Watson Lake, Yukon to Carmacks, Yukon

Day 11 – June 10, 2010
Mileage Today: 390
Total Trip Mileage: 4,058

Nothing like a dog fight to break-up a crowd… But I am getting ahead of myself. We started today in Watson Lake, YT which is the home of the Sign Post Forest. It was started by a homesick army engineer from Illinois, who was doing work in the area with the Alaska Highway. He posted a sign with the mileage to his hometown of Danville, Il, and thus started the tradition. I believe that there are over 63,000 signs now.



Got about 5 minutes out of town before we hit the rain:



But it wasn’t a total wash, and most of the day turned out to be pretty nice.



At our campsite last night, we met a fellow rider from TX. Meet Roger:



Roger is traveling from Kerrville, TX and is headed up to Alaska as well. Roger shared some of his own homemade granola with us. Delicious!



We leap-frogged back and forth along the highway most of the day, until we turned off onto the Klondike Highway to head up to Dawson City. Really nice guy, and I hope we meet up with him again in Alaska.

Some shots from the day:





This would be our first moose sighting (if you don’t count Daryl Johnston).



And now we come to the highlight of the day...



Braeburn Lodge's "world's biggest cinnamon buns". We ate this thing 2 separate times and still did not finish it. Stop here if you find yourself on the Klondike Highway North of Whitehorse, YT.

And our camp for this evening...



This is where pictures can lie and not tell the whole story. By looking at this shot it seems like we have the perfect secluded spot right on the Yukon River, right? Wrong. What the camera leaves out is the huge group of French kids on a canoe trip (although I suppose they could be French-Canadian, not that it matters - just sayin'). Which brings us to the dog fight. We were attempting to sleep in broad daylight at about 11:30 pm, when we were awoken by the conversations in loud broken English. After a bit of this there was an incident involving the introduction of two dogs who apparently decided they did not like each others company. A few growls were exchanged followed by some squeals, and panicked owner hollering. This broke up the crowd. Everyone went to sleep, and all was right in the world. We had our quiet site on the Yukon River, and went to sleep at 12am with the sun up. Ended up being a great campsite.


jordan