Heading for Alaska: Yukon Wildness (plus a Lookback to Kansas)
- Alison (No Fixed Address)
- 4 hours ago
- 8 min read
Last summer's travel to Alaska took us into Canada's Yukon territory three times.
This blog post will cover the first time, as we left the Cassiar Highway in June 2025 to rejoin the Alaska Highway, north of the forest fires that had pushed us off our planned route (up the Alaska Highway from Dawson Creek, British Columbia).
The Town of Watson Lake, a few miles east of the Cassiar Highway/Alaska Highway intersection and just over the border from British Columbia, has a residential population of about 1,200 people. Many of them, however, along with other residents of northern North America, travel to warmer climes during the coldest months. Throughout our summer trip, we enjoyed chatting with local residents about their experiences living so far north (and their travels down south).
Among travelers, the most famous attraction in Watson Lake is the Sign Post Forest. Stemming from a homesick soldier's addition of a Danville, Illinois directional signpost during the building of the Alaska Highway in 1942, the "forest" now boasts over 100,000 signs on two acres of tall posts.
Watson Lake also was where we really began to notice the effects of the "Midnight Sun". Over 4000 miles north of the equator, and just a few days short of the longest day of the year, we would be out walking around at 10pm, with another hour to go before the sun set.
Because summer's short nights (really, just long twilights into dawns) made seeing any Aurora Borealis displays impossible, we also enjoyed visiting the Northern Lights Center in Watson Lake, with a wonderful planetarium film explaining and displaying the northern lights. We will just have to return someday during the fall or winter to see them in the sky!
From Watson Lake, we traveled 160 miles west on the Alaska Highway, dipping in and out of British Columbia as we drove along the border to the Town of Teslin, Yukon.
About ninety miles west of Watson Lake, we crossed a Continental Divide, separating Pacific Ocean and Arctic Ocean watersheds. The rivers behind us, to the east, drained into the Rancheria River, then northeast to the Liard River to the Mackenzie River to the Beaufort Sea of the Arctic Ocean. The rivers ahead of us drained into the Swift River, then west to the Teslin River to the Yukon River to the Bering Sea of the Pacific Ocean.
Ten miles before that Continental Divide, at Rancheria Falls, we strolled on a wooden boardwalk that led through a boreal (northern) forest of white and black spruce, aspen trees, and lodgepole pine.
We learned a lot about trees while we were in Canada! (Canada has over 900 million acres of forest, somewhat more than the United States's 800 million acres.) White spruce are lush in appearance, and require good soil; black spruce, while scrawny-looking, can grow in poor and boggy soil. White spruce grow faster (1-2 feet per year) and taller (up to 80 feet) than black spruce (1-8 inches per year, up to 50 feet). (As we continued north, we would see massive forests of scraggly black spruce.)
Aspen trees are absolutely lovely, with their trembling, light green leaves, their pale, often white trunks, and their bright yellow fall colors (which we would see just the beginning of as we left Yukon in late August on our way home).
Lodgepole pines are so named because their tall, narrow trunks were used as support poles for the lodges of indigenous peoples; early European settlers also utilized them in buildings, mines, and, later, electric line poles. They grow thin and fast (1-3 feet per year, up to 80 feet tall), prefer drier soil than black spruce, and spread their seeds after forest fire heat opens their pinecones.
We stopped overnight at Teslin Lake, Yukon, at a Government Campground (similar to a Provincial Campground in other parts of Canada and a State Park campground in the U.S.). Throughout our travels, we found the Canadian Government and Provincial Campgrounds to be beautiful.
While in Teslin, we visited the George Johnston Museum. Johnston was of Inland Tlingit (pronounced KLINK-IT) descent. (In the early 1700s, Coastal Tlingits had migrated from the Pacific Northwest coast to the more Athabascan inland BC and Yukon area to become Inland Tlingits.) Johnston was a trapper and photographer; the museum includes a selection of his photos, a film about his life, and various artifacts, including a 1928 Chevrolet car that Johnston imported by paddle wheeler and used for hunting on the frozen Teslin lake and to drive the four miles into town after he hand-cut a road. There is also an interesting exhibit on the aeradio used to guide aircraft in the wilderness in the 1930s: two radio Morse code beams which merged into a constant tone if the aircraft was on track.
We also visited the Teslin Tlingit Heritage Centre, which included beautiful totem poles outside and interesting exhibits inside, as well as a live demonstration of cedar strip basket weaving.
Our next stop was the City of Whitehorse, the largest population center in Yukon, with about 30,000 people. Here, Isabel and Alison enjoyed one of their favorite experiences on the trip: a summer sled dog tour with Sky High Wilderness Ranch. These tour sled dogs train to run at around 7 mph (as opposed to racing sled dogs who train to run at around 8 to 12 mph). In the summer, instead of pulling sleds on snow, they pull ATVs on dirt trails. As pack and den animals, the dogs are assigned their own little outdoor house to lie in or on, with a chain lead that also allows them to interact with the dogs closest to them. Our tour experience included meeting and helping to harness the dogs, riding in the ATV pulled by the dogs (the musher/driver assisted the dogs to stay at the training speed using the ATV's engine or brake), and touring the building that stores dog foods (special high-fat, high-nutrition prepared food and meats), food and water dishes, veterinary supplies, cold weather coats and booties, and individualized harnesses. These sled dogs are not a pure breed, like Siberian Husky, but rather mixed breed dogs called Alaskan Huskies that have been bred for intelligence, energy, cooperation, and determination. Sled dogs that demonstrate trail-finding and leadership skills are placed in the front, and strong pulling dogs in the back. Dogs are rotated through the various positions to determine where in the lineup each dog does best and paired with which other dog. Any dog that doesn't have (or ages out of) the joy and excitement of running while pulling a sled becomes a yard or house dog. And Sky High Wilderness Ranch is mostly populated by dogs that didn't work out as racing dogs elsewhere but enjoy the lower-stress touring life.
After this experience, Alison and Isabel want to return someday to join a multi-day winter tour, with each person mushing their own four-dog sled team!
The City of Whitehorse itself is enchanting, with excellent museums and cultural/interpretive centers, lively community life, and a variety of outdoor activities. This was the first city that Alison could imagine settling down in, after over five years of full-time RV living. (However, Doug's love of warm weather means that she would be living here alone during the winter, so this is not actually a realistic plan!)
An outdoor activity in which we all three participated was kayaking on the Yukon River, which runs right through town. (In fact, the City of Whitehorse may have been named for the rapids that looked like white horse manes to the gold seekers of 1897.) The Yukon is peaceful here now, after the 1958 construction of a hydroelectric dam that created Schwatka Lake south of downtown. We drifted downstream, paddling against a slight wind, and saw bald eagles (a mixture of year-round residents and some that migrate down to coastal British Columbia in the winter), bank swallows (nesting in the tall and sandy Yukon riverbanks before migrating to Central and South America for the winter), and swans (probably Trumpeters, who spend their winters in British Columbia, the Pacific Northwest, the northern Rockies, and around the Great Lakes).
Bank swallow nesting holes; bald eagle flying; three swans (Yukon River, City of Whitehorse, Yukon).
From Whitehorse, we continued northwest on the Alaska Highway toward the Alaska border. We overnighted at the Snag Junction (Yukon) Government Campground, next to one of many area lakes. Isabel, once again, bravely dunked herself fully in the cold waters; Alison, Doug, and Hershey were less enthusiastic about that.
The next day we crossed the border into Alaska!
Looking Back: July 2024 in Kansas
Our time in Yukon was full of wild beauty and adventure.
A year before, we had experienced another form of wild nature.
We were overnighting in a small city campground in Montezuma, Kansas: just five RV sites in a small park donated by the descendants of one of the founding Mennonite families, the Unruhs. Thunderstorms were rolling in, and we were chatting with two other sets of RV travelers in the campground. They were custom harvesters - traveling agricultural harvest crews with specialized machinery to help with wheat harvests at the prime reaping time. We learned that, because wheat prices are heavily influenced by moisture content, harvesting is best done when the wheat is not too wet or too dry, so needs to happen quickly when the circumstances are just right. One of the worst circumstances is a hailstorm that beats down the crop, referred to by farmers as "The White Combine". The custom harvesters were not sure there would be a crop for them to harvest the next day if the thunderstorms brought hail.
(There was indeed a hailstorm that night, but we didn't learn before we left the next day if it had destroyed the crops. It didn't last too long or damage the rig, so we hoped the crops were also all right.)
With the strong possibility of tornadoes accompanying the thunderstorms, we had checked out the tornado bunker behind our RV (there were three at the park) and prepared go bags for us and Hershey. Fortunately, we did not end up having to use them.
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