Trip log: RV Trip to Alaska 2014 |
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5/24/2014 Day 17 Layover day at Whitehorse, Yukon We went to the Whitehorse Visitors Center to do internet on their free wi-fi and gather some information, then we took the waterfront walk along the Yukon River. The old stern-wheeler, Klondike, is fixed alongside the river just where you enter town from the east, and has been restored as a museum. It plied the Yukon River between Whitehorse and Dawson in the early part of the 20th century carrying passengers and cargo like gold. It was a steam driven ship that used firewood purchased from vendors along the route to heat the boilers. A more perfect and authentic restoration I have never seen. And more amazingly, it was free. We took scads of pictures which will (I hope) turn into some sort of album.
The main thing you can say about the rivers up here is BIG! Really BIG! All of them are BIG! Lots of water flowing this time of year, water flowing down off the mountainsides, waterfalls everywhere.
We have made a decision not to cross the “top of the world” highway from Dawson to Chicken, Alaska because of the recent (and continuing) rains which would make an already poor route even worse. So we will go south to Skagway instead, take the ferry to Haines, then drive from Haines up to Tok, Alaska. This means passing through Customs three times in about as many days: We cross from Yukon into Alaska just before Skagway, then back into Yukon a little ways out of Haines, then back into Alaska about 150 miles further.
Whitehorse is the capital city of Yukon and is a fair sized town, so we stocked up on supplies here. Rained a little today, but not all day like it has been. Prediction is for partly cloudy next 5 days. |
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5/23/2014 Day 16 Watson Lake to Whitehorse, YT; 273 miles It rained all night so the Jeep and RV are actually a little cleaner than when we went to bed last night. We got somewhat of a late start this morning due to my insistence upon draining the tanks and filling with water even though we could have gone another 2 days. The dump at the junction of the Cassiar Highway and the Alaska Highway was $10.50 and was a carefully guarded secret in the middle of the primitive campground. All the water was still turned off in the campground so we had to go back to the office where the nice man |
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5/27/2014 Day 20 Haines, AK to Condon creek Campground north of Haines Junction, Yukon; About 200 miles
This is a beautiful, wide smooth highway, climbing gently up the Chilcoot Pass to about 3500 feet altitude. Entirely different landscape than coming down from Whitehorse to Skagway. 40 miles out of Haines you cross the Canadian Border into British Columbia, so once again, we go through customs. Then about 50 miles further you go back into Yukon. It’s a total of 146 miles from Haines, Alaska to Haines Junction, Yukon. At Haines Junction we joined the Alaska Highway once again, headed north toward Tok, AK. Bought cinnamon rolls here, drove to the visitors center parking lot, made coffee and ate them. So far the MBCR (Miles Between Cinnamon Rolls) is quite acceptable.
We saw a couple of sharp-tailed grouse along the road, then just before the campground we stopped at the Tachal Dhal (Sheep Mountain) Visitor Center where we spotted 20-30 Dall Sheep, a few rams and mostly females, up on the high mountain. They were too far away to get pictures even with my new 1200 mm lens, but we saw them with the ranger’s spotting scope. This confirms, finally, that the animals we saw coming down the White Pass Highway from Carcross to Skagway were indeed mountain goats, not sheep.
The campground has almost 100 sites, all primitive with no hookups of any kind, but beautifully laid out with large, spacious back-ins and some pull-asides. It’s right on Kluane Lake. Maybe half a dozen campers here. Grizzly bears abound here, even in the campground, so we are checking carefully before opening the door.
The good GPS failed this morning. Just won’t turn on. We took the one we don’t like out of the drawer and it works, but doesn’t find much of anything in Canada. Fortunately, we don’t really need it; there are very few roads up here and it’s pretty hard to get on the wrong one. The cell phone maps work fine for finding things in towns. I finally fixed the tail light problem on the Jeep; wires reversed on the isolation diodes to the left rear light causing the RV, when connected, to flash the tail light filament instead of the turn signal filament of the bulb. |
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5/25/2014 Day 18 Whitehorse, Yukon, to Haines, AK, via ferry; 110 RV miles + 20 by ferry
We left Whitehorse, YT, at 6 AM and drove down the South Klondike Highway to Skagway. This is the White Pass route up which the prospectors came, without benefit of the highway or the railroad we modern travelers use. Absolutely stunning scenery, and we saw several groups of Dall Sheep, probably 20 in total, up on the mountain sides.
It turned out to be a beautiful blue-sky day, the first we’ve had since we left the lower 48. We arrived in Skagway about 9:30--8:30, taking into account the 1-hour earlier Alaska time--had breakfast and messed about looking at stuff for a while, then drove out to the old townsite of Dyea on the Chilkat River which was the base of the Chilcoot Trail. There’s nothing here anymore but it’s interesting to imagine the prospectors gathering here. The White Pass trail takes off just north of Skagway. Both trails lead eventually to the Yukon River. One old timer is quoted as saying, “whichever one you took, you would wish you had taken the other one.”
Imagine a bad “Survivor” TV show: You are among hundreds of men trying to get up the pass to get to the gold fields near Dawson to find gold, but you are basically on your own. Everyone else is trying just as hard to get there before you. You are required by the Canadian Government’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to pack a year’s worth of supplies in accordance with a prescribed list, comprising about 1000 pounds of stuff. And the RCMP checks it at the top and sends you back if you don’t have everything. You start at sea level and the pass is 3250 feet. The trail is 13 miles, virtually non-existent, steep, rocky, and you have to pack what you can up a ways, cache it, come back for more, cache it, then schlep it up a little further, etc. You can use your own mules or horses if you can afford them, or you can rent a mule for an exorbitant price, or you can hire some of the local native Indians for an even worse price, or you can pack it all on your back, as much as you can carry at one time. Of course, other men have gotten here before you and have blocked off some of the trail and are charging a toll to pass, and if you cache your stuff you can’t be sure it will still be there when you get back, unless you pay someone to watch it and hope they don’t steal it as soon as you’re out of sight. |
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5/26/2014 Day 19 A layover day in Haines, Alaska
As funky as it is, this is really a lovely spot—the campground, I mean. Especially now that we’re the only ones in it. There was a big beer festival in town over the weekend, mostly folks from British Columbia, who cleared out just before we got here. They left several huge piles of beer cans and other detritus, but the maintenance guy came around this morning and picked it all up, moved the picnic tables back into place and now it’s just us, one other trailer, the trees and the birds. |
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Totem at Whitehorse, YT |
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disclosed the carefully guarded secret location of the one working water tap—inside the garage. This all took a while as we had to wait while another RV from Georgia filled ahead of us.
We stopped in Teslin, Yukon, for gas which is a reasonable (for Canada) $1.44/liter—the same as in Lillooet, BC. They also had magnificent cinnamon rolls which I fell victim to. The road from Watson Lake to Whitehorse is very good; wide with lane striping and wide shoulders. The surface is not perfect and there’s the odd pothole, but give it about a 9 for 2-lane country roads. We’re now on the official Alaska Highway, Canada #1. Although the road is mostly in Yukon, it dips into BC for about 30 miles just before Teslin. We saw no animals at all today.
We found Wolf Creek Campground, a Provincial park just 7 miles from Whitehorse after driving past it looking frantically for a sign. No sign visible heading west. Finally found a tiny tent symbol sign coming back east. Took one of only about 3 available sites ($12 CDN) and went into town for Boston Pizza about 3:30 PM. We will layover here a day and try to find the Wal-Mart and M & M Meat stores tomorrow, the search for which was unsuccessful today. We are noticing some strange aluminum shavings appearing on the floor behind the driver’s seat. But the slide works fine and I hear no grinding. I think they are fabrication drill shavings. |
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Now, when you get to the top at Lake Bennett, one of the headwaters of the Yukon, you have to build a boat and paddle or float down the Yukon River 500 miles to Dawson City. So where did you get the materials to build the boat? You either had to pack it up the mountain or chop down trees to make it with. Of course, others have already chopped down most of the easily available trees. At Dawson City there are already 10,000 men (and three women) camped in tents and prospecting the hills and they have already staked all the best claims. Sound like fun?
We got on the LeConte Ferry which runs from Skagway to Haines most days for a total of $170. It’s about 15 miles by water between the two, but 350 miles if you drive around by road. We unhooked the Jeep from the RV and drove on separately, Donna in the Jeep first, followed a little later by Russ in the RV. Russ had to back the RV up the ramp into the ferry with the mirrors pulled in, make a 90-degree turn (still backing) and end up beside other RVs and trucks with inches (literally inches) clearance. Once parked our rolled awning was about 2” below the next RV awning, and had they been the same height, would have collided.
The ferry departed Skagway at 3:30 on the dot and arrived at Haines at 4:30. By 5:30 we were camped in the Port Chilkoot Camper Park with full hookups. To say this park is primitive would be an understatement. It does have hookups—if you can find them. Some sites do, some don’t. Some don’t have numbers but there are hookups. Some have numbers but no hookups. We finally figured out that if there’s a picnic table nearby, or an electric box nailed to a tree, or you can see recent tire tracks, it must be a site. But all in all it’s really nice—in the trees, near the water, and close to town. |
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Ferry LeConte at Skagway |
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Classic car at Fort William H. Seward |
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We visited the Heritage Museum and the Eagle Preservation museum, took a walk through town, took some pictures and went out to Mud Bay to the cannery where we bought some fresh (frozen) halibut. It’s hard as a rock, so that’s for another day. We found a rolling fish-n-chips stand across from the Post Office that was highly recommended by the locals and ordered one of halibut, one of salmon to eat with wine on the RV for dinner. For the record, one order of halibut-n-chips was $14.50, salmon-n-chips was $10. At the pub in town, similar orders were $21 to $24.
In searching for the Tlinget Long House, which we remembered from when we were here before on the boat, we found it, and in the process stumbled across an artist’s lair and left with two large, beautiful wood carvings, one of Wolf for Donna, and one of Eagle for Russ. The salmon canning museum which had been here 10 years ago is gone. It had a complete reconstruction of a mechanized salmon canning line complete with a stock of cans, which are not available any more, and the owner could turn it on and the entire line would make cans, go through the motions of processing salmon, and spit the (empty) sealed cans out the end. This particular process was abandoned some time ago because of some instances of contamination and it’s done entirely differently now. Some folks vaguely remember the museum, but can’t say when it closed.
Haines hasn’t quite woken up yet from its long winter’s sleep. The town seems almost deserted. Even the Hammer Museum is closed! This is Memorial Day, and no festivities seem to be happening, although there’s a fishing derby out in Mud Bay. We didn’t go. Tomorrow it’s back up over the mountain into British Columbia for a short stretch, then to Haines Junction in Yukon, and on to Tok, Alaska. |
