Bears, Bison and… Army Trucks?
On our third day we traveled up the highway, starting toward Whitehorse, a town of nearly 30,000 people in Yukon Territory. The road from Teslin to Whitehorse was in decent shape and isn’t too challenging to drive because it doesn’t have a lot of tight curves to navigate. Along the way we saw a number of wood bison along the highway. These animals are a subspecies of bison related to the more common plains bison. They’re native to Alaska and the western part of Canada. We also got to see a mother grizzly bear and her cubs alongside the highway.
After Whitehorse the next large town is Haines Junction, where the Haines Highway (Which predictably goes to Haines, Alaska, one of only two cities in Alaska’s panhandle that are accessible by road from the lower 48.) meets the Alaska Highway. Haines has about 700 residents and is the gateway to Canada’s Kluane National Park and contains some of the tallest mountains in North America. From Whitehorse to Haines Junction you can start to see a degredation in the road conditions with gravel breaks in the road and dips and heaves due to frost.
From Haines Junction the highway heads north toward Kluane Lake. The conditions for this stretch are pretty much the same as the previous stretch – intermitten gravel breaks, frost heaves, dips and potholes. The road has some winding stretches along Kluane Lake and some really impressive mountain/lake scenery as well as some stretches that are marked as sheep crossings.
We were planning on camping at Congdon Creek along the lake, but after finding a finding a site we liked we went to get water only to find a sticker on the pump saying it was out of service. We had gone a couple of days since adding water to our tanks and really needed some, so we packed up and move on. About halfway up Kluane Lake is Destruction Bay, a town named because it was hit by a destructive storm years ago. After Destruction Bay the road is in pretty rough shape all the way to the Alaska border. It’s got long sections of paved, bumpy frost-heaved road with sections of a mile or more of washboard gravel road interspersed between. The speed limit is 70 kilometers per hour (42mph) through all of this and at times we were lucky to make 30 miles an hour. Tough going. Much of the road damage here due to thawing permafrost underneath the highway which is getting worse as our climate warms.
After striking out at Congdon Creek, we set our sights on Lake Creek Yukon Territorial Campground, about 50 miles to the north for our stop for the night. Unfortunately when we got there there was no water as well, even though The Milepost said it was available. Disappointed, we headed down the road another 10 or 15 miles to Discovery Yukon Lodgings and RV Park where we found a site available with no hookups, but at least they had water. We filled our water tank and had a nice quiet night there.
The RV park has an interesting combination of wall tents and cabins for rent in addition to the RV sites in an area with some great mountain views. There’s also a display of retired military vehicles ranging from an ambulance that evokes M*A*S*H memories to a steam shovel, many of which I assume are from the building of the highway. Behind the park there’s a grass airstrip used by medical emergency flights.
Check out our other Alaska Highway posts here.
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