Time to Head Home
After seven weeks on the road it was time to head back home to Minnesota, so we hitched up the car and headed northeast out of Skagway on the Klondike Highway toward the Canadian border. The drive is quite pretty as you climb the Coast Range mountains, roughly following the route of many of the stampeders on their way to the Klondike in the late 1800s via the White Pass trail. We took a shortcut across Tagish Road (Rt 8) from Carcross get to the southbound Alaska Highway at Jake’s Corner. From there it was a pretty uneventful trip past Teslin Lake, through the town of Watson Lake, Yukon Territory and along the Liard River.
MacDonald Campground
As the day wound down we needed to find a place to stay. Our first try was Strawberry Flats Campground on Muncho Lake, but unfortunately all the sites were marked as reserved online and even though there were a few that were vacant, we were unable to get a cell signal (not uncommon in those parts) and couldn’t verify avalability. After driving through Strawberry Flats we decided to backtrack a few miles and try our luck at MacDonald Campground, also right on the lake. As luck would have it there were a couple of sites available so we picked one, paid $20 Canadian and set up camp for the night. All of the sites at MacDonald are waterfront and we had a beautiful view of the lake. We even had a small campfire with some wood that a kind fellow camper gave us.
Kiskatinaw Provincial Park and the End of the Alaska Highway
Our last overnight stop on the Alaska Highway was Kiskatinaw Provincial Park, which was created around the Kiskatinaw River Bridge. It’s a curved, banked wooden structure and part of the original Alaska Highway. Until fairly recently you could drive across the bridge, but it’s now blocked off from vehicular traffic. A new bridge was built a couple miles away and the highway was re-routed there in the ’70s. There’s a small campground in the park where we found a nice site for our last night on the Alaska Highway.
The End of the Alaska Highway and Back to the U.S.
From Kiskatinaw it’s a short drive to Dawson Creek and the end of the Alaska Highway. We took Highway 43 from Dawson Creek to Edmonton and then over to Saskatoon and on to Regina, where we spent the night at Buffalo Lookout Campground. It’s a nice little RV Park east of Regina. From Regina we headed south and east, crossing into the U.S. at Portal, ND and from there it was pretty much straight down US 52 to the Twin Cities.
Check out the rest of our posts from Alaska on our blog page.
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