Beaver Creek to Haines Junction

Another day of driving. . . not so many miles, but lots of bad road. Never is easy. The road had frost heaves today with lots of roadway that just drops so it is always a challenge to drive it. Then there were at least two lengths of road probably about 10 miles long each that were gravel and washboard. And there are also those people who fly by you like you are standing still and throw dust all over and then you can't see where you are going. But hopefully the bad road is now behind us. We haven't heard any more reports of bad road where we are headed now. And once we board the ferry, we will be sailing south and miss the remaining bad roads.

We did have some events today. The first was a moose cow knee deep in a pond way off the road. I stopped and Terry was able to get her with the zoom lens. He got perfect shots of her. We rolled on and sometime later we saw some traffic stopped and could see two shapes along the side of the road. I guessed correctly and it was a bear momma with one cub. So cute. They were on the road at the side and the traffic, which wasn't much, was stopped so as not to antagonize her. When she was further off to the side, the cars pulled out and slowly creeped around her. We stopped a ways back because with the zoom lens we don't need to be close. But we still had to pass her. The other traffic had cleared and I was able to pull out into the other lane and creep past her. She did not get excited or anything which was good. I think they were brown bears.

We were on and off of good and bad roads and we hit one nice stretch of smooth road. I kicked up my speed a bit and Terry started to doze. I was perusing the landscape and just as I settled into my higher speed I caught sight of a huge moose cow trotting up out of the ditch on my right. She was close and she was big! I had to slam on the brakes and nearly set MinnieMee on her nose. Just as I saw that she would clear the motorhome, I saw twin babies following her. Although I had slowed greatly from my speed, I was not yet stopped so I stood on the brake and stopped. The calves trotted past me by just a couple feet. All this action had jarred Terry and he struggled to aim the camera and shoot. He didn't think he got them, but when we looked at the pictures tonight, you can see all three in the picture. It's not a well defined picture because he was shooting into the sun, but you can see them just the same! The only casualty was a bar of soap. LOL Since we have been having to brake quickly for bad roads and wildlife, we always make certain nothing is out anywhere, as we don't want to get hit by any flying objects. Well in our little motorhome, the bath is in the back and I keep a bar of soap on the tray attached to the wall. It has NEVER moved. We keep the door to the bath open and the window shade up because we can then actually see out the back from the rear-view mirror. That bar of soap ended up on the floor between us. Hah. We had a good laugh about that. So the score is Moose 3: MinnieMee 0 and that's fine with me.

We passed by Kluane Lake which is a really large lake. . . in fact it is the largest lake in the Yukon. We had planned originally to stop here for the night, but we have decided to go to Skagway first instead of Haines. So we opted to have lunch by the lake and then drove on to Haines Junction for the night.

Haines Junction has a unique little church made out of a quansot  hut left over from the Army building the Alaska Highway. There is one similar to it in Beaver Creek as well.

These are views of our camp tonight.

Till next time. . . Dale