Two Sides 8.9.25

There are two sides to northern Canada – beautiful and terrifying.

Before heading north, we stopped at Spokane for repairs, which is becoming a bit of a routine.  We added a new mechanic, Todd at Washington Carriage, to our list of repair people.  We’re on a first-name basis with these mechanical geniuses in so many places.  Let’s see, there’s Paul in the Chicago area, Stevie in Spokane, Brian in Fairbanks, Jake in Fort Nelson …

One afternoon we took in the Spokane Valley Heritage Museum, a small collection of local artifacts.  One of the most interesting exhibits was a collection of old telephones and switchboards.  It was fun to watch a few children who were visiting, trying to imagine what life was like in the days of an old desk phone with buttons … let alone a rotary dial phone or the kind where you had to speak into a mouthpiece!  I’d say LCR and I, along with the enthusiastic retiree guides, were the only ones who can remember a time when you would literally speak the number you wanted to reach into a mouthpiece to a human operator! 

Many of the exhibits in this museum were under a photo prohibition, at the request of the donors.  One of these was a player piano, but the guide offered to demonstrate it to us, warning that she could only do it for a short time as she had a heart problem and had already done it once that day.  When she sat down to play we saw why.  The punched scroll makes the music in a player piano, but the operator has to pump foot pedals at considerable force and speed to create the air that turns the scroll!  It resembled vigorous marching in place.  She did indeed get a strenuous cardio workout. 

It’s fun experimenting with new places to camp.  There are many free or cheap camping areas, but it’s also risky.  For one road we were on in northern BC, GPS gave the mileage as 13 but the time as an hour.  We wondered if that was a mistake, but soon found out – the road twisted and turned, rocky, hilly, and that was before we ran into a herd of beef cattle on the road.  Remembering a recent event in which a woman annoyed a herd of bison and was gored, we stopped the car.  I have always heard it is not a good idea to annoy large male animals, nor mothering animals, so we drove only as fast as the herd was moving.  Sometimes they stopped altogether.  I was afraid to use the horn and annoy them, and some were nursing mothers who, I felt, would protect their young with force if necessary.  The youngsters seemed determined to select themselves out.  They would skip around and in front of the car until brought back by one of the adults.  We had no idea what else to do so we continued in this way.  We didn’t know what anyone else would do because we saw no other vehicles of any kind.

    

When we finally got to the end of the road, we found an actual campground which was almost full.  The campers were part of a large fishing derby.  It was set to begin in a few days, so they would come early and just hang around.  They kindly showed us a place where we could squeeze in our rig.  We described the road and the cattle, and they said, oh, nobody comes up here by THAT road!  There was apparently a back way around, flatter and faster. They did acknowledge the cattle were free range and had the run of the place, but said you can just keep driving slowly or give them the horn, and they would move. 

Because that road damaged the step on the trailer, we hoped to find Jake in Fort Nelson.  He fixed the step last year.  We stayed at the same campground as before, only this time it was very full and the restaurant was open and quite busy.  A good fish dinner was a satisfying treat.  We were told the campground had changed hands.  Clearly, it is doing well.  However, Jake was not to be found.  His business was closed and in asking around, we learned he either had moved or was about to.  We did get a tire repaired in Fort Nelson.  The artwork below is from the laundry room at the Triple G Hideaway campground in Fort Nelson.  

Every day, there was more driving through the kind of spectacular mountain scenery one gets used to up here.  Then a day or so later, we encountered another difficult road, to a free campsite.  I looked at the dirt road’s steep hills and at the sky, which the weather app stated was about to rain, and said, I would not go down that road.  My spouse replied: “I’m going down that road!”  At the top of the hill, the campsite was indeed beautiful, secluded and wooded.  The weather app switched to forecasting strong thunderstorms.  It stormed off and on all night.  I have never been that close to a thunderstorm – right up in the clouds, with the thunder extra loud and the lightning blinding all around us.  I wish I could have seen it but in the clouds and at night, there wasn’t much to see.  The next morning, the road was completely made of mud.  It took twice as long to get back to the main road as it had the night before, with the truck often in the lower gears (and this vehicle has some serious lower gears, meant for off-roading).  There was some slipping and sliding but mostly we just had to go very slowly.  This part of the drive was very quiet.  Nobly, I resisted the temptation to say, told you so.  Further damage to the trailer’s step from this road has caused us to give up, perhaps for good, the repair and maintenance of the step, using instead a step stool bought at Canadian Tire.  (Which is a huge tire and hardware chain that everyone traveling in Canada should know about.  They have everything.)

Near Watson Lake, YT, we saw the biggest areas so far of fire damage.  We’ve seen fire damage throughout the west and north before, but we can’t always tell when the fires happened.  The forest grows back quickly and sometimes there are just a few blackened tree trunks sticking up, with heavy shorter undergrowth.  But near Watson Lake we saw entire mountains covered in black trees with only grass in between.  This was damage from this past summer, which we could tell because we’d been there just eight or nine months ago.  Sometimes you could see where the fires had jumped the highway, burning on both sides.  It was beautiful in its own way, but a scary reminder of what can happen in nature that mankind cannot stop. 

One of the pleasures of boondocking (dry camping, camping without hookups or facilities) is unbeatable views.  We stayed in roadside rest areas several times in the company of fantastic mountains and glowing, iridescent rainbows.  There are also wide meadows of wildflowers along the highways.  They are purple, yellow, and white mostly, with a little red thrown in on occasion. 

One day we woke to a large group of travelers in big buses who all seemed to know each other.  Turned out they were part of a tour of 24 units, going through Alaska and Canada and heading in the opposite of our direction.  Several owned their own rigs, and some were renting.  One group member, named Kirk, was from Delaware and told us of camping there with his Oliver trailer, which was only a few feet longer than our Bigfoot.  

We compared notes and chatted for quite a while before we all moved on toward our respective destinations. 

At Watson Lake, we visited the Signpost Forest, which we have seen before and added our own sign to in 2012.  (See the 2012 piece which I added to this blog when we were there last year.)  We thought it would be fun to see the sign again.  When we were there last fall, it was a cold, rainy day and we did not venture in.  This time, it was beautiful and sunny.  There are thousands of street signs, license plates and other artifacts on which people carve, paint or write their names, where they came from and sometimes how many miles they traveled to get here, from a few miles away to the other side of the world.  Many are intricately carved or painted, clearly in anticipation of coming here.  Besides the tall signposts, there are several pieces of construction machinery, with signs stuck all over them. 

When we were there in 2012, there were around 75,000 signs.  Now there are over 100,000.  There is no index or grid and sometimes signs are out of order, put in any available space with others that have vastly different dates.  Even though we have a photo of our sign, with several signs around it to give cues, we were unable to find it.  We strolled around the tall rows of panels for a good while and saw thousands of witty, beautiful, and funky signs and objects made into signs (my favorite was a small tire with the info painted on in white), but not ours. 

The stretch between Watson Lake and Whitehorse is a good place to view wildlife.  We saw deer, one or two bears, a small herd of bison to the south and the larger herd we’ve seen before in these parts, farther north.  We also saw but did not manage to get photos of what appeared to be moose calves, charcoal gray with fuzzy velvety horns, skipping across the roadway.  If their mothers were near I would not want to mess with them but we saw no parents.  They are so cute at that age, before they get big and ungainly.  In general it is an event when you can get a picture of an animal because they move pretty quickly and know to get out of the way.  Except for the bison, who clearly know they rule the place since no one would want to risk their vehicle on a close encounter.

The wildlife on the road even got into my dreams.  I dreamt a herd of tan and white colored goats was on the road, surrounding my car and following me.  I woke up trying to shoo them vigorously and yelling at them to go away.  Only, these goats were chasing me down Vincennes Avenue in Chicago, heading toward Monterey where the post office is located. 

We are heading out from Whitehorse in the next day or so – then we will be in an area we haven’t seen before.  Here are photos of some maps I got at the campground in Fort Nelson.  Some of you have been asking about our route and I know from experience that US maps are short on detail when it comes to Canada.  I hope this gives you a better idea. 

On the first map, you will see Fort Nelson at the lower right corner.  We left Fort Nelson on Tuesday, August 5.  The second map continues the route north through Yukon Territory and the Northwest Territories all the way to Tuktoyaktuk, also known as Tuk.  It may appear that I have carefully marked our planned route; however, those red and yellow lines are the map – they show how few roads there are in this area.  From where the Dempster Highway (yellow) branches off Highway 2 (red), there is literally only one road north!  

The Dempster Highway was built along an old dogsled route.  It was completed in 1978, but the portion of the highway that runs from Inuvik to Tuk was only completed in 2017.  Before that, the only way to Tuk was to fly in. 

Gas prices:  in liters, $1.34-1.45/l, translates to $3.67-$3.97 gal in US.  In Whitehorse: $1.61/l, or $4.45/gal US.

 

Signage: 

Novus Glass, windshield repair in Spokane, WA:  “Show us your crack.” 

Sign on gas pump in northern BC:

“Instructions to customers:

1.      Pump gas

2.      Take picture of reading on pump

3.      Pay at office inside.”

That, my friends, is Canada.

 

And the winners, a tie this time, from the same location:

Sometimes a picture says it all.

Sign on washroom at combination gas station/grocery store near Clinton, MT:

 

Patron waiting in line at said washroom: