We're in Alaska!

We left Prince George and made our way west on the Yellowhead Highway passing through the town of Smithers, British Columbia. We turned north on the Cassiar Highway and spent the night at a rustic campground at a beautiful lake where we had our first encounter with the voracious mosquitoes of these parts. This road as a reputation for being narrow with long drop offs and no shoulders. Our rig handled it with no problems. We got a pic of a small bear foraging on the side of the road. We passed through Jade City, which is a family run jade mine and store. We were amazed to learn that 92 percent of the world's jade is produced in this area. We entered the Yukon Territory and camped at the junction of the Cassiar and the Alaskan Highways. We met a young Swiss couple that were riding bicycles from Columbia, South America all the way to Anchorage! We saw dozens of bicyclists loaded with packs on the Cassiar and Alaskan roads. The road from Whitehorse, capital of the Yukon, is good pavement with some short gravel sections until the last 80 miles or so, where there was a lot of frost upheavals, long gravel sections and construction waits. We camped at Destruction Bay on Kluane Lake, the largest lake in the Yukon and there were warning signs about grizzly bears. The weather which had been nice for most of the trip turned very bleak with temps in the forties and cold rain. The lonely campsite was rather spooky and with the rain and bears and all we decided to stay in the camper and watch a (creepy) movie. We finally made Alaska yesterday and camped at Moon Lake in a rustic deserted campground and rolled on into Fairbanks today. After all of the rough camping, we are set up in a very nice RV park next to the Chena River practically in downtown Fairbanks. I finally have good WiFi, we are charging the camper batteries and Debbie is doing the laundry. Tomorrow we will hit a grocery store, top off our water and diesel tanks and head for Denali National Park for at least a four day stay. I am hoping to finally do some good hiking and biking.

We're In Canada!

It's been a while since we updated this blog since we have had very bad luck finding WiFi that will upload pictures. We're in a nice campground in Prince George, British Columbia that seems to have reasonable internet so I will continue ou report. After a few days in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming, we finally landed in Great Falls Montana. We visited the Lewis and Clark museum which was one of the best ones that we have seen. We went straight north to the Alberta border and spent the night at a roadside rustic campground southwest of Calgary where we met a family that was stranded because they had hit a deer on the highway and destroyed their radiator. Running into wildlife is no joke especially in a remote area where there is no cell service. The next day we went north on a remote road to Banff National Park. This park was amazingly crowded with Japanese, Germans and ever other nationality. We stayed at Johnson's Creek campground and hiked up to two waterfalls. We visited the famous Lake Louise which was picturesque ,but actual not nearly as large as I had imagined. I was picturing a lake more like Jenny Lake in the Tetons. We then proceeded up the Icefield Parkway towards Jasper National Park. This is an amazing scenic drive. You are completely surrounded by stunning mountain peaks and glaciers. We stopped twice to view bears on the side of the road. The wildflowers were also very evident. We stayed at the Wapiti (elk) campground in Jasper. After setting up camp we were visited by a big group of elk cows with several fawns. It's funny,but an elk fawn is bigger than a full grown North Carolina whitetail deer. We keep a careful eye out on the highway, because hitting an elk or a moose will total your car or worse! Tonight we are in Prince George, British Columbia. Tomorrow we are heading further west on route 16 and then we are taking the very remote and rough Cassiar Highway up to join the Alaskan Highway up in the Yukon. Tonight I am fixing a chicken wire gravel guard to the front of my truck. The next two weeks or so will be in very remote territory and we may be out of contact for awhile due to the lack of WiFi.

Our 2013 trip to Alaska and Western Canada.

We left Raleigh on our longest and most ambitious trip yet on July 26th. We took four days to get to Boulder, Colorado, Bill's old home town. We spent several days visiting with family and old friends before heading north to Wyoming. We spent the four days of the Fourth of July holiday weekend at Curt Gowdy State Park near Cheyenne. This park has some of the best mountain bike trails that Bill has ever seen and he got to ride about half of them before his bike suffered fatal brake failure. The rest of the stay was spent hiking the trails and relaxing in our not so private (or quiet) campsite. The space to our left was occupied by thirteen people, 4 dogs and nine cars. The space on the left was another fifteen people multiple dogs and yes, as you can see from the photo, they even brought their washer and dryer!

I am also showing you was a bag of chips, bought at 400 feet above sea level looks like at 8,000 feet!

We dropped Bill's bike off in Cheyenne for repair and went to the Vedauwoos National Forestry campground which is know for it's high quality rock climbing. We took a short stroll on the Turtle Rock Trail and almost immediately encountered two cow moose on the trail. Moose have been recently reintroduced in this area after having been wiped out by the early settlers. From here we will continue north and stay somewhere in the Big Horn Mountains.