Beaver Creek to Johnson’s Crossing
(Updated with pictures)
I haven’t all that much to report today. Our Alaskan activities left us behind schedule for getting home, so we’re doing lots of driving to catch up. Today was all retreading Alaskan Highway we’ve already done in the other direction.
It’s not a bad thing, though. The scenery is different going in the other direction. Not only that, but half an hour into the drive, we came upon a moose in the road. At last! It was quite small compared to the stuffed ones in museums. We stopped near it. It didn’t charge us. It gave us a slow look, then ambled into the undergrowth. I scrabbled for my camera, but failed.
This time, our views of Kluane National Park were uninterrupted by cloud, and it looked wonderful - snow peaked mountains towering over forests and lakes. This is the North you see on the covers of travel books.
We had lunch in a cafe in Haines Junction - 300km from our start.
Shortly after Haines Junction, we saw an old wooden bridge that we hadn’t spotted coming the other way. We had to stop for a closer look. An information board explained that it dated from the original 1942 building of the Alaska Highway, and replaced a previous bridge that was built in 1902. I would have liked to have walked across it, and I’m sure we could have (despite a broken support), were it not for our obedience when it comes to signs.
As we left Kluane behind, we came to realise that the best views were through our rear window, for now.
We stopped in Whitehorse for some food and supply shopping, and to belatedly move our clocks forward to Canadian time. I got irritated enough with the pump at a Shell petrol station, that I left and filled up elsewhere instead.
We drove another hour or so, to our current RV site in Johnson’s crossing, around 600km from Beaver Creek. Johnson’s crossing has a bridge, and a combined motel, petrol station and RV park — and that’s it. The whole motel/petrol/RV concern is for sale. We arrived at around 8, and the office was closed, so motel customers would be out of luck. We got to choose a site, and will pay in the morning. This business (and presumably the property it’s on) could be yours for CA$520,000.
One of the benefits of getting to the office when it’s open, is that they tell you the key code for the toilet block. We didn’t get that luxury.
Now, at a previous site, the combination lock had five buttons, and the code was two digits long. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader, to work out how many attempts it would take to find the combination by brute-force. Actually, if I told you it would probably take you ten attempts, you could have a reasonable guess at the actual combination.
Today, Debbie did try a brute-force attack, and failed. So, she asked our neighbours, who told her the single digit code…
Meanwhile, I lit a fire, and investigated why there were so many insects around the front of our van. In so doing, I found a small mangled bird embedded in the grille. It was about the size of a chaffinch. Prizing it out at throwing it away some distance from the van did nothing to reduce the insects’ numbers. Perhaps they were feasting on the remains of their less fortunate brethren? Still, better they were there than at our picnic table.
I was very proud of the fire I made today — it produced just enough intensely hot embers to cook our buffalo burgers, leaving a tiny heap to be extinguished with a couple of beer bottles of water.
After eating, we walked down to the Teslin river, mostly to look at the handsome road bridge. Under the bridge, there’s a boat ramp, and signs telling fishermen what the regulations are.
Tomorrow: more driving!