Day 7 – Wildlife day
March 11th, 2009 Posted in 2008 Alaska trip2008-06-20, Friday
Toad River (07:58) to Big Creek Yukon Government campground (14:30)
This morning we left Toad River pretty early and continue the drive. The weather is very good and there is hardly any car on the road. Last night we were thinking perhaps we have been driving “too much” per day and didn’t get enough time in camp to enjoy the day. We made plans for a few days ahead and think we should aim for stopping around 4-5pm if we are camping, and 6-7pm if we will be staying in a hotel. We also decided to skip the Campbell Highway loop (via Ross River) to free up some extra days in case we needed more days later in the trip.
We spotted so many animals today we almost ran out of room recording them on the whiteboard!
For some reason David was being annoying all morning, but I cant remember what he did or why anymore. I’m only writing this down because this is on the log book and was in David’s handwriting. At Allen’s Lookout (“Historical Mile 570″) we stopped for some (morning) snacks and enjoy the scenic view of Liard River.
At “Historic Milepost 627″ we crossed the “official BC-YT” border. I think this is the only spot where there’s actually a sign saying this is a border. The Alaska Highway then goes between BC and YT several times before finally staying within YT border.
We get to Watson Lake, YT around noon and checked out the visitor center for some tourist information. The folks at the information center asked us which direction we are heading and quickly gathered a pile of info books: one for each city we will be passing through until the Canada-US border, campground maps and lists, and advise us to stop by the Northwest Territory visitor center at Dawson City if we are planning to take the Dempster highway to Inuvik. They also handed us a booklet for some sort of contest where we need to write down the number posted on each of the spot listed and turn in the booklet for some prizes drawing. OK. We weren’t really sure what the prizes are and the odds of winning is probably close to zero, but when you are a tourist you do what the tourists do!
After walking out of the visitor center with piles of books/maps with us we checked out the “signpost forest”. I guess this got started during the time folks were building the Alaska Highway, some soldier got homesick and posted the sign for his hometown then everyone started doing that. Over the year the signpost forest has grown significantly and I am not really sure if all those signs are legally obtained… I mean, some of those city signs look like they were “removed” from the city limit sign you see on roadside. According to the data posted at the visitor center the sign post count at 1988 is 6281, and by 2007 it’s 64371. We did not try to find out what it takes to put up a sign here (or if there’s any) since we come unprepared.
We walked around the “forest” looking for interesting signs. There are the usual city/town signs and lots of license plates. There is a pretty high number of foreign plates of any kind too, mostly European.
We did not see a sign for Milpitas, but we did see one for Fremont, even though there is a lot of city named Fremont in the US we are pretty sure this sign came from our neighboring city since it has the Fremont, CA logo.
After the signpost forest we went for a little grocery shopping at the local general store. Earlier at the visitor center we learned that Whitehorse is really only about 6 hours away but thinking that we will have an “easy day” we decided to stop at the Yukon Government campground at Big Creek which is about 2 hours away from Watson Lake.
We arrived at Big Creek campground around 2:30pm and picked a campsite to setup camp. This is the first Yukon Government campground we stayed in. The campground fee is CAN $12 and they supplied the firewood. We noticed most of the sites are really designed for RV and have gravel pads. It doesn’t really bother us to sleep on gravel since the REI sleeping pads we have are really comfortable. We picked out a campsite which turned out to be really two campsites, but the campground is pretty empty so we are pretty sure we wont have neighbor tonight.
In the Yukon when the sun doesn’t really set until 2am or something like that, 2:30pm is really in the middle of the day. We can definitely feel the heat too. Mistake number one for pulling into camp too early! Its way too warm to do anything, so we end up staying inside our pop-up shade most of the time. Mistake number two is we under estimated the mosquito population in Yukon. Not only do we have to deal with the heat we have to deal with mosquitoes! We both got a thick later of mosquito repellent on but it does not seem to help when we need to be outside the pop-up shade. I also found out I really hate the smell of one of the repellent (the spray on dry kind) and have to settle for the other “less effective” repellent.
Around dinner time we grilled some steak for dinner and David split some wood to build a campfire. We were thinking maybe the smoke from the fire will keep the mosquitoes away from us a bit, this sort of worked but not optimally.
Because we pulled into camp too early and end up being sort of miserable due to weather and mosquitoes, we spend a good amount of time re-plan some of the trip plan we made the previous night. We also decided when we get to Whitehorse tomorrow we are going to get some serious mosquito repellent gears!
Before going to bed it was still pretty bright outside so we walked around the campground checking things out a bit. There are like 4 groups (two RV, us and a couple in a smaller car) of camper staying at the campground for the night.
Distance today: 241.7 miles.
No FJ spotted
Wildlife spotted: gray wolf x1, deer/elk x1, moose x2, caribou x3, dall sheep x5, bear x2, bison x3