We Reached Alaska!

Monday, May 18, 2009 – Day 18 – Victoria Day in Canada

We pulled out of Whitehorse this morning around 10:00, after fooling around with a low tire.  (It didn’t need to be changed, we just tightened in the valve, filled it with air and it was good to go!) We took the South Klondike Highway 2, out of
Whitehorse.  We’d been told by many people (as well as the Milepost), that this was a treat for the eyes. We were not disappointed.  Every curve and every mile was an even better view.

The Milepost had also told us about a real gem of a lake in the mountains.  Emerald lake as the name suggests is just that colour.  The pictures we took can just not do it justice. From the overlook it just fills your whole field of vision with colour. 

A little further down the road is the Carcross desert. It is referred to as the, “Smallest Desert in the World”; consisting of some scrub pines and a lot of sand.  It covers only a few acres but qualifies as a desert because it receives so little precipitation which is a result of its unique location in a rain shadow.

At the town of Carcross, YT.  we saw a number of RV’s turning onto the road ahead of us.  It was a Caravan! (The RVer’s equivalent to a wagon train of the old west.)  We had also been warned to expect this.  We did get lucky though because they turned off to fuel; all 20 or more of them. We would have been stuck behind them at US Customs  for hours.  Bad enough last night we had been busy consuming all of our remaining oranges and drinking the last of our Canadian beer in anticipation of the grilling that we would get by the U.S. customs officer.  The border guard simply admonished us for having not signed our passports; made some remark about this area of Alaska being geographically in Canada but politically in the U.S.A., and sent us on our way.  He did stamp our passports with a neat stamp of a steam locomotive for Skagway, Alaska.  Almost as soon as we crossed the border crossing into Alaska  the temperature seemed to warm up and all the leaves on the trees seem to be in full bloom.  (I suppose it is the effect of the Pacific Ocean coming up the Lynn Canal.)  A few more miles of white knuckle driving at 30 MPH around tight turns and down steep grades brought us into the town of Skagway, AK.

Skagway is a strange place.  It served as the debarkation point of most of the fortune seekers of the Klondike Gold Rush and the start of their journey up the Chilkoot Pass to Whitehorse.  Today, it still is a debarkation point, but now they are tourists from the Cruise Ships. We had remarked to a couple of retail people about how busy they were today…they both said, “Wait till you see Wednesday, we have 5 cruise ships in!”  This will apparently swell the population in a few square blocks to 10,000 people – everyone of them looking for souvenirs.  And for every 2 gift shops or restaurants there is a jewellery store.  RV’s also compete with buses, tour operators and pedestrians to find their way through the restored  downtown area.

Did I mention in an earlier post that most RV Parks are located in the marginal areas of a city.  Well the one that we are in is located right beside some railway tracks at the foot of a mountain.  We have a bunch of the good ole boys doing donuts in the parking area on their ATV’s and drag racing along the railway right of way.  (Could be a long night.)  Other than that, the view is great. We are surrounded in this valley/fjord by mountains with the sea just a kilometre or so away. 

Tomorrow – The White Pass Yukon Railway, billed as “The Scenic Railway of the World”