Seven Bears, a Signpost Forest, and our first Totem Poles

Continuing to Play Catch Up:

Sunday:

Sunday proved to be a seven-bear day. Waiting for a flagwoman to pass us down the highway through a construction site, I listened to the “neighbors” in the jam of traffic who were standing beside their vehicles talking about all the animals they had seen.  Several people said they had already seen five bears.  I countered with seven!  One woman said we had unfair advantage because we sat so high up.  Tough!

The first bear (at left) had a mouthful of dandelion flowers.  I got stopped and stuck the camera out the window just as he turned and hid his face.  I saw a lot of bear butts today.  They all seemed camera shy. The high point, though, was a black bear cub trying to catch a butterfly.  Like a kitten chasing a string.  No photo there either.

We rolled into Watson Lake in time to buy more $5 gas and visit the famous Signpost Forest.  Some homesick GI once put up a post with a sign giving the name of his hometown.  37,000 more people followed his lead.  Ok, 37,002 people.  Marsha and I had brought along a sign from neighbor Larry Janzen’s “3 ½ Happy Barbers” shop in Green Valley.  Larry has photos of his signs taken all over the world in places where his customers have traveled.  He will now have one more for his collection

We found we were not the first folks from Show Low to make the trip.  There was a large sign here pointing the way to Show Low City Hall, about 2500 miles south (Look for a blue sign at the lower right).

 

The town of Watson Lake came about when the Army Air Corps built a major airfield on the lake during WWII.  It was one of a long string of fields built from Great Falls, Montana, to Nome, Alaska to allow pilots to deliver Lend-Lease aircraft to the Russians.  The original Alaskan highway was built to link all these airfields together. At the old Watson Lake flight ops building Marsha and I saw photos of hundreds of B-25 Mitchell bombers and P-39 Airacobra fighters lined up at the Watson Lake airfield ramp in the 40s.  All these American planes were wearing the red star insignia of the Russian Air Force.  Our greatest nightmare of the fifties had actually come true back in the 40s; Russian planes and pilots routinely “invaded” Alaska and Canada. Then flew home in brand new aircraft.

 

It stays light here until well after midnight, so about 8:30 pm (it looked to be about 4:30)  Marsha dragged me to the Northern Lights Planetarium to see a program about, you guessed it, the Northern Lights.  She slept through most of it, but I learned that there were auroras above us right then. We just couldn't see them because we were locked inside a planetarium.  And also, we couldn't see them until after sunset anyway.  Which will come sometime in October.

We spent the daylight night in a Yukon government campground on the opposite side of Watson Lake (the actual lake, with water) from the Watson Lake airfield.  And two miles west of the town of Watson Lake. They had free firewood and free mosquitoes.  We stayed inside. But it was gorgeous.

Monday:

We carried on west from Watson Lake, stopping at Rancheria Falls on the Rancheria River.  From the name, it sounds like it should be in LA (lower Arizona).  The facilities in both British Columbia and the Yukon are first rate, by the way.  Super roads, great campgrounds, and here they had thoughtfully built a boardwalk out 500 meters through the forest to the falls.

A friend in Wyoming once told me his state had only two seasons:  Winter and Roadwork.  True here also, apparently.  We found a crew spreading a slick of oil on the road then covering it immediately with a layer of gravel.  When we got to the part they had finished, it appeared they used twice as much gravel as the oil could glue down.  I remarked to Marsha that it also appeared that they were installing brand new washboard on what had before been a perfect road. But soon, the smooth road reappeared ahead of us.

We also stopped at the Tlingit Heritage Center in the village of Teslin, where they had a small museum with a first rate building and art exhibits.  By the way, Tlingit is pronounced “Klink-It.” They were and are the totem pole builders of western Canada.

All together, we drove 300 miles from Watson Lake to Whitehorse, Yukon, on Monday. To put Whitehorse into perspective, I should tell you that it is about 100 miles north and east of Skagway, Alaska. And much further north from the capital of Alaska, which is Juneau. We got into Whitehorse late and found all the campground filled. So we joined 100 of our closest friends in the Walmart parking lot for the night.  We found a man who looked a lot like our Green Valley neighbor John Luce, getting a haircut next to his motorhome in the Walmart parking lot.

Tomorrow will be another day.  Actually, as I write that I realized it already is tomorrow.  Midnight slipped right past me here in the land of the midnight sun. It tends to do that.

Next installment: The first Alaska Gold Rush (which actually took place here in Canada’s Yukon).

All photographs copyright 2013 John B. Taylor (I add this because apparently they wind up stashed on Google)