Kluane Lake, YT to Whitehorse, YT – 172 Miles
Another sunny day, but chilly as we woke up, 42 degrees. We were on the road by about 9:30. The road was in good condition as this is a section of the Alaska Highway that has been slightly re-routed and rebuilt sometime fairly recently. It is wide and smooth, and follows right along the shoreline of Kluane Lake for several miles. As it rounds the head of the lake in a wide U-turn, there is a Visitor Center for Kluane National Park, the Canadian counterpart to Wrangell-St Elias National Park on the Alaskan side of the border. The Visitor Center is located on a wide plain at the foot of another mountain called Sheep Mountain. This mountain is the home to a band of Dall sheep who enjoy the warm south-facing slope, especially in the winter time. There are a couple of spotting scopes set up on a viewing deck, but there were no sheep visible at the time. The original road bed of the Alaska Highway can be seen slanting up the face of this slope, above the current highway.
After the wide U-turn around the head of the lake, the highway veers away from the lake and begins to climb up through a series of low hills, actually the base of the foothills of the St Elias Mountains. It goes over a couple of summits which are just shy of 3300 ft, which are the highest point on the Alaska Highway between Summit Lake back in BC and the end of the highway at Delta Junction. The snow-covered peaks of the front range of the St Elias Mountains are easily visible to the southwest. From here it’s just a short hop into Haines Junction, where those travelers returning south via the ferry down the Inside Passage turn to the port of Haines, Alaska. One of the alternative deviations on our journey was to go down to Haines and perhaps take the ferry as far as Juneau, then return via Skagway and up the lower portion of the Klondike Highway to its Junction with the Alaska Highway a few miles east of Whitehorse. However, a few days ago at one of our campgrounds another camper told us about a day trip to Juneau on a catamaran that included whale watching and a visit to the Mendenhall Glacier, at a price about half that of the ferry (at least if we took the Tiger on the ferry). There were other considerations, not the least of which was the inflexibility of the ferry schedule. This was an attractive alternative for us, plus it let us go back and visit our friends Jock and Karen, whom we had traveled with several days earlier in the trip.
We met Jock and Karen in Dawson City, where they were camped next to us in an RV park. They have a small travel trailer similar to our friends back home, Ted and Sally, who have a Casita. (By the way, Ted and Sally, if you’re reading this, we’ve lost count of the Casitas and/or Scamps we’ve seen so far. There must be at least 25 or 30; in fact on this one day we saw five or six.) Anyway, since we were traveling the same way as Jock and Karen, at least as far as Fairbanks, we ended up camping together for at least three of the next four nights even though our daytime schedules took us to different venues. To make a long story short, as we finally parted ways at Fairbanks, they invited us to stop by and spend the night with them in Whitehorse if we got back through there on or way home. At the time, we were planning to do the Haines-Juneau-Skagway ferry alternate, which would have put us back on the Alaska Highway at Jake’s Corner, bypassing Whitehorse. So when we made the decision to do the catamaran day trip instead of the ferry, we gave them a call from Tok and asked if the invitation was still open. They said sure, come on down, so after gassing up in Haines Junction we continued eastbound into Whitehorse.
We arrived at probably 3:30 or 4:00 pm. After a quick glass of beer to unwind, we all jumped into Jock and Karen’s car and they took us on a tour of some of the sights of Whitehorse that most tourists never see. First was the fish ladder at the big dam on the Yukon River. Because damming major salmon migration streams like the Yukon impedes the migration of the fish up to their spawning grounds, a long, switch-backing fish ladder was built to allow the salmon to literally climb over the dam in a series of short steps, much like swimming their way through a long series of rapids. This particular fish ladder is made of wood, and is supposedly the longest wooden fish ladder in the world. At the top is a visitor center with glass viewing ports where you can see the fish and where the biologists count the fish and maintain other vital statistics as they study the life cycle of the salmon.
From the fish ladder we drove by the lake created by the dam, which is the home for several float planes, then went further upstream to Miles Canyon, a narrow cleft in the bedrock where the Yukon River is squeezed down to a passageway just a couple of hundred feet wide. This canyon, and the rapids just below it which are now covered by the reservoir behind the dam, were one of the most dangerous obstacles to the Klondike Gold Rush miners who descended by boat to the gold fields up around Dawson City.
We then returned to Jock and Karen’s house and had a delicious dinner, followed by lively conversation until almost midnight. During this time we made use of their washer and dryer to get our week’s worth of laundry done. Needless to say, I didn’t get my daily blog written until now, the next day in Skagway.
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