great place to camp last night. Well away from the road and flat. It’s a popular place by the looks of it, with the number of stone fire circles and ashes.
The day dawned fine, a relief from the cold wet day of yesterday. The peaks surrounding us are still showing traces of snow.
On the road by 10am with a fair bit of ground to cover. Our original intention was to head straight for Skagway in the US but decided that it would be a shame to miss Whitehorse and as the turnoff south was only 8 or so k’s, we changed our minds.
The Cassiar Highway becomes a little narrower but still with a good road surface. Vegetation and scenery doesn’t change much.
About 50k’s short of the Alaska Highway we passed kilometre after kilometre of burned our forrest. Both sides of the road. It must have run for about 25k’s, as far as the eye could see, in every direction. What a sight it must have been! There is sign of significant regrowth, not of pine, but birch. A little later we found that the fire was in 2010. One way of dealing with the Pine Beatle!
The Yukon
Once on the Alaska Highway we into the Yukon. The Yukon is sparsely populated, compared to BC.
Just short of Teslin a motorbike loomed quickly behind us, waving as he passed. It wasn’t Roger from the previous day. A little further on he was stopped for a Red Bull so we pulled in beside him. Chatham is his name, from Fairbanks. He is on his way home from Texas, where he flew for the purpose of buying the bike. He tells us he crashed the last one when a herd of Caribou came straight across the road. While he didn’t elaborate, it must have written his bike off. This one is a GS1200cc BMW Tourer and looks pretty new. He’s a nice chatty guy. Our experience, as a generality, is that the American’s seem more gregarious.
Whitehorse (pop 26,500), is again, a modernish town, smaller than Prince George (pop of 72,700).
There are apparently some facades the old wild west town it must have been in the late 1800’s, but we didn’t see any in our ‘drive around’.
The camp site, High Country RV was 9k’s out of Whitehorse on the main road to Fairbanks. The last couple of hours before bed at 11pm were spent laboriously updating the blog site. Wifi was so slow, it took 20min to load one photo. At least we have a couple more days written up.
Thanks for your comments folks, it’s great to hear from you. Sorry, there is not always time to respond to each one. Any news of what’s happening politically in the UK would be great. We don’t mind bias..:). We have spades of our own! We’re so out of touch, though have heard Theresa has at last taken the hint!!!
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