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When I last left off, I was in Fort Nelson in a hotel, rested and ready to hit the road again. And that is what we did. We drove and drove and drove the past few days and have finally made it to Fairbanks Alaska!

The drive from Fort Nelson to Whitehorse was long and I made it even longer because I wanted to drive an extra 2.5 hours round trip to the Northern Territory just to say I had been there. We only went a few miles over the border and then turned around and drove straight back to were we started but at least I can now say I have been there.

All day Friday we traveled the Alaskan Highway. We saw some beautiful scenes along the way including lots of caribou and buffalo. They would just be walking in the road and you would have to slow down and ease around them when they felt like moving. One of my favorite sitings was a caribou that was swimming across a lake and then he bounded out on the other side, shook himself off, did a little dance and ran across the road in front of us and up into the hill on the other side.

We ended up stopping in a little town between Fort Nelson and Whitehorse called Watson Lake. It is often called the Yukon’s gateway because it is the first town you run into in the Yukon if you are coming from Canada to Alaska. They have a great little visitor and info center there and they talked us into watching a short movie on the history of the Alaskan Highway. I found it to be very interesting and it was a nice break from driving. One of the things that Watson Lake is best known for is their Sign Post Forest. “The forest was started in 1942 by a homesick U.S. Army G.I., Carl K. Lindley of Danville, Il., Company D, 341st Engineers. While working on the Alaska Highway, he erected a sign here pointing the way and stating the mileage to his hometown. Others followed his lead and are still doing so to this day. On July 20, 1990, Olen and Anita Walker of Bryan, Ohio placed the 10,000th sign.”

We made it to Whitehorse really late on Friday night and found a room, fell asleep and headed out again about 6 a.m. so we saw very little of it. It is the capital city of the Yukon and was the largest town we saw while traveling through the Yukon. There are very few places to stop along the Alaskan highway and there were a few times when we got a little nervous on the gas situation because the places that sell it start shutting down in September for the season. We will have to plan well on our trip back through in a week or so from now! We are hoping to get to see more of Whitehorse when we pass through again on the way home.

One of the great bits of advice that we got from the lady at the Watson Lake info center was the suggestion that we take one route out of the Yukon into Alaska and another back in so that we didn’t have to drive a lot of the same road both ways. We decided to detour and take the Klondike Highway to Dawson City on the way to Alaska.

The drive itself was pretty and we stopped along the way to see things like Gravel Lake:

We also saw the entrance to the Dempster Highway which we would like to make into a future adventure. It is a road that will take you all the way up and into the Arctic Circle. It has been known to bust a few tires and beat up vehicles pretty bad but the scenery is well worth it they say.

Dawson City was once a booming gold mining town and it has kept its charm with dirt streets and wooden sidewalks. You can even see some of the original buildings from the early 1900s mixed in with the newer, more colorful buildings. We had lunch there and then took the George Black Ferry across the Yukon River to the road that would take us to Alaska on the other side. The ferry and road is only open in the summer so we just made it. After September 15th we would not have been able to do this. The road I’m talking about is called the Top of the World Highway and it was BEAUTIFUL! Fall has arrived in the Yukon and we saw it better here than any where else.

I could have taken photos all day on this road and we stopped a lot which made us a little late in getting to Fairbanks…. but it was totally worth it! Most of the road on the Top of the World Highway was unpaved and rough but we didn’t mind.

We crossed into Alaska on top of the mountain at the most Northern US customs gate. The Taylor Highway, on the other side of the gate, took us off the mountain, past the little town of Chicken, AK and then back to the Alaskan Highway on the Alaska side. We made it to Tok, AK (the first Alaskan town on the Alaska Highway) just in time for dinner and had some awesome pizza and the famous Fast Eddy’s restaurant.

We are in Fairbanks and the surrounding area for a few days and then on Wednesday will head out again to Anchorage in the South. The weather has been great and we are having a blast! Hopefully we will get to see the Northern Lights while we are here…

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