Whitehorse

The road cuts through huge swaths of wilderness and nothing-ness. Check your gas often, service stations are very few and far between.

Today I saw elk, buffalo, and a coyote on the road. Some of the people I have talked to have also seen black and grizzly bears on the road.

I treated myself to a stop at the Liard Hot Springs. This is my first visit to a hot springs, and it was definitely awesome. I heard from some people there that it is one of the better hot springs. If you do the Alcan, this is a mandatory stop.

The water smelled faintly of sulpher but it wasn’t bad. It was WAY hotter than I thought it would be, where it exits the ground it can be up to 125 degrees. The part you can swim in includes the actual spring location, and the closer to it you are, the hotter the water is. It is a challenge to reach the area where the water comes out of the ground, it is so hot.

I had a salmon salad and cracker snack for lunch. It really did taste pretty good, but looked eerily like “Fancy Feast.”

The Alcan highway is interesting in that there are no real cross streets, so the people that you see at rest stops or pass on the highway start to become familiar, and usually end up starting a conversation at some gas stop. The BMW, the BMW from California, the RV with the green gas can, and the fat girls from Iowa almost become comforting to see on the road.

I finish up with British Columbia and get to Yukon.

It is really starting feeling like I’m on a frontier, for some reason the Yukon seems so much more distant.

I rolled in to Whitehorse fairly late, 9pm, and the first camp site I went to was totally full. Uh oh. I went to another camp that was close to downtown, and luckily snagged the very last spot, number 13. I met a guy on a BMW GS1200 at the camp site and we ended up grabbing dinner together. He was from Vancouver and was on his way back home from Alaska.

It’s funny how many traveling bikers there are around here, and how easy they are to get to know. Definitely the easiest way to meet people.

Odometer: 10,195

Elapsed miles: 7,004