Finally, it starts to feel like summer! A couple days over 80 degrees! Up until now we’ve only had a handful of days in the 70s, and nothing above 66 for about 5 weeks.
From Dawson City we drove on towards Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon. The first night we boondocked next to Lenore Lake, and the next night we got an amazing camp site right on the lake at Lake Laberge, made famous by the Robert Service poem The Cremation of Sam Mcgee. The lake is huge (and actually part of the Yukon river), but it was totally calm the night we were there.
We passed through Whitehorse and didn’t find much that interested us, except the historic SS Klondike National Historic site, where Parks Canada has done a great job explaining the importance and challenges of the riverboats in this part of Canada before there were roads.
We stopped for a couple hours at Lairds River Hot Springs, which was quite nice. The campground was full, so we just camped along the river about 1 mile down the road from the springs. Christine had a hard time not collecting all the amazing rocks in the riverbed.
We next spent 2 days at MacDonald Campground on Mucho Lake. This is a fantastic no reservation campground where every spot has lake access. I did lots of kayaking on the lake and biked over the Stone Sheep Trail to see some really interesting rock formations.
Next on to Ft Nelson, where we decided to try the Canadian chain restaurant “Boston Pizza“, which has nothing to do with Boston (the pizza was OK, not great). Luckily our waitress let us know about a nasty accident which had caused a large bridge fire that closed the Alaska Highway to the south where we were headed. But they opened the road to cars and small RVs the next day, so it only delayed us a bit. It could have been much worse, as the only other road would have added about 30 hours of driving.
Next on to Dawson Creek, mile 0 of the Alaskan Highway. The town itself was quite unremarkable, but we did learn some interesting stuff about the building of the Alaska Highway. Check out this documentary if you want to learn for yourself.
We finally made it to our AirBNB in Hinton, just outside of Jasper National Park. We covered 1600 miles in 8 days, a record for us on this trip. Time to do laundry.
Full set of photos for the week are here.
