John Rachal's Blog

DAY 27, June 17, Monday

We chose to stay two nights in the Pioneer campground and RV park just outside of Whitehorse. We were dry camping, which here meant that we had a nice little wooded site that we had to slither into by making about a 300 degree tight circle, then backing more or less straight into it, but with trees close by.

The day was chilly and wet, though not exactly raining, or at least not raining constantly. We left the dogs in the camper and headed into Whitehorse. First stop was the somewhat restored S. S. Klondike, a paddle wheeler that plied its way up and down the Yukon River carrying provisions and gold from Whitehorse to Dawson City and back again. It would have made Mark Twain warm inside to see that steamboat, as he too had been a cub river boat pilot and for a short while a pilot, had written Life on the Mississippi about his sometimes hilarious experiences as a cub, and if memory serves he once later in life said that it was the most satisfying work he ever did. Learning to “read the river” was the ultimate and arcane measure of mastery, and of course his pseudonym was itself an actual measure of the depth of the water relayed to the pilot. I enjoyed seeing some of the mysterious components of the two steam engines, and I do marvel at the genius required to design them and make them work. I also marvel at the physical strength required to load and unload all the freight and the firewood for the engines—logs four or more feet long and a foot in diameter, ten or more to a wheelbarrow-type dolly.

We then had lunch at the Burnt Toast café, right beside the far more famous Ribs and Salmon restaurant. I ventured to have a salmon sandwich, but it was a little too fishy for me. Then over to the Visitors’ Center, then back to camp to give the dogs a break. Then back into Whitehorse to a pastry shop where I also posted the last blog entry since I could use their Wi-fi, then to a grocery store, knowing that Whitehorse would be the last city we would see for a while.

DAY 28, June 18, Tuesday

It was cold in the camper this morning, 53 degrees. The camper has three sources of heat: an electric heat strip along with the A/C, a little electric heater Val bought that is quite sufficient for a small space, and a propane heater when electricity is not being used. So far we have only used the generator for electric usage once.

I cooked pancakes on our little gas grill outside, washed the dishes in a nearby sink for the purpose, and we departed at 11, bound for a private campground by Kluane Lake sort of near the dot on the map that said Destruction Bay. You might think a dot on a map might indicate an actual town, but typically that would be exceedingly optimistic. Few rise to the level of even a crossroads, since there is only the one road, the Alaska Highway. Some have a single building that might have an ancient gas pump. Some are real peek and plum towns—by the time you peek out the window, they’re plum gone.

Except for the forest of Christmas trees, and the distant Canadian Rockies, snowy and cloud-kissed, the day was another grey day. The light drizzle that is so common up here, at least so far, didn’t begin until we were at the campground and fairly settled in after a lonely drive of 150 or so miles on the very lightly travelled highway. You keep bumping into the same people along the highway because there are so relatively few places to get gas, eat, or whatever. We visited with our neighbors last night, saw them again today when we stopped for lunch (two days in a row having lunch at a café!), and then again at a little Visitors’ Center for the Kluane National Park near our campground. We are right on this enormous lake, with surrounding mountains, and the view would be great on a clear day. Grey on grey on grey, and light rain. But I’ll never forget the comment of one of Dick Allison’s seminary professors when Dick one day commented on what a rainy, yucky day it was. Oh, but it’s a perfect day for the kind of day it is, the professor cheerily replied.

Total mileage as of today, the end of our fourth week, is about 4880, and tomorrow we will break 5,000 miles as we cross the border into Alaska, bound for Tok.

DAY 29, June 19, Wednesday

It was cold, low 40s, and rainy this morning, and thus a good day to sleep in. We got up around 8:30, Val did interior chores, and I unhooked and wrestled with the stiff potable water hose in a cold drizzle. Val helped me with the latter, and we finally decided to just roll it within some semblance of roundness and put it in the car. I had oatmeal, Val had grits.

Within ten miles of our departure, 100 feet off the road, a huge grizzly had his (her) head up and almost seemed to be posing. If the black bears we have been seeing are between 150 and 300 lbs., this bruin was at least 400 and almost certainly more. He was very brown (though color is not definitive of species, since black bears can be brown or even blondish, though all the ones we have seen have been dark black) with an enormous head and body. The missed photo of this animal will almost certainly be my biggest photographic regret of the trip. I did not see him until I was about parallel with him, and had I stopped I would have had to back up a couple hundred feet with the camper. Still, I wish I had tried to do so since traffic was so light. It was so quick that Val didn’t see him at all, regrettably for both of us. It was memorable. On The Voyage of Discovery, Lewis had neglected to reload after shooting at a deer and suddenly had to retreat into a river when a grizzly charged him; or, as Lewis wryly observed, the bear was “advancing briskly.”

We drove about 240 miles today, with the morning wet and gloomy with low-lying clouds and the afternoon mostly sunny and gorgeous. We finally encountered frost heaves, sort of like dry heaves but not as enjoyable. Frost heaves are the result of winter on the road, creating sudden rises and dips, and these undulations taken at speed can be very bouncy, and particularly so for anything you are pulling. Every spring work crews add more pavement to try to level them out. In Canada many of the as yet unrepaired ones were marked with flags, but most in Alaska were not. Val, who drove the second half of the day, averaged in the low 40s, but most folks were going a little faster. She said that it was very unpleasant driving, and it is.

After waiting in almost an hour-long line at customs, we entered Alaska around 4, or 3 o’clock Alaska time, after just over 5,000 miles and 29 days. We got into a decent little campground near Tok. We would have stayed two nights but it was full the second night. In the evening we spent a full 20 minutes deciding whether to take the notoriously bad southwesterly Tok cutoff, which a woman at an earlier stop today strongly urged against, or the 130 mile longer route up to Delta Junction and then down to Glennallen. Val, in her usually capable way (at least on those not-all-that-frequent occasions when she has a cell signal), looked up what others were saying about the cutoff and the general consensus was in agreement with the lady’s advice—take the longer, though not necessarily that much slower route. It’s not often we have to choose routes on the basis of the physical quality of the road.

I’m not sure how dark it actually gets around, say, 2:30 or so in the morning, but probably not very. Sunset here in Tok is 11:48 pm, and so it’s still late dusk-ish well after midnight, and sunrise is 3:16 am. I got up around 4 am to use the bathroom the other night and it was already pretty much full daylight.