Wednesday, August 27, 2008

We headed south despite the road closure warnings. We had checked the road reports first thing in the morning and were told that the road was still closed. Then, after cleaning up the breakfast dishes we checked one more time. The highway had been opened BUT could close again at any time. We decided to risk it and down the road we went. We got about 2 hours down the road, half way to Carmacks & we ran into a road closure warning. As the road wasn’t actually barricaded, Jo spoke to one of the Yukon highway workers, who suggested that if it were him he would go for it, so we carried on. Just north of Carmacks we passed a huge construction earthmover moving very slowly down the road. At Carmacks we hit the barricade; the road had closed about 25 minutes before we got there. The road had washed out, and a roadcrew was installing new culverts. We prepared to be parked there for a number of hours (days?). We thought about going about ½ mile back to Carmacks, but there really wasn’t anything there to do, other than nap or watch DVD’s in the rain, and so we opted to stay put at the barricade. About 10 minutes later the flag man came over and told us that this was going to be our lucky day, opened the gate and let us go through-ahead of the earthmover (and the famous red German sleeping bus). About 10 miles down the road we saw the problem. Lots of water damage to the road from the flooding from the day before, all kinds of mud and the road half torn up at one spot. They were in the process of installing more culverts to handle the extra water - and they’ve been getting lots of that this summer. We made it to Whitehorse, ended up with a great campsite, in the woods and no neighbours, kind of what we had imagined we would be finding everywhere in the North ( we should have been buying lottery tickets…). In the evening we wandered around Whitehorse (saw the log cabin skyscraper!) ate the best fish & chips we’ve ever had and went to the infamous “Frantic Follies Gold Rush Review”. A great vaudeville style show, like the show in Dawson City (but actually well done), Can Can girls, singing, Robert Service poetry and very bad jokes but a good time. It’s been running 39 years, so they must be doing something right, though they do bring in busloads of tourists from the cruise ships at Skagway. This morning when we got up there were actually a few little blue bits in the sky and we took advantage of it and went to Miles Canyon. It’s a beautiful canyon about 6k from Whitehorse that has walking and xcountry skiing trails all the way into Whitehorse. A very narrow gorge with high cliffs on both sides of the Yukon River, with a pretty fast current going through. We had a nice hike there and then back on the road.

More tomorrow.