July 13: On the AlCan: Charley Lake to Muncho Lake
Bob: We had a typical simple camping breakfast, hot oatmeal I think, and then disattached the tent from the car and folded everything back up to fit behind the back seats under the hatch. Deflating the air mattresses, rolling the pads, stuffing the sleeping bags, folding up the chairs, and rolling up the tent so it would fit back into its bag all took quite a bit of time, especially as we were so out of practice. But thankfully it DID all fit in OK, and we were on our way North by about 9 o'clock. The landscape for the first part of the day was flat or gently rolling land as we were still far to the East of the Rocky Mountains. But once we made the big turn to the West that you see in the map above, the scenery quickly became spectacular--bare-sided gray mountains with some snow still on them, roaring rivers in rugged gorges, and crystalline mountain lakes. Fantastic! |
Monika: We slept pretty well in car and had hot cereal for breakfast, not bad. Packed up everything and started out on rather deserted streets. By lunch time we had gotten to Fort Nelson, the last relatively large town. So after lunch we tried to find an axe, but all we could find was a hammer and some flip flops for me to walk in the campground. We also filled up on gas and got more money from an ATM before we went on. Up until now we had driven north alongside the Rockies through the foothills. Now we turned west and started some serious climbing. It was a very pretty drive but also slow because of the curving, hilly road with many pretty bridges and lakes. |
Bob: We encountered our first bear on the road, a black bear, but he or she didn't seem to like the heat either and quickly retreated into the underbrush. A peculiar animal called a "stone sheep", an odd mountain breed of wild sheep with a raggedy coat and surprisingly long, spindly legs, also ambled along the shoulder of the highway at one point. |
Monika: We did see our first wildlife: a very strange looking Rock Sheep, and a bear who decided to amble away when we stopped to take a picture. |
Bob:
Although in the morning we had broken camp at a primitive campsite, by the evening we had decided to spend a night in the lap of luxury at the Northern Rockies Lodge at Lake Muncho--quite a shift in ambiance! Why did we choose the lodge? Well, partly, we chose the lodge because we wanted clean sheets and a hot shower, but partly we simply wanted someplace cool as the outside air temperature was hovering at 85 degrees despite being way far North and in the middle of the Canadian Rockies! We both felt the interior of the lodge would be cooler than a tent would have been. A plus was a great view out towards Muncho Lake, one of those pristine lakes that dot the Canadian Rockies. |
Monika: Our goal was Muncho Lake, where there were two campgrounds and a lodge. It was rather hot 88 degrees, which would be Washington D.C. weather, but not the Canadian Rockies, for goodness sake! We decided to splurge and stayed at the lodge, a very beautiful place right next to the lake, but no AC. But they did have a nice shower and we felt cleaner after having showered. But it remained hot, and when we finally opened the balcony door after the sun had gone down, we got the noise from the people on the restaurant patio, directly underneath our room. But we had a beautiful view! |
July 14: On the AlCan: Muncho Lake to Watson Lake
Bob: We had our room door and balcony door open for some cross-ventilation after the sun went down. That cooled us off for sure but also kept us awake as our room was directly above the outdoor dining area of the lodge's restaurant and we could clearly hear all the conversations! The restaurant closed at 10 p.m., fortunately, so we got to sleep then and slept well through the night. The next morning dawned clear and cool enough that we decided to take a walk down to the lake. Muncho Lake was a typical Alpine lake, pristinely clean, crystal clear, and a beautifully deep shade of blue. Surprisingly, we saw a nice turboprop 6-passenger float plane tied up at a dock on the shoreline. Given the paucity of roads in the North, float planes using the lakes and rivers as airports are much more common than they are in the "Lower 48" states. |
Monika: We finally got to sleep a little after 10, since the dining room closed and the revelers below us were escorted out, but not without a final song by one of the more inebriated men. Blessed quiet broke out, and although it was still light, we got to sleep easily. When I woke up around 2:30, it was again light but I did manage to get back to sleep. But when I woke up the next time around 4:45 I could not longer sleep. I managed to remain quiet until after six, but then I had to go to the bathroom and Bob woke up. We decided to walk down to the lake. It was a beautiful lake surrounded by mountains. There even was a float plane at a dock. So photographic opportunities abounded. |
Bob: I had wanted to have breakfast at the Lodge, but the restaurant prices turned out to be absurdly high, even by resort standards. So in the end we simply checked out and started on our way North, looking for a likely place to stop and have breakfast. As we left, I noticed a gaggle of motorcycles in the parking lot, and one Honda Gold Wing in particular was equipped with some extra plastic gas tanks that had a hole in the center and were designed to fit snugly down over the little hitch on the rear of the bike. Clever! We did in fact find breakfast at a small, unprepossessing roadside cafe that had reasonable prices, considering how far up the AlCan they had to truck all their food and other supplies. This Mom-and-Pop type place was of course fairly slow to prepare our orders, but they did also offer free Wifi so we entertained ourselves by quickly checking our email and Face book page while we waited for breakfast. After breakfast, I felt a LOT more optimistic about our trip, which just goes to show the effect that a good meal will have on your mood! Continuing North through northern British Columbia, we enjoyed that section of the Canadian Rockies, which was rugged indeed. The scenery got a little more gentle as we finally entered the Yukon and turned westward in the direction of Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon Territory. Curiously, we saw some buffalo herds on the berm beside the shoulders of the road--apparently they were introduced into this region as a part of some kind of a preservation effort and have survived and prospered on any patches of open grassland. We also saw the first bear that I could be reasonably sure was a grizzly bear ambling along the roadside. |
Monika: We packed up and got on our way a little before 8, deciding to have breakfast 50 km farther up the road. But that place was in the middle of a road construction stretch and we went on for another 50 km. By that time, we both were getting very hungry, since dinner last night had been a little skimpy. But the breakfast was great, I had French toast, Bob had an omelet and we shared. They also had Wifi, so between munching and drinking pretty good coffee we could check our email. All around a win-win situation. We continued on to Watson Lake. The scenery at the beginning was very dramatic mountains but the valley widened a bit and the mountains were less rough as we entered into the Yukon. Along the side of the road we saw several groups of buffalo grazing and also a bear ambling across the road. There also was a lot of road construction, thus although the total distance was only around 250 kilometers, it took us 4 hours to get to Watson Lake. |
Bob: After splurging on the lodge the previous night, we decided to once again try our hand at camping. To that end, we picked the provincial campground on the other side of the lake from the town of Watson Lake. The campground was really deserted, which always makes me a bit uneasy, truth be told, but we picked out a nice site underneath some trees for shade and relatively convenient to the water tap and toilets, which were unfortunately pit or vault toilets. That is not our first choice of facilities--we prefer flush toilets--but pit or vault toilets were the norm in the public campgrounds in the Far North. The campground also featured a separate food preparation area complete with bear proof food lockers, which I thought was a jolly fine idea and MUCH safer than having food storage and preparation at our campsite. However, the food locker required a lock and we didn't have one! So one item on our shopping list when we went back to Watson Lake for the afternoon was to find a little lock of some kind, which we finally did locate along with a small hand ax for splitting wood, at a small sundries-plus-hardware store in the town. Since we were already in town, we had lunch at a local burger joint (way too far out in the boondocks for a fast-food chain), and wandered about a bit. Quite to our astonishment, we found a full-sized, honest-to-god IMAX theater in the middle of this teensy-tiny town (less than 1,000 people for sure) which is located in the middle of absolute NOWHERE! Apparently, the Canadian government for some obscure reason supports the Northern Lights Center with its IMAX theater way, way out in the boondocks. We were the beneficiaries of this economically dubious arrangement, and we saw two crackerjack IMAX movies there. The first one was about Black Holes, what causes them, and what it would be like to go into one! Impressive! The second movie was at least vaguely related to the theme of the museum in that it featured absolutely stunning movie clips of the Aurora Borealis, otherwise known as the Northern Lights. Boy if you ever get a chance, see that film in an IMAX theater because that 180 degree surrounding view is probably the closest thing you will ever get to seeing the real phenomenon. (I have seen the real thing and can vouch for the fact that it is rather spooky to watch.) After the movie, I saw a do-it-yourself car wash place and, taking pity on our poor car, which had been almost covered with the remains of large black dragon flies further South, we decided to take some time and wash it. I don't know if the car felt better, but I surely felt better driving it! |
Monika: We had decided to set up camp in a public campground 5km north of Watson Lake and then come back into the town. The campground was quite empty and had nice spaces under the trees. So we picked a nice space close to the bathrooms (pit). We noticed, they also had a cooking area and bear proof lockers for the food. Everything looked rather nice, except the mosquitoes, who seem to be abundant. Back in town we decided we needed lunch, an axe, a small lock, gas, and we also wanted to see the show about Northern Lights. Lunch was at a local greasy spoon, not a bad hamburger and a salad instead of the French fries for me, while Bob had a hearty soup and a tuna salad sandwich. Thus fortified it took us a while to search the stores, but we actually found a small axe for fires. At the gas station we saw a do-it-yourself car wash and decided to treat the car since the poor thing was covered in bugs. There were two shows in the Northern Lights planetary style IMAX theater. The first was on black holes and very well done. The second on the Aurora explained the phenomenon and then had stunning movie footage covering the whole sky. Well worth the price of admission. |
Bob: Watson Lake's one claim to fame is a "Sign Forest" started by a homesick soldier during the initial construction of the AlCan highway by the U.S. Army in 1942. He stuck up a signpost with a sign for his home town back in the U.S. Other soldiers followed suit, and soon there was a stand of posts with signs from towns all over the U.S.A. in a little field on the edge of town. In the decades after WW II, tourists followed in that tradition and kept adding more and more signs from cities and towns all across America and even from more distant points around the world like Europe. Attached to the Sign Forest was a visitor's center with the usual very helpful Canadian staff people and a small museum concerning the construction of the AlCan highway. The museum was chock full of odd tidbits about the history of the highway, including the fact that although the Army bulldozed the initial roadway through to Alaska in 8 months, much if not most of the road was then rebuilt by civilian contractors over the next couple of years. Did you know the route of the AlCan was basically arranged to connect a series of airfields that led up to Alaska? One curious exhibit was a WW II poster which showed the AlCan being used to equip Alaska with fighters and bombers to strike the home islands of Japan. The actual events, however, were that the "island-hopping" naval war in the Pacific Ocean was ultimately used to bring bombers within range of Japan rather than using Alaska as a staging area, which would have been fraught with weather-related difficulties for 9 months of the year! Although tempted to add a sign to the Sign Forest, I had neglected to bring one with, so we just returned to camp after our afternoon in Watson Lake. Although we had picked a site with the best of intentions in the middle of the day, as dusk fell a cloud of very hungry and very motivated mosquitoes descended on our camp site. We were super happy to connect the car to the tent, and then sit in the tent for the rest of the evening, protected by the tent's mosquito netting. Going to the bathroom, however, was a bit like running the gauntlet in that we raced over and back to avoid as many of the mosquitoes as possible. |
Monika: But Watson Lake is best known for its Sign Forest. At the visitor's center people driving the AlCan have for a long time put up any sign, official or homemade. Anybody can put up a sign. There were lots of wooden signs with peoples names, old license plates from all over, but also town signs like you see at the entrance into a town. A rather large number of these came from German towns, but there also was one from Burlington where Lois used to live, and she and Merlin did drive by here a few years ago.....hmmmmm... The visitor center itself gave us a lot of information on the Yukon and the AlCan. They had a movie and exhibit on the building of the highway. In 1942 the USA needed a road to connect Alaska to the lower 48. Roosevelt announced the building of the road from Dawson Creek to Fairbanks two weeks before the Canadians agreed. The army was mobilized and in 8 months the road was built. It was said that at times the surveyors had a hard time staying ahead of the bulldozers. Back at camp we donned our mosquito jackets and had noodle soup. We put the rain fly on the tent, the food into the bear locker and set the back of the Prius up for the night. |
