June 2019 – The Al-Can Highway, a dream realized!

We’ve dreamed of this for years and it finally happened, crossing the Canadian border, cruising through British Columbia and the Yukon Territory, and finally hitting the Alaska border!

We have lots of pics to share with you from our travels up the Al-Can through Canada to Fairbanks, AK, so sit back and relax and take a tour of Northern Canada with us!

Dawson Creek, British Columbia- Mile Zero

Two days of camping here just to get the lay of the land and get the obligatory tourist photos… 🙂

We drove anywhere from 200 to 400 miles in a day, depending on how easy or difficult it was to find camping. One highlight was boondocking beside the Racing River in a pullout beside the river on Crown Lands (think BLM land in the States), so it was FREEEE!

So the dirt in front of the Beast, harmless enough when we pulled in, turned into a mud bog after a night of rain! Our choices were to stay through the forecast of rain, rain and more rain, then wait until it dried out before we could exit, or bail now and hope we could pull out of here up the small incline to the highway. We opted to bail out, and we had the Beast hooked up and ready to drive out in less than 30 minutes. And it was a good thing we did! It rained continually for two full days, but we motored down the road and parked ourselves in what turned out to be one of my favorite places on this whole trip– Liard Hot Springs Provincial Park, British Columbia. Wow. Just wow. Natural hot springs, developed enough to make it easy to get to (a short stroll on a boardwalk through the marsh, where we actually saw a moose one day), past tropical-type vegetation to the most wonderful natural hot tub we’ve ever seen. It. Was. Wonderful:

I didn’t want to leave here, but the road was calling, so onward we went. The next few days were mostly stopovers for a couple nights rest, so check out the new web page, Scenes from the Road.

Hundreds of miles later, we stopped in the town of Whitehorse, Yukon, to provision up, rest, and see some sights. We had more fun that we thought we would… turns out Whitehorse is a great home base to tour a fantastic area, including our first foray into our primary destination– Alaska! Whitehorse was only a 2-hour drive to Skagway, Alaska, so how could we NOT? Because of its location, Skagway would have been tough for us to get to from any other place, so here are some scenes from that terrific day trip, including the drive down Alaska Highway 1 through the Yukon. By the way, the Beast stayed snug in its campsite in Whitehorse:

Then, just as we were getting used to kilometers and liters, we’re back to miles and gallons, if only temporarily!

We loved Skagway and could have stayed a week, but the Beast was waiting for us in Whitehorse and there were other sights to see. The next day, anxious to get some fishing in, we went up the road a few miles to a small boat launch on the Yukon river. At first we drifted downstream through some channels and grasses that would have taken us out to Marsh Lake, a 19-mile long lake that is part of the Yukon drainage.

But we realized we had better head back upstream before we got too tired, so we returned to the boat launch. BUT… the view upstream looked too tempting to ignore, so we kept on paddling. And the landscape went from peaceful and semi-developed to wild beauty:

The peaceful interlude over, the next day we hit the road towards our main goal of Alaska. Skip on over to Scenes from the Road to see just how the drive looked (and felt… owww, the bumps!).