trading post, and fire brigade.

A view across the Lutak Inlet looking eastward.

Howard Payne Memorial Dead Tree Photo for the month.

Eagle on the gravel flats.

Same eagle after it moved over to a treetop.

Some sort of strange waterfowl preening itself on  rock right at the southern end of Chilkoot Lake where it proceeds southward through a short section of river rapids to join Lutak Inlet and then Chilkoot Inlet. After some research with Peterson’s we decided it was either a female common Merganser or a male Northern Pintail but the shots weren’t clear enough to make a definitive determination and the darn birds never turned around where we could get a decent look.

Pine cone shot Connie got…we kinda like these.

Two shots of a waterfall across Chilkoot Lake, one to show perspective and a closeup of the falls itself…probably 400 or 500 feet total waterfall height but cascading over in a dozen small drops.

Chilkoot Lake Pano…the waterfall above is on the right side mountain.

Pano looking south from the upper end of Lutak Inlet. The narrow opening at center left is where it joins to Chilkoot Inlet which proceeds to the right behind the mountain at the Lutak Inlet entrance. Haines is about 6 or 8 miles downstream from this location. Obviously low tide due to the large exposed gravel flats section…based on them the tidal range here is probably 10-15 feet by Neil’s guesstimate…this checks pretty closely with the 13 feet he got when he looked up aide table. The water is about 200 yards from where we were standing at low tide (and it looked like we were about at low tide when we took this shot)…at high tide all of the brown grassy areas are under water but the higher green spots are above water plants of some sort…more like lichens or small shrubbery type plants and not grass except in the very near foreground.

With that our photo day was done. After a quick stop by the library to see if we could find some fast Internet…note to self, the Internet at libraries here in the far north is lousy…both here at Haines and previously at Whitehorse it was almost the slowest we’ve ever seen…anyways we stopped by and got a few groceries. However, the prices reduced us from buying our list to just buying the things we are out of, hopefully when we get to Fairbanks on Monday the prices will be a little more reasonable. Prices in Alaska are expensive…but the ones here in Haines were ridiculous. We paid 3.98 US a gallon for fuel compared to 2.79 we paid in ND on the way up a month back and 3.60something equivalent on our Canadian stops. I guess that Haines is at the far end of nowhere (the closest place on the road is Haines Junction and that’s 150+ miles back north from here) and with the shipping costs it just is expensive. 

Cyas.

Days 7 and 8 were spent in Whitehorse YT…with many preplanned activities for Sunday day 7 and a free day on Monday when we did laundry, got some groceries and ran errands.

Sunday we got up, had coffee and breakfast and headed off to St. Paul’s Cathedral for Mass…following that we came home and just hung around the house until lunchtime…then headed out for our scheduled activities for the day.

First up was the Whitehorse Visitor Center…where we snagged some free wifi to check mail and podcasts as well as watching their movie about the Yukon in general. Then we headed over to the Whitehorse Rapids Fish Ladder…which probably leads you to wonder just what a fish ladder is…so I’ll tell ya’.

When the Whitehorse dam was built it naturally disturbed the salmon migration back to their home stream for spawning…the dam raised the level of the river about 60 feet which meant essentially no more salmon could get upstream. To get around this problem you build a fish ladder. Downstream of the dam you build a weir (essentially an underwater wall) that produces an artificial waterfall that the salmon can’t leap over. The design of the weir is such that fish get pushed to the sides of the river and run into the current coming down out of the fish ladder. The ladder itself is essential a raised wooden canal that runs up the bank of the river with a gradual rise until dumping back into the lake above the dam. Salmon sense the current coming out of the fish ladder and instinctively follow it as they think it’s the river itself. The channel is not continuous but has a wall across it every 10 feet or so with a small hole on the bottom of the wall…the holes in consecutive walls alternate sides. The hole creates eddies in each little box to allow fish to rest and then then just proceed through the series of holes gradually rising until they swim out into the lake upstream of the dam. The ladder itself is about 6 feet wide and probably 5 feet deep and runs for most of a mile around the dam.

The folks that run the ladder also run a salmon hatchery that hatches about 150,000 fry (baby salmon) a year…these are carried upstream and dumped into streams that they then remember as their home stream for returning when the time comes for them to spawn. The hatchery salmon get the small top adipose fin (the little one just in front of and above the tail) removed and a computer readable bar code pin inserted into their nostril area for later identification as hatchery vice wild salmon.

We got some nice photos of the fish ladder area.

The Visitor Information Center and Fish Ladder signs…along with a memorial at the visitor center to Yukon guides.

An Arctic Grayling which is one of the fresh water fish that inhabits the Yukon…Neil’s first ship was named after the Grayling although it was a standard Grayling rather than an Arctic one…notice the oversize dorsal fin that most likely is an adaptation to help them navigate and chase prey in the very turbulent Yukon.

The weir producing the waterfall, the fish ladder itself starts to the right (downstream) of the weir and on the near bank.

The portion of the ladder coming up from the entrance…you can just see the weir turbulence on the left side of the photo…and can’t really see the walls built within the ladder. Two things to note in this shot…the reversal of the ladder as it leads down to the river and then just below and to the right of the blue building in the background you can barely make out a lighter blue bridge over the river…we’ll come back to that bridge in a minute.

The ladder looking upstream toward the dam from the same spot as the above two photos. It continues upstream to the left around the dam but essentially looks the same all the way until it dumps back into the lake. The white water is at the dam…and is extra water not needed for hydroelectric power right now…this dam is power only and has no flood control role…this combined with the relatively small lake behind it and the large flow of the Yukon results in constant release of excess water via the spillway.

A close up of a portion of the ladder.

The entrance portion of the ladder immediately downstream of the weir. This is the same steep portion at the left of the 3rd photo back…the fish enter the ladder for a short steep climb to get onto the bank section of the ladder then make a hard right turn into the long upstream portion. Fish take about 24 hours to completely traverse the length of the ladder.

 An HDR looking upstream toward the dam from the light blue bridge I told you about before. Neil walked across this bridge today…which means that we’ve now been on both pedestrian bridges and 2 of the 4 vehicle bridges that span the Yukon. On our planned route…we’ll cross the ferry at Dawson City and the bridge at Carmacks…which leaves only the bridge across the Yukon on the Dalton Highway that we won’t have been over. It’s 130 miles from Fairbanks though…so unless one of our Fun Stuff™ days takes us that way we probably won’t spend the time and diesel to go cross it. Even without it though…we’ll have been across 6 of 7 possible Yukon river crossings before returning home.

Another strange fact about the Yukon…as I said the other day it starts in Atlin Lake in northern BC…and is actually within 50 miles of the Pacific Ocean (where it eventually empties via the Bering Sea) at it’s source. Unfortunately it’s surrounded on the west by the Coastal Mountains and on the south and east by other mountain ranges…so the only way it has to go from Atlin Lake is northwards…which leads to a 2,000 mile trip to the sea instead of a 50 mile trip.

The fish ladder starts right below the concrete structure on the left side of the waterfall you can see in the photo below. It proceeds up and to theft then reverses direction right behind the third to last tree coming from the left and proceeds up the slope past the bridge. The gray line you can see running up and to the right just below the fence is the ladder structure.

From the fish ladder we headed over to the SS Klondike stern wheeler museum. This is the second SS Klondike and was built in the 1930s or so with parts from the original Klondike that sunk in shallow water. It plied the river between Whitehorse and Dawson City 450 miles downstream for 5 months a year up until 1955…a day and a half going downstream and 4 and a half days coming upstream due to the current…and burned a cord of wood an hour to fire it’s boiler. It retired in 1955 and was turned into a museum and placed in it’s current position on the bank of the river in the early 1960s. It’s a 240 foot long stern wheeler with about a 3 or 4 foot draft and carried mostly cargo to Dawson City on the downstream route and returned with mineral ore upstream to Whitehorse where the ore was transferred to railroad cars for transit south.

An overall view of the vessel.

The ship’s capstan…used not only for hauling the anchos up but also for raising and lowering the two large vertical black and white poles you see in the photo above. When the ship got stuck on a sandbar they forced the poles down into the bottom which lifted the ship up and let it lurch forward a couple of feet…this was repeated until the sandbar was passed. It also served to haul on a cable that helped ships pass an area going upstream known as the Five Fingers for some large rocks that stuck out of the water. The current was so strong there that the stern wheel alone could not get the ship upstream…so they attached themselves to a 1,500 foot long cable and winched themselves upstream along with the stern wheel.

The ships boiler…hand riveted and bolted together…and pressure gauge. You would have to be a very brave engineer to bring this boiler up to 300 psi.

The primary cargo on downstream runs to Dawson City.

The ships double expansion steam engine, propulsion gearing to the stern wheel, and electrical generator. The steam engine and propulsion gearing has a twin on the other side of the stern.

The second of our 3 (or maybe 4) planned Yukon River vehicular bridges…we crossed it to get to the fish ladder. This is looking downstream.

A view of the port sun deck looking forward. Notice the small inset warning in the upper right…I’ve blown it up for ya just in case. Notice that we’re on the cheap seats side of the sign.

With that our day was done and we headed home. Had dinner with Bill and Linda…she cooked country ribs on the barby and Neil contributed some baked beans as a side dish. After that we had a wine and cheese party hosted by David and Bettie our hosts for the trip and then came home.

Day 8 is an errand day…laundry, groceries, diesel, library for some fast/unmetered Internet access…and perhaps some touristy stuff downtown afterwards and then dinner out with Bill and Linda at the Klondike Inn. So…I’ll go ahead and close this and should we have anything photo-worthy tomorrow I’ll add it to my next post.

Cyas.

One thing we’ve noticed on our trip so far is the lack of nighttime…it might actually get dark eventually but we’ve never been up late enough or early enough to actually confirm that. Alaska as you probably know is known as the Land of the Midnight Sun…and while I don’t think we’re going to be actually far enough north overnight to verify that…when we go up to Anaktuvuk Pass north of the Arctic Circle we are far enough north but won’t be there over night…anyway, sunset today in Teslin is sometime after 2300 and sunrise is before 0300. When we go to bed at 2300 most evenings…it’s not dark at all, in fact it’s barely sunset and evening twilight lasts at least 2 hours due to the shallow angle at which the sun sets. We woke up the other day and moved to our recliners well before 0300 and even then the sky was lightening up and sunrise was clearly on the way. This extra sunset makes us more likely to stay up doing things later than we normally would in latitudes where it actually gets dark…Neil just wandered out to see if he could find the eagle again…it’s 2030 now and still looks like late afternoon, not mid-evening. We kinda like it though.

We continued our trek westward…leaving Big Nugget RV about 0730 again for the 150 mile drive to Teslin YT. Today’s road conditions were pretty good…you could go the speed limit pretty much the whole way which was 100 kph (kilometers per hour, 100 = 62 mph)…after some experimentation Neil discovered that 90-92 kph was s nice speed for BAT and the rig with the resonant frequency of the suspension, the way the roads are built and all. At that speed the road vibration tends to dampen out and the whole rig just seems happier at that speed.

We didn’t have too many planned stops today…we wanted to stop by and see the Rancheria Falls which entailed a 1/3 mile hike from the parking lot. Unfortunately when we got there there was a big crowd of RVs in the somewhat limited parking area so it took us a couple of minutes to figure out where to park…luckily another 5th wheel pulled out so we just went ahead and then backed in where he was parked with a little assistance backing up from Bill…and it was starting to rain a bit. We decided to not let that stop us…and discovered when we got out of BAT that it was cold (46 degrees) so we opened up the house and got both our ScottEVests and our rain gear, changed into our hiking boots and set off. After the short hike which was mostly on a boardwalk and graded path we arrived at the falls area and discovered 2 very nice falls to photograph.

We got some nice shots from viewpoints along the way.

While hiking down the path and at the falls we got a few nice shots as well.

On our way today we passed over Porcupine Creek…which for those of you who have watched the TV show Gold Rush…was the first of many places that Todd has failed at being a gold miner. Todd is the strange guy from Washington state with the really weird looking long gray/black beard and the old dad that loves his 400 excavator. Anyways…he’s pretty much failed at mining for gold in both the Yukon, Klondike and South America and for the first couple of years he failed pretty miserably at Porcupine Creek. Connie’s favorite gold miner…Parker Schnabel…mined nearby at the Big Nugget mine that his 90something year old grandfather has been mining for many years. We didn’t know exactly where to look for either mining site…and the roads aren’t big rig friendly anyway…so we settled for just passing over the creek. 

By this time it was starting to rain pretty steadily so we beat feet back to BAT, fired up and hit the road…amazingly enough the completely full parking lot had diminished to just us and one guy riding his bike by the time we got back…the rest of the people got their photo, spent 30 seconds looking at the falls and moved on I guess. With the bad weather we pretty much didn’t stop again until we got to Teslin…where we stopped to get a photo of the Nisutlin Bay Bridge…which is the longest water crossing on the AlCan at 1917 feet long. You can just barely see our RV park at the far end of the bridge on the right side right by Teslin Lake.

Luckily it stopped raining when we got there and we quickly parked in our assigned site 18, brought on power and unhitched as we needed BAT to go into the museum…the site wasn’t very level so we had to unhitch anyway. Didn’t bother with water or sewer connection…we filled our fresh tank with 50 gallons when we left Northern Lights the other day and have been using that for the past 3 days…we’ll dump and refill tomorrow when we arrive in Whitehorse as we’ll be there 3 days.

During the daily status update meeting for the caravan…Neil noticed this immature bald eagle in a nearby tree and grabbed a few shots…our first eagle of the trip and he is literally in a tree in the middle of the campground.

Neil did a quick couple of maintenance items…our hitch squeaked the past couple of days so he pumped some grease into it. he also silicone sprayed the our leveling jack shafts and added 2.5 gallons of DEF (diesel exhaust fluid) to BAT’s tank. DEF is a urea based chemical that gets sprayed into the exhaust manifold to reduce emissions to make the California tree hugging crowd happy. Other than having to buy and pour it in…DEF isn’t much of a bother…with the single exception that BAT won’t run without it…no DEF means no run. Normally we fill up at Pilot or Flying J truck stops in the states but the stations up here don’t have DEF on draft as it were…so we just carry 5 gallons with us which lasts about 4,000 miles and whenever we use one of the 2.5 gallon jugs we just buy another one to replace it. We’ll be in Whitehorse over the weekend and it’s a big enough city to have things like Walmart and Canadian Tire (which is sort of like Walmart for Boys…lots of tools and other guy stuff).

Once that was done Bill and Linda joined us for a trip over to the Tlingit Cultural Heritage Center…the Tlingit are the native people of this region. They do lots of totem carvings…here are the ones out in front of the center…they represent the wolf, eagle, frog, beaver, and raven clans of the Tlingit people.

Inside we sampled Bannock with wild berry preserves. Bannock is essentially a biscuit dough deep fat fried in lard. Mighty tasty albeit a little tough and chewy. We also toured the center and drooled over all the carvings of masks and delicately beaded mittens, mukluks and other native people gear.

Once that was done we headed home for dinner…Neil cooked Jambalaya and we had Bill and Linda over…Linda and Neil have been alternating cooking duties on the days we don’t eat out since cooking for 4 is no harder than cooking for 2 and that way each of us only has to cook on alternate days.

Saturday we slept in as we only had 105 miles to go to our next stop in Whitehorse YT where we’ll stay until Tuesday AM. We also needed to stop back by the Tlingit Cultural Center to get our Yukon Passports stamped and they didn’t open until 0900. So…after coffee and some cottage cheese and strawberries for breakfast we headed off. About 45 miles up the road we stopped by another famous cinnamon bun place…but we’re sort of cinnamon bunned out so we just got a blueberry scone and split instead. We had a nice easy drive with just a few easy stops for pictures on the way before arriving at the Pioneer RV Park just south of Whitehorse where we’re parked in site 42…parking here is pretty tight with alternate sites having the rigs reversed because of the way the utility pedestals are installed. We unhitched and got setup for our 2 day stay then had some lunch.  A few photos from the trip.

After lunch we headed off for our first scheduled activity in Whitehorse…a guided 3 mile hike along the Yukon River through Miles Canyon and Canyon Village. It’s about a 3 mile drive from the park and on the way we stopped for our first view of the Yukon River…this is the second longest river in North America after the Mississippi at 1,920 miles in length. Starting in glacier fed Lake Atlin a bit southeast of here…the Yukon drains most of northern YT and the southern half of the Northwest Territories as it transits north before flowing into Alaska…where it changes direction to roughly southwest until emptying into the Bering Sea in western Alaska. Several interesting facts about the Yukon are that despite being almost 2000 miles long it has exactly 4 vehicle carrying bridges over it…one near Marsh Lake on the AlCan, one in Whitehorse YT, one in Carmacks on the Klondike Highway and one north of Fairbanks on the Dalton Highway up to Deadhorse AK. There is a ferry at Dawson City YT that is replaced by an ice bridge in winter and 2 pedestrian only bridges in Whitehorse…one of which you can see in the first shot of the river below. There is one hydroelectric dam near downtown Whitehorse. Other than those 8 human constructions the river is completely unimpeded. Here’s a shot taken at the overlook looking over Miles Canyon, one of the two pedestrian only bridges is visible. By the time we get back we’ll have crossed 3 of the 4 vehicle capable bridges on the river as well as the ferry up at Dawson City…and if we decide to head over to the other side of Whitehorse we’ll have crossed all 4 of the bridges.

The Miles Canyon and Canyon City served a vital role during the Klondike Gold Rush in the late 1800s. There were originally two sets of rapids near here on the river…one at Miles Canyon which is the narrow gorge below the pedestrian village above and the second one near downtown Whitehorse about 8 miles downstream…the shot above is looking upstream and Whitehorse is to the left and behind the overlook we were standing on. People heading to Dawson City to strike it rich in the gold fields came downstream on the Yukon then their boats could not make the passage through these two sets of rapids. The local commander of the Northwest Territory Mounted Police…which became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or the Mounties later on…decreed that because of the danger in the rapids you had to hire a professional boatman to guide your craft through. Alternatively you could offload at Canyon City which is on the left bank of the river in the photo above just around the bend you can see so it’s behind the trees on the bluff in the center. From there…there was a horse drawn tram that carried your cargo and boat around both sets of rapids. Once south of Whitehorse you put the boat back in the water, loaded it up, and continued on downstream to Dawson City.

Here are a couple more shots of the Yukon.

In the evening we went over to the Frantic Follies…which is a vaudeville type show held at the hotel in town. A pretty funny show with some audience participation and a group of pretty talented performers. Here are a few shots Neil got during the show. The first shot is the one with audience participation…this guy was a member of the audience that got dragged up on stage.

This was advertised as being the Elizabethtown PA Sympathy Orchestra playing Pachabel’s Canon in D…being played on crosscut saws…and it was actually recognizable as being the correct tune.

Explaining Cabin Fever…which happens a lot in Yukon during the winter.

When the show was over we came home…still daylight despite being almost 2300 at night. Tomorrow we’re off for some more Fun Stuff™ in Whitehorse after Mass in the morning.

Cyas.

We’ve had a pretty good couple of days. Wednesday morning we left Triple G Campground in Fort Nelson about 0730 for the 185 mile transit up to Liard Hot Springs where we stayed at the Liard Hot Springs Lodge RV Park. The trip is supposed to have some of the best scenery we’ll see as well as numerous animal sightings…but we’ll get to that later.

Our first stop heading north was at Indian Head Mountain…this is a rock formation up on the side of a mountain very similar to the one in New Hampshire known as The Old Man of the Sea…sort of a profile of rocks. This one looks supposedly like an Indian profile…we thought you needed a pretty good imagination to see it.

Next up we hit an area with no road…reminding us of that line in Back To The Future Part 2 where Doc Brown says “Roads…where we’re going we don’t need no steenking roads.”

And a beaver dam and lodge on a branch of one of the many rivers we crossed.

Here’s a shot of Summit Lake…which is (naturally) located at the top of Summit Pass…which is the highest elevation reached on the AlCan…4,250 feet. That’s Mount Saint George behind the lake on the left side. The water here is amazingly clear…it looks like bathtub water and you can easily see the bottom 15 or 20 feet from the shore at a depth of 6 feet or so. Really nice view…along with a very nice campground that we could stay in if we wanted to…no utilities but with our generator and solar panels it would be no problem…right on the lake and the sites are big enough for us to fit pretty easily. If we ever come back up this way we’ll keep it in mind…but it would definitely have what our friends Howard and Linda call the “it factor”.

Next up we stopped by the hoodoo’s and took a short hike about 1.2 miles overall to see them…325 feet high although I’m not sure how they measured that as the pinnacle structure of the didn’t look that high but maybe it’s measured from the bottom of the slope or something.

A nice pano shot of the area behind our second cinnamon roll purchase of the day…more on that later as well…and a shot of the Toad River right before we got to the second cinnamon roll stop.

A shot of Muncho Lake…a 20 mile long lake pretty close to Liard Hot Springs…again, amazingly clear water.

Now…about that wildlife we were supposed to see today…eh, not so much. We did spot a mother moose and calf while we were having a sandwich but she they ran back into the woods before we could get a shot. We also passed through Stone Mountain Provincial Park…which is the home of the Stone Sheep. This is a brownish sub species of the white Dall Sheep found further north in the Yukon and is very similar in appearance to the Bighorn Sheep we have in the US Rockies. We did spot one of these but they blend into the grass really well and even though it was within 5 yards of the road we didn’t’ see it until we were within 30 yards or so…luckily it jumped away from the road when we startled it and not out in front of us. We (naturally) saw it right as we got to the bottom of a fairly steep but short hill so stopping for a  photo wasn’t really in the cards…although we did see one so we were happy. After that…the only other thing we saw were some Bison…here’s a couple of shots of those for ya’.

So…on to the Cinnamon Roll Stops. Shortly after we passed through the section of the road with no pavement above we passed what has to be the best…roadside…marketing…sign…ever.

We figured that any place that claimed to be the center of the Galactic Cluster as far as Cinnamon Buns was concerned we should stop at…so we did. As we were ordering our bun…we decided to have a Bun Off…since there was another place with homemade cinnamon buns farther on at the Toad River Lodge we decided to get one there as well and we’ll sample both of them for breakfast tomorrow…including photos…and post the results later. Stay tuned.

This is the only remaining original suspension bridge on the AlCan…it’s about 1100 feet long and dates from late 1942.

Finally for today…a couple of shots to show you what our rig looks like after just 2 of 60 days on our Alaskan caravan. The first one is of the front bottom…take a gander at all the mud caked on it. The second one is of the side near where our water supply hooks up…the center little brown area is where Neil cleaned it a bit to highlight the dirt level. By the time we get back we’ll be really dirty I guess…and we’ll need plenty of washing to get ourselves clean again.

I’ll have to take one of BAT for ya as well tomorrow.

After our arrival at the campground…we got setup in site 7 then changed clothes and walked over to the Liard Hot Springs Provincial Park where they have…amazingly enough…hot springs. All of our group entered at the warm end of the cooler pool and just soaked in the warm mineral waters until we started to look like prunes. We did briefly dunk ourselves in the cool end of the warmer pool and it was quite toasty…with only a few of us actually being able to go put the rock on the ledge at the hot end of the hot pool. You coulda boiled an egg in there I’m tellin’ ya’. 

Ok, on to Day 4. Early morning while Neil was doing outside stuff he got a couple shots of the dirt on BAT…you can see the original color a little bit around the edges in some places but we’re mostly just dirt colored.

After that…Neil went across to Wayne and Debbie’s rig…they’re the tail gunners for our group and one of their duties is to have coffee ready on all travel days at 0630…so he went across and brought two cups back to go along with the Bun Off.

Here are the contenders. In this corner we have the bun from the Cinnamon Bun Center of the Galactic Cluster (actually it was named the Tetsa Lodge) nestled inside it’s styrofoam takeout container. 

And here’s the challenger from the Toad River Lodge.

As you can see…both of these are huge…so we split them in half and saved the remaining two halves for tomorrow. We then nuked each half and split them into halves again and gave us each a piece of both. After some chowing down…we came to a conclusion…and the winner is…they’re both outstanding. They are different so it’s really more a matter of what your particular choice in buns is…the Center of the Galactic Cluster one has sweeter gooey stuff, is more gooey and a milder cinnamon taste while the Toad River Lodge one is less sweet but has more cinnamon flavor and the bread part has a little better flavor. You really can’t go wrong with either of them though…so we’re going to give it by a nose to the Galactic Cluster based on their better marketing.

Right before we pulled out of the campground…Neil got this shot right next to the shower facility you can see in the background…this specimen is about 15 feet from the showers and maybe 30 feet from the back of the campground office.

We headed out about 0730 and spotted our first wildlife…a yearling black bear…on the side of the road not 300 yards after pulling out of the campground back onto the AlCan. There wasn’t any place to stop there for a photo and (at least as far as bears were concerned)…this was to be the routine of the day. We spotted 4 bears altogether and 3 of them were in a place where we could have gotten off the road for a photo…but all 3 were running at the time towards the woods as something had startled them before we saw them. The fourth one…which was actually the first one ya see…was posing for an excellent photo opportunity but there was no place to stop. 

Other sightings for the day included a fox that again we got no photo of and several groups of bison along the way.

A nice shot of a set of rapids on the Liard River…Liard is actually the French word for Poplar and the river and nearby hot springs were named for the large stands of Poplar trees that bordered them.

And a shot of the Liard River a little farther upstream…here are two different HDR interpretations of the same set of RAW images…the first was done with Lightroom’s somewhat limited HDR rendering and the second with the more capable Photomatix Pro.

Ya’ really  can’t go wrong with either of these…although Neil thinks that Photomatix does a better job since you can modify how the tone mapping is done with some sliders within the application and the Lightroom version has no options other than the single rendering that it decides on.

We crossed the border into the Yukon Territory shortly after the Liard River shots were taken…here’s the obligatory “we were here and got the photo’s to prove it” shots. I guess that makes us Yukon Men like that show on TV.

We pulled into Baby Nugget RV just west of Watson Lake YT about 1130 and quickly got set up in site 48. Not much to see or do here around the campground though…so we just lazed around the afternoon until it was time for our planned activity (that’s code for included in the tour price) of the day…a trip to the Signpost Village.

Signpost Village was started back in 1942 by a guy who put up a license plate from where he grew up. Over the years about 80,000 signs have been posted…everything from license plates to pie tins with inscriptions in Sharpie marker to carved wooden signs. All of them were put up by people traveling the AlCan…so naturally our host David had prepared a special sign commemorating the 2015 60 day RV Adventure Treks caravan.

Afterwards we watched the movie about Yukon and AlCan history…then went to the Upper Liard Lodge with Bill and Linda for dinner…we all had various types of schnitzel…and all were really good. Neil also got a shot of our site here at Baby Nugget RV.

With that…we gave up and headed home…after watching Deadliest Catch with Bill and Linda we came home for TV and bedtime. We’re off again at 0730 tomorrow morning for our transit to Teslin Lake YT then again to Whitehorse YT on Saturday…then we get a couple days with no travel…good thing as we need a day off.

Cyas.