Alaska Highway - Watson Lake, YK

Yesterday, Friday the 13th we headed out of Dawson Creek and north on the Alaska Highway. The first part of the drive was through a more populated area of farm country and was a sunny drive to Fort St. John. Once past this point the landscape became all forested on both sides of the highway. Also, a few miles north of Fort St. John it clouded up and started to rain. We climbed in elevation to a little over 3800 feet and the rain became heavy snow for a long way - in fact was starting to accumulate on the roadway.



Then we went back down to a lower elevation and it became all rain again - and rained pretty much the rest of the drive. We stopped after 285 miles at Ft. Nelson, BC for the night and it rained for pretty much the rest of the afternoon.

As we were driving along in the rain, we saw 2 or 3 cars stopped beside the road ahead of us. First thought was they had spied a moose - there are moose warning signs all along. I slowed down to see what it was, but by the time we did see it, I was too far by to stop. It was two Grizzly Bears in the edge of the woods by the highway. LaVerne was mad at me for the rest of the day because I didn’t get stopped in time (and backing up in the motorhome with the Jeep back there is a no-no).

Today we left Ft. Nelson, BC with much better weather - a mix of clouds and sun all day with a couple of light showers along the way. Not far out of Ft. Nelson we left the sparsely populated areas and headed into the northern portion of the Canadian Rockies which extend up in to northern British Columbia and the Yukon Territory. We started at an elevation of around 1300 feet and proceeded to climb up and go down for a couple of hundred miles. We crossed a couple of summits that were around 4600 feet, then down into beautiful river valleys at around 2500 feet. Really fantastic scenery. Here’s some pictures --







Along the way we saw some wildlife - although not as much as we’d hoped for. We saw deer, several buffalo, and 5 separate Black Bears, but no Caribou or sheep. The second leg of the Alaska Highway today was 325 miles and we stopped for the night at Watson Lake, YK. This is where the world famous “Sign Post Forest” is located - they have hundreds of posts with thousands of signs that people from all over the world have put up. After getting our campsite set up for the night went into town and checked it out and put up our sign!





Tomorrow the adventure continues!