Travel Journal: (Alaska to Loveland CO via Cassiar Highway)

I'm on the top of the world...

"highway" that is. (with all due respects to the late Karen Carpenter). The Klondike Highway (aka: "Top of the World Highway") runs from Tok Junction, Alaska to Whitehorse, Yukon through Chicken, Alaska and Dawson City, Yukon. At first glance on the map, you might think it is called that from where it located, very far north on the globe. However, once you have driven it, the reason becomes obvious. The route follows the ridge lines of the hills between a couple river valleys and from many places along the route, you can see for a long long way. You really feel that you are on the top of the world looking down on creation.

However, the road isn't all that great, and to call it a highway is a little bit of an overstatement. It isn't real bad, but the section of the road from Chicken to the Canadian border is a dirt road. It is a good, fairly well maintained dirt road, but still a dirt road. The section of the road inside Canada from the border to Dawson City is paved but patched in many places as well. The border is a couple little buildings high in the hills in the middle of nowhere and only operates 8am to 8pm (AKDT) each day, and only about half the year.

Much of the way has burnt forests from wildfires that scorched the area last year, which was a bad year for fires in this area. There was a fire burning in the distance while we were on this highway this year.

The top of the world highway uses a ferry to get across the Yukon River at Dawson City. Our wait for the ferry boat was about an hour long, due to other long vehicles ahead of us in line and the limited capacity of the ferry boat. By the time we got to Dawson City, over the dirt roads, our car was plenty dirty. The combination of sections of wet muddy roads and dry dusty roads made sure that the car had about as much dirt as it could hold.

Now, this is what roads were expected to be like up here. 

While in Alaska, we heard from other RVers the the Cassiar Highway is horrible and should be avoided at all costs. One other person talked about how the rear ladder fell off their 5th-wheel trailer due to the vibrations caused by the bumpiness of the road. (it also had bicycles hanging on it) They said that they went slow and made it sound like this was the worst road of all roads in the area.

Not being one to believe everything we hear, we still took this road, partly because it went where we wanted to go to see people and places we wanted to visit, and partly to see another route between the lower 48 and Alaska. The truth is that this road isn't all that bad, and more like what we had originally expected the Alaska Highway to be like.

The road runs between the Alaska Highway near Watson Lake to the Yellowhead Highway at Kitwanga. The northern 2/3rds of the road is not too hot. It is a narrow 2-lane, no-painted lines, no shoulders road that is , mostly chip seal pavement, which included many bumps, dips, potholes, patches and major sections of dirt. The dirt sections were mostly well graded so they weren't too bad. While the Alaska Highway had speed limits of mostly 100 km/hr which was easy to exceed, the northern part of the Cassiar Highway had speed limits of 80 km/hr, which was rarely met. Often you couldn't get above 70 km/hr, and 50 km/hr was pushing it in some unpaved sections. However it looked like construction equipment and large trucks had no trouble going faster. The southern couple hundred kilometers of this road was very good (smooth paving, lines, some shoulders, few potholes and patches).

The road is pretty, with a nice view here and there of mountains, streams, and lakes, however the cleared right-of-way isn't as wide as the Alaska Highway one was, so the trees often block the views. We would drive this route again in a heartbeat, but then maybe we like the ruggedness of it all. High-speed highways are for getting somewhere fast. Roads like this are for seeing some back country.

BC South of the Cassiar

We had another chance to visit with a relative on this portion of the travels. Our nephew, Ryan, is working this summer as a volunteer at Rock Nest Ranch. This camp is located near Houston, BC, which was along the way down through Canada on our way back to the lower 48 states. This is a Christian camp that is aimed at native youth, ages 9 to 12, from places nearby. He gave us a nice tour of the camp and we had a chance to eat lunch with him there. The only bad thing was that it was a rainy day while visiting him. For some reason, it has been rainy almost all the time we have been in Canada. From the sounds of what the temperatures have been like in Colorado while we have been gone, we need to soak it all up while we can.

While traveling south, the night time hours started getting longer (it was actually starting to get dark at night). Also the trees were getting taller, and there was a significant amount of beetle kill in the forests. Until now, the roads have been relatively sparsely traveled. Once we got near Prince George, traffic was noticeably heavier. This has continued on the roads South toward the US border. On the day following our stay in Prince George, the weather turned to all sunshine, not a cloud in the sky. As we traveled south the weather stayed that way and got hotter. We must be getting close to the US. Surprising to us, the terrain also turn dryer in this portion of the trip.

That night our stay was in a place in the Hell's Gate Canyon that was highly spoken of in the Milepost. As we approached this place from the north, the scenery wasn't the greatest, so we wondered about how good this place was. It turned out to be a very nice place with tall trees and lots of space between RV spots. If it had cell phone and internet service, it would have been perfect. The next day had very pretty scenery through the canyon, but was rainy again. Since there wasn't any planned stops for this day, rain while traveling is good and much better than hot and dry.

Back in the USA again

We crossed the border at Huntingdon /Sumas at about lunchtime. While they had three of the four lanes open, it was a slow process, and took about a half hour. This time, the border person wasn't very happy that we didn't have photo ID for Sara. He informed us that if you're 14 years old or older you need to have a photo ID, and all will need passports in the near future, but he still let us go after telling us about this problem.

Our first experience back in the USA had to do with reservations at the North Whidbey RV Park., near Deception Pass State Park. When Jerry made the reservations it was for arriving on the 22nd and leaving on the 23rd. When we checked in, the office had it as staying the nights of the 22nd and 23rd, and said that they didn't do less than 2 night stays on weekends in the summer, which she was going to firmly enforce, even though the web site doesn't mention this requirement and the confirmation email didn't indicate that the original request was changed. Since we already had plans for the next night, we chose to get our money back rather than pay for two nights there and only stay one. This left us with no where to stay that night. After checking the Oak Harbor City Beach RV park, we decided that we would go on to Vancouver after meeting up with Jerry's sister, Sharon, and a couple of our nephews, Adam and Brian, for dinner. We weren't able to meet up with Sharon's husband, Carlton, or our nephew Douglas, due to them being at a scout function. Dinner was great, but we then had a 4.5 hour drive to Vancouver after that. This made for a long day, but it did turn out fine.

At this point, we are at Jerry's mom's house for a few nights spending time with her and Jerry's brother and his wife, Richard and Carol. The high temperature for one day was going to be in the 90's so we took a quick trip over to the coast have chowder at Mo's, take a walk on the beach, do a little bit of shopping, and soak up some more cooler temps there.

This break gives us a little bit of time to get ready for the final segment of travel. Part of this included rotating the tires on the Subaru. While everything pointed to towing it all four down is ok, there is a down side to doing that. It doesn't hurt anything, however it is wearing out tires unevenly. The front tires are both wearing out the extreme inside tread. In order to make sure that the tires don't totally fail, the decision was to rotate them with the rear tires. It looks like we will be buying a set of tires when we get home.

After this we will be traveling home by way of I84, I80 & Hwy 287. Having traveled this route many times in the past, it isn't anything exciting, and we will not be stopping at any particular sites.