2004/07 Yukon trip - Trek to the Arctic - |
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Soon we were headed back up the Alaska Highway, with Sandie looking at her rockhounding guide again. We took another side trip up a rock road to Aishihik Lake where there were supposed to be some interesting rocks. The weather looked ugly but the scenery was gorgeous. The mountains in this part of the Yukon are lower and more worn, with great valleys in between. This is what the whole of Beringia was supposed to have been like during the Ice Ages.
We stopped at Otter Falls, and then had lunch on the edge of the Aishihik Lake.
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Otter Falls (0.08) |  |
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Usually Sandie cooks lunch while 
I explore and take photos, but this time I was cooking and she was sorting through rocks. I was about to call her for lunch when I saw that there was a very large bull bison standing on the bank just above her watching her. In a weak moment, I shouted a warning before reaching for the camera. Sandie didn’t hear me but the bison did and shot off into the bush never to be seen again. Of all things, I didn’t expect to see a bison in the Yukon, but apparently they’ve been reintroduced from Wood Buffalo park after being hunted nearly to extinction in the last century. Sandie had found a nice piece of soapstone and a few agates. She was skeptical about the bison.
Back on the highway, we passed a group of mountains that looked to be pink, and we realized that this was because they were covered in fireweed. We also passed Haines Junction where the road goes south to Haines, in Alaska, a few minutes ferry ride from Skagway where we’d spent the weekend, but we passed Haines up for a future trip. The mountains ahead of us were looking sharper, higher, and dotted with snow and glaciers. These are the St Elias Mountains, an enormous barrier between the Yukon and the sea. These are Canada’s highest mountains, up to 19000 feet, and they are part of a number of parks: Kluane, Tatshenshini, Alsek, and Wrangell. These are all wilderness parks, without roads, which means you can only get in on foot or by plane. The highest mountains were out of sight but those closest to us were covered with dramatic storm clouds, very photogenic to us safely in the valleys, but tough if you were up there.
We stopped for the night on the beach at Kluane Lake (pronounced Klooarny), a large, icy-blue lake, ringed with mountains, and with a beach full of rocks for Sandie to sort through.
Friday 30th July
It rained most of the night and we had water coming in another of the windows. As it was on the low quarter of the camper, the suspicion is that we have one leak in the roof and it flows across the ceiling and shows up as a leak in the lowest window frame. That kind of problem is hard to find and harder still to know whether you’ve fixed it. The tallest mountains around us were dusted with snow in the morning, so winter’s coming already to this part of the world.
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