Monday 7/28
Day 4: Yukon, Atlin & Skagway
We woke up to a nice sunrise and blue sky at 5:00 a.m.. Everything was going fine
until I couldn’t find my keys. It took me 30 minutes to realize that I had left
them in the door of the canopy hood that was open and not visually in
sight. Hopefully nothing stupid would happen to me like that again but at
least they weren’t lost. As I drove north toward Yukon I saw another
Black Bear along the side of the road about 6:30 in the morning, no picture again as
it ran as soon as it saw the truck. As I reached
Yukon and started driving
west there were a couple Elk that were by the road in the morning around
7:00 a.m.. I was driving on the only paved highway in
the
Yukon as they were repaving the road because of the problems up here with their
weather. We continued north and stopped at Rancheria Falls and took some pictures. It was a nice
quiet place with a good view but not as high of a waterfall as we expected.
It was very quiet with no other noise but the running water.
We stopped at Jake's Corner for gas and a shirt for Jacob. There was also a unique restaurent here as
also served as a daycare, gift shop, typewriter museum and bird sanctuary. We headed south for
Atlin which was 65 miles of gravel road. On the way we passed Little Atlin Lake
and Big Atlin Lake which has an island in the middle of it. This was a nice little town that has a small trailer for a hospital.
We will go back if we are up this way again. As we were driving around town we drove by a house that looked like a pyramid. This is located right next to the museum
and I would sure like to see the inside of it some day. It looks like it's three stories with a fireplace in the middle of the house.
It's a great idea rather than an A-frame, in an area that gets alot of snow. There was a side road from town that led us to a pioneer cemetery that had mostly wooden grave
markers of people who had been buried in the early 1900's. There was also a Warm Bay spring that
was about 75 degrees temperature, not real hot but warm enough to relax in. This was a couple miles out of town, and there was also an
underground water creek that came out by the end of the gravel road.
We started driving back north and ran into our second rain storm. It stopped raining before we reached the junction to where we would
drive back south again to Skagway. We got into Skagway around 6:00 and and parked in town to walk. The truck
parked in front of us had been bought from the same place in Seattle where we had bought ours,
it’s a small world! There are a lot of souvenior shops here as this is where
most of the cruise ferries bring international tourists to Alaska. This place is busy during
the day with tourists but pretty quiet at night. We ate pizza and were
introduced to the the expensive prices of beer in the restaurants. I’ll buy mine at the
store from now on.
We were going to stay in Skagway and take a 3:00 am ferry ride to Haines but I had to wait until 10 pm to get tickets. While waiting, I took a shower at the public dock, the first one I had since we left and it felt good. I go back to get tickets and find out that the ferry was going to be 2-3 hours late and we decided to drive there. We start drivng back north and pull off the side of the road at 11:00 pm to sleep for the night. Drove 550 miles today and 2100 total in four days.