Day 9: Watson Lake to Haines Junction, YT, via Skagway, Alaska

The plan for the day was the Alaska Highway, route 1 through the Yukon. It could be Minnesota Iron Range except for the mountains up ahead. And the lack of roadkill. Whether the lack of roadkill is because there are not enough cars to hit anything or that there isn’t anything to hit (our game sightings today consisted of one bear), I couldn’t say.

We stopped at Rancheria Falls to stretch our legs and play with the pano feature on my phone.

The highway dipped back into British Columbia (Super Natural!) and then returned to Yukon (Larger than Life).

About then Steve got this super idea. He accuses me of always wanting to know what is around the next corner, but today he was the one eager to leave the main road. Route 8 led south to a town called Carcross (short for Cariboo Crossing, but we didn’t see any). Here's their hundred-year-old Anglican church.

Another road angles back toward Whitehorse, the capital of Yukon, but the road that interested us was the one to Skagway, Alaska.

At the suggestion of the woman in the tourist information office, we picnicked at the boat launch at Tutshi Lake (pronounced Too Shy).

We thought that was fabulous and then we climbed to the snowfields and water meadows at the top of the pass, passing tour buses from Skagway as we did.

If any of you have cruised Alaska, you have no doubt been to Skagway, a tourist town if there ever was one, lined with 19^th century-style shops with a gold rush theme. When we were last here, I did the nine-hour hike to a glacier and back while Steve and Mom took the train we had taken the first time we were here. Today we drove and (while our brakes cooled!) looked across the valley at the train we had ridden before.

When brakes are smoking, they take about fifteen minutes to cool so there was plenty of time to explore.

My daughters will remember that feeling when you mingle with the clean and neat tourists who have taken the cable car to the top of Table Mountain while you have sweated your way up the trail. The feeling was very similar as we parked our dusty car on a street with a couple hundred pedestrians for every vehicle and went in for ice cream. (I have not mastered the art of the selfie or you would see my chocolate cone as well as Steve’s butter brickle.)

We oo-ed and ah-ed our way back over the mountains The scenes we had enjoyed on the way in looked pretty blah on the way out. The day could not have been more perfect, and we made sure the Lord knew how much we appreciated it.

Tonight we are in a simple but clean motel in Haines Junction. It would have been neat to take the ferry from Skagway to Haines and come over the Coastal Range at ta different point, but the next ferry didn’t leave until 2:30 tomorrow. Next time …

Afghan update: No ripping out! Just a few … um … adjustments.