For the last week, more or less, Howard and I have been headed north and west for more than 2,500 miles. And today we arrived at our northernmost destination – Watson Lake, Yukon Territory.
Our bikes at the Welcome to Yukon sign.
If you look at the trace left by my SPOT satellite tracker, you can see just how far we’e gone (and Howard’s gone close to a thousand miles further):
Our trip so far.
So, you might ask, why is the Yukon a territory and not a province? Because while it is somewhat bigger than California, it only has about 35,000 people in it – That’s like a town roughly the size of Kearney with all the university students on campus.
Watson Lake feels like the remote place that it is. There are two places you can get hot food in town – Kathy’s Cafe and the truck stop. Everything is rustic. The hotel we are staying in tonight is a recommissioned World War II air corp barracks. It’s clean and comfortable (and pretty cheap by local standards), but the bathrooms and showers are down the hall from your room, reminding you that it really did use to be a bunk house.
Howard and I spent a fair amount of time at the main tourist attraction for Watson Lake – The Signpost Forest. This is a collection of thousands of signs posted by visitors since the first one was put up by a lonely Army man who was missing home as he worked on the Alaska Highway back in 1942. Our host at the Air Force Lodge, Mike, describes the forest as “the world’s largest collection of stolen property” – which has some truth to it, but is not the whole story. There are many stolen street and city signs, but far more that people have made by hand so that they can leave a lasting memento of their visit.
The Sign Forest is an almost endless collection of signs dating back to 1942.
Of course, just because we have made it to the Yukon does not mean we are ready to head home yet. In the morning we head south toward our westernmost destination – Stewart, British Columbia and Hyder, Alaska. So in the morning we leave the Alaska Highway and head south on the Stewart-Cassiar Highway. Yes, at this point we are headed south to Alaska. To be fair, we are not going up to the mainland Alaska; instead, we are headed to the little spit of Alaska that extends hundreds of miles down the Canadian coastline.
But that’s a story for another day.