Yukon

Yukon Gold

The first thing I said as we drove back into Yukon was, “Wow, the skies are just as big as when we left!” Yes, it’s the same sky as everywhere else, but somehow in Yukon I was constantly aware of the magnitude above me more than other places. It’s beautiful.

It was an exciting time to be my camera, because I had that thing working full time during our drive through Canada. The fall colors were really beginning to explode, and I filled up the camera to capacity every day. I’m sure if Andy asked you to quote me on the trip it would be a three-way tie for, “That YELLOW!” “That RED!” and “That ORANGE!” And that’s only if gasps don’t count.

After spending a few weeks high up in wintery weather, the temperate fall was a welcome change. Scout and Gracie also got to spend more time outdoors, so everyone was enjoying Yukon to the fullest.

On our original trip through Yukon, Andy had mentioned wanting to pan for gold, and as we drove farther through the province, we realized we still hadn’t tried our hand at fortune-hunting yet. We found a nice spot to pull out by the river, took our pot lids, food scoops and a very excited doggy down to the water, and got to work.

It was a lot of fun and pretty exciting, even though we didn’t see any sparkly signs that we were in a good spot for panning. We wished we’d started sooner in the trip, because I could have panned for hours and hours in any river around.

Scout had other plans for our time outdoors and tried all his best methods to convince us to throw all the sticks he found by the river.

So on the walk back to the Turtle, we threw sticks, played hide and seek behind the trees, and then on the last leg Scout just bounded up and down the path with general Border Collie joy.

Farther down the road Andy wanted to check something under the hood, so we pulled over for a riverside picnic. Though the Yukon is so wide it looks like a lake!

We panned for gold again after lunch, but no luck. We did see a fresh bear paw print in the mud near us, so we decided to make it a quicker stop and get back on the road.

We could see some storms ahead, which made the light moody and surreal.

When the most spectacular rainbow poured out of the sky, we followed it for a full 15 minutes before it evaporated back into the air.

The storm moved all around in the distance, and when we stopped outside Taro for the evening, we could actually see the sheets of rain traveling east along the riverbank.

It never hit us directly, so we basked in the after-storm light and played outside until the sun went down.

Everyone had a successful day, I think.

We had to try one last gold panning session before we left, so we played outside for a bit before packing up.

As I put the panning implements in the Turtle, I laughed at how instantly messy it gets in there, between the toys we keep out to use later, the mud we inevitably and consistently track in, the rocks I can’t stop collecting and have no room for, the boots laying on the floor that we removed to change into “gold-panning shoes”, the travel pamphlets shoved into the front console, among the other regular chaos specific to Turtle life.

I decided to take a picture for posterity, since in 20 years we’ll want to remember the reality of our lives and not just the pretty pictures immediately post-clean-up. Right as I took out my camera, Scout came running to the door to see what I was up to, and the smile on his face and mud on his paws inadvertently made the photo complete: the reason we live this lifestyle, messy as it may be. At the end of the day, we all have that goofy smile on our faces.

There weren’t many gas stations around, so we stopped in Taro for a fill-up and an ogle at this awesome orange beast.

Then back onto beautiful Highway 4 toward Watson Lake, which we’d be passing through one more time on our way into British Columbia and Alberta. But first we had to stop at what was to become our Favorite Campsite Ever, a free pullout on postcard-worthy Finlayson Lake.

Due to the burn ban, we hadn’t been able to have a fire for months, and it seemed like fate that the ban had been lifted right as we came upon this site, complete with cut firewood scattered around for the taking.

We were sitting just a little elevated from the water, overlooking the lake. There was no one around except the two people flying sea planes nearby. It was crisp, cool and clear, and we were on cloud nine that we got to live there for a whole day.

It was such a perfect spot that I took a quick video of the fire so that in future years we can relive the moment.

If we didn’t have the winter weather nipping at our heels, we would have stayed for days. But that chill wasn’t far behind, so we moved on toward Watson Lake.

We thought it would be fun to go visit our signs at the Signpost Village, especially because it’s not too often these days that we’re somewhere familiar. There they were!

Then on we drove into the endless green and gold mountains and valleys of British Columbia.

We had a garbage bag to toss, so we pulled over at a viewpoint to use the waste bins, and accidentally stumbled across this vista.

And this was the view from the other side of the parking lot! Beautiful British Columbia, indeed.

And then to add even more icing to the British Columbia cake, we stopped at Liard Hot Springs and accidentally had the time of our lives. We’d read about it over and over while researching the area, but didn’t think much more of it than “Sure, we could stop at a hot springs; that sounds nice.”

It was wonderful. It’s a provincial park and not privately-run, so for starters it’s really affordable. The day use fee is just $5 per person, but the hot springs fee is waived if you’re camping, which is $26 a night. That’s actually a little on the spendy side for boondockers, but it’s also really nice to have water and garbages at your disposal now and then, in addition to the free hot springs. So we paid for our site, got settled and then went straight to the hot springs.

It’s a beautiful walk down the boardwalk to the springs, over the warm marsh that is very popular with the wildlife, especially during winter.

For a developed hot springs site, this one is surprisingly untouched in all the best ways.

There are bathrooms, changing rooms, and a deck, but other than those few comforts it’s just a lovely pond that’s a piping hot 110-120 degrees at the source and then cools the farther away it travels from there. So the upper pool stays super toasty, and the lower pool is a perfectly warm and slightly deeper swimming pool.

We loved it so much we spent a few hours there on our first trip before going back for dinner and some travel planning.

The Anti-Project always has other plans, but luckily she has a short attention span and was soon on the prowl for buggies while we got a little work done.

As we planned we decided we weren’t ready to leave the hot springs already, so we decided to stay another day, then went back for our night soak. Liard doesn’t have closing hours since it’s a natural springs, so we got to soak until late when we were ready for bed.

The next day was another sunny fall day, perfect for multiple trips to the hot springs.

That night as we splashed around the warm lower pool and visited with some other travelers, the Northern Lights came out in enormous green flickering bands that twisted and arched from one side of the sky to the other over our heads. We laid on our backs and floated in the steaming water, watching the lights and laughing out loud at how perfect it all was.

When we got back to the Turtle, it was late and we were all warm, cozy and ready to snuggle up. While we got ready for bed, Gracie crashed out under her own personal quilt that my niece Ava made for her before we could even make it up to the loft!

With plans to return as soon as possible—especially in the snowy winter months—we got everyone ready to move on.

Gracie’s preferred and self-appointed travel spot is in a clothes bin in the closet, which is kept open for her as we drive. Usually when it’s time to go she hears the engine start and hops into her spot, but if she doesn’t sometimes we have a conversation about it to give her a chance to get in before we start moving. And it’s adorable.

And with the huge skies of the Yukon in our rear view mirror, we set our sights on the road ahead.

The Road to Alaska – Part 5: Yukon! Valdez! Gracie Cleans Her Tail!

Everything you’ve heard about the drive to Alaska is true.

Ok, wait.

I guess I don’t know what you’ve heard about the drive to Alaska. Let’s go with this instead: if you’ve heard that the drive to Alaska is mile after mile of astonishingly beautiful scenery that seems too enormous and perfect to exist in real life, then what you’ve heard is true.

Especially once you hit Yukon. I have so many photos of this drive that I promise you’re hoping I never show up at your house for a slide show. Because it would take longer to show you all the gorgeous scenery and tell the stories than it took to drive through it. But here are a few of my favorites.

Right??

If you make the drive, be sure to multiply your estimated drive time by 2 to account for all the stoping and staring you’ll be doing.

The beauty didn’t stop once we hit Alaska, of course. We went to Valdez, where we’d been told the best fishing awaited us. You’ll just have to believe me when I tell you that I caught a fish on my very first cast, and then caught two more before Andy had even finished attaching his lure! (In all fairness, he’d gallantly put mine on first, which is why I was fishing already. But it just goes to show you how good the fishing is in Valdez!) We estimate that we caught 25 fish—dollys and humpys. We kept two to bring with us and released the rest, not because we didn’t want them, but we just didn’t have any room left in the fridge after all the fish we caught in Haines. A fine problem to have, it’s true.

From Valdez, we took a very early ferry over to Whittier. As we drank our coffee and admired the ocean, the fog made the horizon completely disappear, which was lovely.

As the sun rose, a chubby little porcupine came out of the bushes and delighted everyone in the ferry line.

The Valdez-Whittier trip is about 4.5 hours, and so beautiful that even though it got chilly we stayed posted up on the deck under our blankets for most of the ride.

Once we arrived in Whittier, we drove straight on to Anchorage. We had so much fun visiting friends while we were there that I’ll make a separate post to cover all those adventures.

For now, I’ll make the title of the post accurate with the following pictures of Gracie cleaning her tail.

The Road to Alaska – Part 4: Yukon and Haines

So if you’ve been following along, I think it’s pretty apparent that some of the real highlights of our travels for me have been all the wildlife sightings! Since we began the trip through Canada to Alaska, my face has been pressed against the window on the lookout for animals, and so far we’ve seen some really fun ones, including foxes, swans, herons, marmots, seals, and more bald eagles than I can count. I have a list in the Turtle of all the animals we’ve spotted, which includes a running tally of all the bears we’ve encountered.

Shortly after we crossed over into Yukon, the total increased by three at once when we saw a mama bear with her two tiny cubs! I lost my mind. They even stayed close enough to the road as we drove by for me to get a few photos, which Andy had to remind me to do since I was too consumed by delight to remember to get my phone out. I’m so glad he did! Look at these sweethearts.

I added three marks to the list as we drove away, and soon afterward we took a detour to visit Watson Lake, YT. We thought we’d stay the night there, but the small town was so overcrowded and chaotic that we decided to resupply at the small grocery store, visit the famous Sign Post Village, and then get back on the road.

The Sign Post Village is an attraction that started when a homesick G.I. hung a sign for his hometown on a directional signpost in his army camp. Later, others began adding their own signs to the post, and as of today there are somewhere around 72,000 signs from all over the world there, hung on fences, trees and posts.

Well, now it’s closer to 72,002. . .

We happened to have two of those little Oregon license plates with our names printed on them in Andy’s toolbox (and a cordless drill), so we’re now officially part of the Sign Post Village! (Andy would probably like me to mention here that they’re even affixed with nice stainless steel screws. He was pretty excited about that detail.)

Our next stop was Whitehorse, YT—a good spot to grab a beer at Yukon Brewing and plan out the next few days. We’ve been in such remote and wild areas throughout northern BC and Yukon and the sporadic cell signals have left us more off-grid than usual. And since we never have any travel plans laid out more than a day or two in advance, we’ve been enjoying the good old-fashioned “roll into town, go to the Visitors Center, find a map, and hopefully it has tips on things to do in the area” approach. This pairs nicely with the “go to the local brewery, meet some locals, and ask them what’s fun around here” method.

But it is also nice to arrive in a town that’s large enough to have cell service (and a grocery store that carries flavored sparkling water because we’re addicted and are having a hard time getting our fix up here). That way we can come up with a general game plan that includes great hikes or museums, places to dump tanks and fill up with water, and fire up our favorite campsite apps to ensure we wake up to a lake as often as possible. (Fellow travelers, we enthusiastically recommend Allstays and iOverlander for finding perfect free sites. We’ve stayed at so many incredibly beautiful campsites and overnight parking spots that we never would have found on our own.)

The points of interest we visited in Whitehorse, however, were discovered without assistance from Google. As we drove into town, Andy saw a crazy-cool vehicle parked outside of the Museum of Transportation and declared that it would be our first stop the following day. And so it was. The museum was super interesting, and had some of the most inventive murals and displays we’ve ever seen. But the very best part (for one of us) was definitely the LCC-1 Overland Train, the only one of its kind in the world and the reason we went to the museum in the first place. Andy ogled and I took pictures.

We got a deal on admission if we visited both museums in town, so after having lunch at our dining table in the sunny parking lot we went to the Beringea Museum next door and enjoyed that quite a bit too. Our tour guide was excellent!

Not our tour guide.

We left Whitehorse—and Yukon altogether—and crossed back over the border into Alaska to visit Skagway.

On the way, we saw this:

Before getting to this:

One day in Skagway didn’t seem like it would be enough, but we also wanted to take the ferry into Haines so we bought a ticket for the following day and spent the rest of the day soaking in the town and shopping with the myriad cruise ship tourists. We took a brothel tour at the Red Onion Saloon, had a beer at the Brewery, and bought a few nice warm hats, which seemed like a good idea at the time even though it’s presently very warm and sunny up here.

The next day we loaded our house onto the ferry, and while Scout and Gracie took floating naps down below, we enjoyed the scenery from the bow. It’s a quick trip, and I wanted to stay on that ferry so much longer than we did. One of these days we’ll take a days-long ferry so I can read a book in my sleeping bag on an exterior top-deck lounge chair like we saw a few others doing and it really struck my fancy.

It’s such a pleasure to visit so many different towns and cities as we travel, and extra-specially fun when we really connect with a town. Well it happened again, this time in Haines, and though we’d planned on staying just a day we found ourselves enjoying the town for three! We had so much fun.

A definite thrill was getting to see the grizzly bears that fish in the Chilkoot river. Going to the spot they frequent was a bit of a zoo (pardon the pun) as all the tourists flock there at feeding time—us included. But it was worth the crowd; we saw a female grizzly casually swimming and picking at salmon one day, and two young ones crossing the road to the bridge to catch dinner the next evening. It was awesome.

We also were not surprised at how much we liked the Hammer Museum, since we’d been looking forward to it for days. Well worth the $5 admission, especially because the kids working there were so knowledgeable and ready to share interesting points about the hammers we were looking at. And there were 2,000 hammers to look at.

On our third day in Haines we got our fishing licenses and went to Chilkoot Lake to post up and see if we could catch some fish. The bears were making it look pretty fun, and I suppose all the fishermen dotting the river were a good sign that the humans were having some luck as well. We decided to go to the lake even though the river seemed to be the popular spot, as it was quieter there and with less of a chance of having to defend our catch (and our lives) from the hungry bears who more often frequent the river.

The weather cooperated beautifully, and as we cast we enjoyed the scenery as well as the company of the friendly people we met throughout the day. But the best part was the luck we had! Andy’s summary of the day went something like this: “Before we lived in the Turtle, that day of fishing would have been something to plan and look forward to all year, then remember all the next year. But today we just accidentally happened upon it and it was a most incredible day of fishing, and we could stay and do it again if we wanted!” It’s true, and we’re so grateful that we’ve been able to live our dream and have opportunities like this. What a day.

We were having so much fun we couldn’t stop casting until the sun started to go down around 10 p.m. and chilled us enough to drive us indoors. We cleaned and filleted the fish, then had some for dinner at “our spot” at a turnout by the ocean. All three nights we were in Haines we stayed at the same turnout, which we loved for the views and also that it was set back from the road enough that we could walk the animals around on their leashes with plenty of room to explore.

Gracie enjoyed perching on the barrier for maximum water gazing, and while she was sitting so nicely I told everyone to stay still so I could take a picture.

Nailed it!

Saying goodbye to Haines was difficult, but if we stayed any longer, we’d end up being locals. So we had one more Frisbee session at the park by the library and we drove on.

Back into the Yukon! Woo hoo!

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