The Yukon

The Yukon.

At Watson Lake where today’s travel started, we saw a unique item: The Signpost Forest, a “forest” of upwards of a thousand 15’ tall 4 X 4 posts anchored in the ground and covered front and back with signs.  Street signs, city signs, homemade signs, signs made of wood, metal, plastic, bedpans, saucepans, license plates.  One sad note: while the ladybug was posing amidst all this, she escaped my fingers and fell down between the floorboards of the forest entryway.  With no way to retrieve her, we were forced to leave her there.  But when we return on our way back to post our sign,  I’ll come equipped to try to get her back.

Our ride took us across most of the width of the Yukon.  The landscape was an odd combination of mountains, desert and plains.  At points it was very much like the Adirondacks with forested mountains rarely rising above treeline, and the road wandering past pretty lakes.  This part was quite nice.  At other points, however, it was like a deserted gravel pit, with rocks, gravel, and scrubby plants strewn all over.  The overall affect was quite distinctly not pretty, I have to say.

 The temperature was in the upper 50’s but we still felt more comfortable in long underwear, sweatshirts, jackets, rainjackets, and neck warmers.  These were especially appreciated after an afternoon headwind picked up.

We have stopped now in Haines Junction and are relaxing in the bar of the first hotel offering fair value we’ve hit on our whole trip.  There’s a nice breeze flowing through the sunny doorway.  It’s now 6:00 and the barkeep tells us that sunset won’t be for another 6 hours.  She hands us a printout of the forecast confirming sunset at 23:44 and sunrise at 4:37.  I also see that there’s rain ahead for tomorrow.

The road today was much less well maintained, mostly suffering from frost heaves and patched potholes.  Fuel was not a problem.  Although some of the stations I plotted during planning were long since abandoned, others that had been too small to appear on maps have surfaced at key spots.  Our reserve remained untouched.  We have become almost cocky about it, and are seriously considering trekking from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay–a stretch of 500 miles with nothing burnable I can find–so we can touch the Artic Ocean and spend a night with no sunset at all.  Sebastian figures that we can dump most of our luggage in Fairbanks, load up with gallons of fuel and make it no sweat.

-Peter