Where The Bears Are...Or Aren't

When we left Whitehorse after getting our new tire mounted, we headed south back to the Alaska Highway. It was a cold and rainy day. At the Yukon River bridge we stopped to view the river, which looked like blue-green glass, and read plaques about the Lewes Dam. We stopped at the Rancheria Lodge and spent $200 for a fill-up. 

Then we turned off the Alaska Highway and onto the Cassiar Highway, an alternative road. 

We decided to find a place to boondock. After passing several turnouts that did not look suitable and accidentally passing one that did (no place close to turn around to go back), we found the perfect spot well off the road--a large, flat turnout with plenty of room. No one else was there, but people had camped there before. Not only were there several fire pits, it was obvious that people had emptied their holding tanks on the ground. This isn’t legal or environmentally-friendly but understandable when dump stations are few and far between and can cost over $10 for a one-time use. 

When we’re alone in a remote area, David often mentions the movie Race with the Devil about some RVers who find themselves chased around by devil worshippers after stumbling on a human sacrifice ceremony. It has to be one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen and not one to see before you go RVing. He brought it up at least four times today. I’d rather not be reminded of this movie.

Until recently, the Cassiar Highway was a gravel road. Now it’s mostly paved, but much of it is winding and narrow with steep drop-offs of 5-8’ on either side. It’s not nearly as bad as Top of the World Highway, but it too has no shoulders, no guardrails and no painted lines (except for the most southern part). It’s as if the road was built on a berm. It was a bit scary for me but didn’t bother David except that he found the lack of lines on the road taxing. There were some construction and gravel stretches. 

The next day we took a hike in Boya Lake Provincial Park where we saw a couple beaver dams and trail posts that had been clawed by bears. Light reflected from shells on the bottom of the lake causes the water to look aquamarine. 

In Jade City we stopped at a jade store with lots of jade products made from jade from a nearby mine (but too expensive for our budget). 

Throughout the day, interesting cloud formations stood out against a pure light-blue sky. The scenery on this road is fabulous with bigger trees than in the more northern permafrost areas and lots of small lakes, green grassy marshes and bogs. There were a few eerie stretches of tall, skinny, toothpick trees blackened from a fire. 

Our campground was on a pretty lake with a nice view of a mountain sprinkled with what looked like powdered sugar. Neptune was on the picnic table when the owner’s dog came trotting over. Neptune didn’t seem afraid, but when he started to leave, the dog lurched forward to pursue, so I grabbed the cat, who still didn’t have enough sense to be scared, and put him inside. The rain finally stopped. In the morning we walked over to the lake accompanied by the dog who followed us around acting expectant and excited, waiting to play(?) with the cats. I covered Plato’s eyes (so he wouldn’t panic) as I carried him to the truck and had to turn my back to the dog who was jumping up, trying to get at the cat. David distracted the dog while I got Neptune to the truck. 

The day started out cloudy and cold, warmed up to 59, then ended up cold and rainy. We saw three black bears but they disappeared quickly into the woods. We also saw a small dead bear in the road, possibly a cub. We learned about avalanches at one stop. They’re a big problem and concern in winter. 

Then we turned off the highway and drove to Stewart, 40 miles east, along a scenic road through a narrow canyon with several glaciers easily visible and a rushing river below. We stayed at the full hook-up private campground, which was a large lot with grass and some vegetation. We walked the estuary boardwalk in Stewart.

The main reason we had come to Stewart was to go to Hyder to see the bears. I had heard that grizzlies congregate at Fish Creek in Hyder to eat salmon, and the national park service had built a boardwalk for people to observe them safely. We had seen grizzlies on our trip, but I wanted to see more, and I expected to see lots in Hyder. 

In the morning we went to the visitor’s center. I asked the kid at the counter if there were any bears in Hyder. He said he didn’t know. 

We drove the two miles from Stewart, BC to Hyder, AK. Hyder is a teeny town cut off from the rest of Alaska. It has a population of about 100. We stopped at the general store. The store owner was bemoaning the lack of customers. He said usually at this time there are lines of motorcoaches parked outside. He also complained about the tourists who go to Fish Creek for five minutes and say there aren’t any bears. “You have to wait an hour or so,” he said. “This is wilderness, not a zoo.” We continued on to Fish Creek. David saw a sign that said it was a fee area. I didn’t know there was a fee. I looked at the brochure I had just gotten from the visitor’s center. It said there was a fee but didn’t say how much. We got to the parking area where lots of cars were parked. We could see people standing in ponchos under umbrellas on the boardwalk and viewing platform. I went to the park ranger at the kiosk to ask the fee. “$5 a person,” she said, “but it’s good all day.” “Are there any bears now?” I asked. “There’s one,” she said, but it’s at quite a distance and difficult to see. The bears mostly arrive early in the morning or later in the evening, after 7 pm.” 

We decided that rather than pay $10 to wait around all day in the rain for bears that may or may not materialize, we would drive up to Salmon Glacier. Maybe we would see a bear along the way. We started driving the 23-mile dirt and gravel road. At first the muddy road had lots of small potholes and followed Salmon Creek. We didn’t see any bears. Then the road got steep. We passed a (copper?) mining operation. The road got steeper, windier and narrower. There were no shoulders. There was a sheer drop-off in many places. Mist and fog drifted among and above the trees, and small waterfalls cascaded down the mountainside next to the road. We stopped to view the toe of the glacier and could see the braided river far below. When we got to the top, there was a small one-person tent, a couple Porta Johns, a trash bin and “Bear Man” selling postcards and bear DVD’s for $10 from the back of his station wagon. 

We looked at the dramatic Salmon Glacier saddled with fog and mist. You could really see the “river of ice”. It was cold. When we were ready to leave, it got even foggier. 

I said it wasn’t safe. It was bad enough driving up, but we were on the mountain side. Going down we would be on the edge. David said not to worry. Sometimes it was so foggy you couldn’t see the view at all. It was nauseating how close we were in places to the edge, which was ill-defined and broken away in places. But we made it down safely. When we passed Fish Creek it was still early afternoon, so we decided to head back to the campground. I would have loved to have seen more grizzlies, but we were too tired to return to Fish Creek that evening.

Sun in Dawson, Stuck in Whitehorse

Dawson City was a welcome relief after our unsettling drive on Top of the World highway. The campground was muddy from all the rain, expensive and not particularly pleasant, but the day after we arrived, the sun showed up and the temperature got up to the low 60’s. 

We liked Dawson. It’s small, very walkable and perched on the swift, muddy Yukon. They have tried to retain the flavor of the original boomtown with restored period buildings, dirt streets and national historic sites. The visitor center has helpful information, videos and exhibits. The National Park service does a wonderful job interpreting the town and various sites. 

We visited the SS Keno sternwheeler, a national historic site. 

We went on an interesting walking tour of the town in which the guide told us "weird and unusual stories" of Dawson and let us inside several historic buildings not open to the public. 

We went on a tour of the Palace Grand theatre and learned its history and stories. 

We visited Dredge No. 4, which is located eight miles out of town in an active gold mining area with maybe 90 claims being worked. Huge piles of rocks called “tailing” piles line the road from when the dredge was operational. Many of the piles have bird houses on wooden poles stuck in them. 

During the hour-long tour we walked through all four levels of the dredge. The dredge stopped working in 1960 when it sank in the mud of Bonanza Creek. It was eventually recovered in the 1990’s. 

A mile or so farther down Bonanza Creek road is where it all began at the Discovery Claim National Historic site. Plaques along a short trail describe early gold-mining methods and how the Klondike Gold Rush got started. 

Robert Service cabin

We were lucky to be in Dawson for a free “authors” event, which started with a presentation in the cabin where Jack London lived. The presenter talked about the year Jack London was in the north, and how it inspired many of his stories and novels. After that was another entertaining presentation at the nearby Robert Service cabin about the poet’s life and years spent in Dawson. 

We drove five miles to the top of Midnight Dome where we got a great view of the entire town, the Yukon and surrounding mountains. 

After two days in Dawson, we headed south to Whitehorse, where we planned to get our flat tire fixed, so we’d have a spare. It’s about 335 miles away, so we stopped halfway for the night. There was quite a lot of gravel road, some patches, some for a few miles, the rest asphalt or sealcoat. We were surprised at the amount of traffic headed north, presumably to Dawson. It was Friday and the first day of an annual event called “Discovery Days”. 

When we got to the bridge before Selkirk, we stopped at an overlook. A bicyclist was there, smoking a cigarette. He looked like he’d seen a lot of sun. We said “Hi” and then proceeded to the campground. It had no facilities of any kind. Even the trash hadn’t been emptied, but it was late and there wasn’t really a good alternative. We picked a spot as far from the other campers (tenters) as possible (because of our loud generator). The bicyclist we had just met showed up, and I talked with him a bit more. He was from Holland and over a period of three months had ridden from Vancouver up the Alaska highway to Alaska and pretty much the same places we had been and even more and also Top of the Highway. I asked him if he was enjoying himself. He said yes, otherwise he wouldn’t do it. He wasn’t doing it for any other reason than the enjoyment, and if he got tired of it, he would just catch a bus back to Vancouver. 

The next day the rain returned, more or less. Each time we stopped to take a hike, it was raining. We stopped at a viewpoint of Five Finger Rapids, one of the rapids the Klondike stampeders had to run. 

At another turnout we looked at the ruins of the Montague roadhouse and interpretive plaques about conglomerate rock (or puddingrock). 

We got into Whitehorse on Saturday around 4 and immediately went to a tire store. They told us our flat tire was unfixable. So we went to another one. They said they could fix it (based on David’s description) but not until Tuesday because it was a three-day holiday weekend. We went to a third store, and they said they could fix it if we gave it to them immediately. David got the tire out from beneath the truck. They examined it and decided it wasn’t reparable (because it was a large lateral tear), but they could sell us two new tires. 

We left and went to WalMart and parked. David decided the tire probably wasn’t reparable after all. He walked back over to the second tire store to price their tires. They didn’t have any in stock but told him to go to the first tire store we had gone to. David returned, unhooked the truck and drove back to the first store. They had a tire that would work and would open at 7:30 am on Tuesday on a first come first serve basis, so we had to wait two more days. 

Whitehorse isn’t a bad place to be. It’s Yukon’s capital and largest city, with a population of about 26,500 and has plenty of facilities. It’s a pleasant town on the Yukon River that we had visited on our way north. It gave us a chance to catch our breath, stock up on groceries and find a place to get online, (which actually was a bit difficult). At the visitor’s center we learned that Discovery Day is a holiday (celebrating the discovery of Klondike gold in the Yukon) in the Yukon only, not the rest of the country, and that the festivities were happening in Dawson, not in Whitehorse. (Perhaps we should have stayed a couple extra days in Dawson.) 

On Monday the rain stopped for awhile, and we walked a couple hours on the Millennium Trail, a pleasant path that follows the Yukon river from the Klondike sternwheeler to the fish ladder, across a couple footbridges and also to a small island loop trail through berry bushes. 
Tuesday morning we dashed over to the tire store and were second in line. They were doing construction on the road next to the tire store. It was very muddy. The parking area was muddy. We bought one truck tire, and they mounted one trailer tire, which we had brought from home with us. (Total cost was $360, about $80 more than what we would have paid at home.) So then we were on our way. It was about 46^o and raining. It rained most of the day, was foggy and got down to about 43^o. A guy at the gas station working on his car said it had been a cold and wet summer. We hoped for better weather south.

Over the Top to Dawson

In 1898, gold seekers, or stampeders as they were called, rushed to Dawson City in the Yukon in hopes of striking it rich in the Klondike Gold Rush. But to get there, they faced a long, perilous journey. They could start in Dyea and climb the steep 33-mile Chilkoot Trail or begin in Skagway and climb the less steep but just as difficult 43-mile White Pass trail. They had to transport a ton of goods to survive a year, and so it took numerous trips and several months to make it through the pass. Then they camped in tents through the winter until the lakes thawed. They traveled the remaining 550 miles by water on boats they built themselves. They navigated through rapids, endured bugs and long hours of sun and tried not to go bonkers. Out of 100,000 who tried, 30,000 actually made it to Dawson City, only to find that most of the gold-bearing streams had already been staked by prospectors who had been in the area since the year before. 

Our trip to Dawson was not nearly so long or fraught with danger, but it wasn’t without its challenges. We essentially began in Fairbanks, drove 200 miles to Tok, 100 miles to Chicken and 93 miles on the Top of the World highway across the Canadian border and into Dawson. Most of the road from Chicken to Dawson is dirt and loose gravel. Long stretches are steep, narrow and winding with soft shoulders (or none at all) and precipitous drop-offs. I had already gotten a taste of this kind of road in Denali and didn’t like it one bit. We had heard that at least one motorhome had fallen over the edge this year (all passengers survived). I was concerned, especially since it had been raining. A camper who had traversed the highway told us, “If it’s raining when you get to Chicken, don’t go on Top of the World highway. Just turn back.” The woman at the visitor’s center in Tok was reassuring. “He’s driving,” she said referring to David, “and he doesn’t want to go over a cliff any more than you do.”

When we left Denali, it seemed like the weather was improving. It was warmer, and the sky was almost clear. We drove to Fairbanks, 120 miles away, and, after two false attempts at finding a campground (one had no campsites left with hookups, the other had gone of business), we found a campground. Since the weather was warm, in the 60’s, and the sun was shining, we went on a bike ride.

We had to ride on sidewalks at first because of busy roads until we got on the multi-use trail, which follows the Chena river to downtown and beyond. We stopped and looked at some monuments. 

The path continued a long way, but after an hour, we turned around.  The river itself isn’t particularly attractive, in my opinion, but some beautiful flowers had been planted on the trail downtown. 

We spent another day in Fairbanks visiting a few sights and running errands. We saw two male musk ox butt heads with a huge, resounding boom at the Large Animal Research Station. Evidently males don’t live as long as females because of brain damage due to this practice of theirs. The day had started out warm but, by that afternoon, it was back down into the mid-40’s and raining.

We left for Tok the next day, stopping first at the Santa Clause House in the North Pole, which is essentially a Christmas store. We stopped at several turnouts and learned about the various gold rushes, saw an impressive view of the Alaska range and looked at the Alaska pipeline extending across the Tanana river. 

We walked around Rika’s Roadhouse, which Rika ran for years in the early to mid 1900’s, catering to prospectors and locals. 

At the Delta Junction visitor center, we got the obligatory photos of the end of the Alaska Highway marker and the big mosquitoes. We drove through a lot of permafrost areas with dwarfed black spruce. We saw a mother moose and her baby, but when we slowed down, they quickly disappeared into the forest. 

The last time we were in Tok in the same campground, David rotated the tires and plugged a leaky tire. This time he adjusted the brakes of the trailer tires because they weren’t responding properly. He had to raise the trailer to do this. He had a hard time because they were gummed up, so he had to disassemble the hubcaps. 

In the morning it was cold, cloudy and rainy. As we turned onto the Taylor Highway leading to Chicken, the landscape was mostly stunted black spruce forest. A lot of it had been burned in 1994 and still not recovered. Sometimes the burned part was on both sides of the highway, sometimes on just one side. There were acres and acres and mile after mile of black, burned stick trees against a dull grey sky. It was kind of surreal. The road wound up and down. Few cars were on it at first. It rained harder, so we passed the turnouts I had planned to stop at and didn’t go on a short trail. It was freezing cold, well, actually it was in the mid-40’s. Cold enough. Traffic increased. The road was paved at first with rough patches and quite a lot of road construction. A few miles before Chicken, the road turned to gravel. 

At Chicken we looked at parts of a gold-mining dredge. 

Then we went to “Downtown Chicken”, which is essentially one business with several stores and a gas station. 

We got 7 gallons of gas to top off the tank. There were a couple campgrounds and an old intact dredge. We looked around and then continued on our way. 

It had warmed up to the high 50’s and stopped raining. I was surprised at the amount of traffic heading opposite us, including several oil transport trucks. Had all of them come across the Top of the World? The next few miles the road was narrow and winding with soft shoulders and steep drop-offs over a 1,000’ cliff. It was pretty scary for me in places. Neptune was antsy and whiny and wanted to get out. When we got to the small government campground (no hookups) we were thinking of staying at, we decided that our generator would disturb the two tenters already camped there, so we left. We had descended a long, steep mountain and were level with a river, so there were boon-docking possibilities. In a couple miles we found a big turnoff far enough off the road and decided to camp there. We were in an active gold-mining area, which accounted for some of the traffic. Recreational gold panning is allowed in a few miles of public land. We saw some people panning for gold in the river. After dinner, I decided to try my luck. I got out an aluminum pie pan, walked across the road and over to the river and started panning. Gold is 19 times heavier than water, and so it sinks into the river bottom. It also settles out in your pan. My pie pan wasn’t robust enough to do the job, and I didn’t have a shovel, so, our mini-fortune wasn’t made this day. David came over and told me the truck had another flat tire, on a different tire. He plugged it. So now we have two plugged tires.

In the morning it was raining and cold. We left around 8:30. I remembered the woman who said not to go on Top of the World if it was raining. The cold just made it worse. It meant that I might get hypothermia while clinging to the side of a cliff we had just fallen over. The descriptions of the road in my guidebook only made matters worse: “EXTREME CAUTION: Steep climb on narrow road as highway ascends. Limited passing room, soft shoulders and long drop-offs make this a dangerous stretch. If in doubt, STOP for oncoming traffic: Do not risk a tip over by putting a wheel into the soft shoulder!”. David said he wasn’t worried about it and had no intention of falling over a cliff. 
The road we were on had recently been graded, meaning that not only was it gravel, it was freshly-exposed gravel with big sharp rocks sticking up. Within 10 miles, the flat tire alarm went off right before we were about to ascend the particularly steep, narrow, dangerous section of road described above. David stopped the truck and got out to look. He rushed back in and said we had seconds to pull off the road. There was a pullout just ahead but it had a deep dip. 

We tried to get into it and got most of the trailer off the road before the tire went completely flat. David tried to plug the tire, but the hole was too big, so he changed it with our only spare. It took about an hour. During that time, I considered that perhaps we should turn back to Tok where we might get the tire fixed. We were about to go on the steepest, narrowest, most precarious part of the road. What if we got another flat between here and Dawson? We didn’t have another spare. We couldn’t pull off the road. People may not even be able to pass us. We had just gotten two flats within ten miles. The road back to Tok wasn’t easy, but once we got past Chicken, it was paved. I made the suggestion to David. He considered it and then decided we should take the chance and forge ahead. He was afraid of getting another flat but didn’t like the prospect of backtracking. He decreased the tire pressure from 45 to 35 psi to make the tires less susceptible to flats. It continued to rain. 

Then it got foggy and colder. It got down to 40^o. The tire alarm kept going off because it wasn’t connected to the new tire, so David stopped to check the tires every ten or 20 miles. So here we were on a narrow, steep, winding road with soft shoulders, hairpin curves and no guardrails, where one small, false move might find us tumbling to our deaths over a steep cliff. To make matters worse, visibility was poor, and if we had a flat, we would be stuck. “Uh, remind me why we’re doing this,” I asked David. “Is this fun?” Fortunately when we had to pass someone coming the other way, it wasn’t at a spot that was too narrow. We got higher, and it got foggier. The highway is known for its scenic views. For awhile we couldn’t see very far. When we could see, it was mostly black spruce stick trees scattered about a rolling mountainous landscape of olive green willow bushes. It was a bit surreal or science-fictiony, especially in very foggy patches. We had about 90 miles to drive this day, often at 20 or 25 mph. Oncoming cars, oil trucks and even a few tour buses passed by. A couple tour buses led by a pilot car passed us and helped flatten out the gravel in the road. The cats were unhappy, perhaps because they could feel our agitation or maybe because the road was so bumpy. Neptune complained incessantly. At one point I gazed down an especially steep cliff on my side of the road and imagined us falling over it. Then I stopped that thought so as not to attract it. 

We didn’t stop at most of my planned stops. When we got to the Canadian border, we were asked some questions and waved on through. In Canada there were intermittent sections of pavement. The gravel didn’t bother me as much as the drop-offs, which didn’t bother David. The rough gravel patches bothered him. Finally Dawson was only a few miles away. 

We stopped at a rest area with a viewpoint and a “Welcome to Dawson” sign. Then we got to the ferry, the last obstacle between us and Dawson. David had read that vehicles with low clearance could have a problem, so he was concerned about our being able to get on the ferry, but there was no way we were turning back! We got there at 3:23 pm and were first in line. The ferry was on the other side, loading up. But it didn’t take long for it to fight the strong current over the Yukon River. We got on quickly without a problem. By 3:43, we were across. It was still raining slightly. We went to a campground a little ways out of town, registered, set up and by 5:00, we were in for the night. Made it.