20030707                  Open new window with today’s pictures.

July 07, 2003
Monday

Start:   Moutain Shadow RV Park, Iskut BC
End:     Downtown RV Park, Watson Lake YT
Miles:   213
Hi Temp: 72.3
Lo Temp: 46.9

Link to pictures taken this day.

We ate in and got on the road around 8:30am. Despite the assurances of the owners yesterday, we saw no moose last night or this morning. There were a flock of barn swallows, which was good because there were a mess of mosquitos for them to eat. It was cool and mostly cloudy.

The scenery on the Cassiar today was very nice.  We went over one pass that was 4,000' high; the mountains on one side had a clearly defined tree-line, above which no trees grow.  Snow-topped, of course. The scenery was impressive but not terribly beautiful. The trees are now black spruce and aspen, with some birch. These are the high-latitude trees, those that can sustain themselves with a short growing season and can stand real cold.

We came upon another black bear, a sort of scruffy looking customer. We took a couple of pictures, but he's not that great.  We went on, and stopped at a place called "Jade City", which is near a place where jade is mined.  Here, they sell hand-polished (you can't machine-polish jade) charms and figurines. Dolores bought a pendant and a slab of jade that she wants to use in a project.  Then we went on up to the Alaska Highway.

We decided to come in the extra 15 miles to Watson Lake, Yukon, rather than stay at the juction of the Cassiar and the Alaska Highways.  We did some light shopping, got cash, and so forth.  There’s a new grocery store & bakery that looks very nice compared with what was there before. We had a light lunch in the trailer and a light dinner in the coffee shop at the hotel (the dining room was closed).

We did a little laundry this afternoon.  We got into a conversation with a couple who just arrived via the Mackenzie and Liard Highways, which we were planning on doing on our way out of the Yukon.  Their advice - don't. They say they've never seen such a bad road, and they've done that road several times.  They are driving a class "B" RV (a modified commercial van); if they had trouble with that thing, we'd really have problems with our rig.

Thus, we'll have to replan the part of our trip where we were going to go from Fort Nelson BC to Yellowknife NWT to Edmonton AB.  More later on that.

There are still quite a few rigs in this parking lot we're in (we've been here before, twice), but it seems that it may be fewer than two years ago.  Just a feeling.

The temperature stayed cool until we entered the Yukon, then it (perversely) warmed up to short-sleeve weather. The clouds went from mostly cloudy to mostly sunny, and the rest of the day was very nice.

Dolores settled in after dinner to watch TV (cable here with 7 or 8 channels, one of which is Detroit, another is Spokane). It's the damndest system.  Every now and then, the channel you're watching will change to another channel with a totally different program. It's like they have a schedule for this area alone and they pick the signal off satellites as they need it.

We were settling in, when there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find the campground owner.  He explained that both ends of my fresh-water hose had developed pinhole leaks, so he replaced it.  Now, I had taken a hose and cut it in two and inserted a filter between the two halves using radiator hose clamps.  Both ends had been leaking a drip a second; perhaps there's higher pressure here and the pinholes opened up.  In any case he said the water was fanning out all over the place, so he replaced it.  Sure enough, there's a different hose, cut in two, and my filter in the middle. He wouldn't take anything for doing this, either.  Nothing.  There are some really nice people up here.