2004/08 Yukon trip - The road home - |
|||||
We left Keno after lunch and drove back towards Mayo on what used to be the original Silver Trail. It was very rough and bouncy and there was little to see other than trees. Beyond Mayo, we retraced our route to Stewart Crossing and then continued south on the Klondike Highway, through Pelly Crossing to Carmacks. There we took a side trip to the Cliffside Agate Mine, another rough road, but quite short, set up camp for the night and gathered agates in the twilight. Yes, as we traveled south and as the calendar moved on, the days were getting shorter and we now had a few hours of darkness. However there were no northern lights to be seen as we had a lot more smoke here, from the fires around Whitehorse.
Tuesday 17th August
The Cliffside agate site didn’t prove very productive, so we tried a few other sites in the area. We had maps in Sandie’s rockhound book. The first was a total bust: we scrambled up the cliff from the road but we never found 
the trail at the top to the site. Sandie bodysurfed her way back down the cliff and was lucky enough to find a few agates en route. The second site was in an old coal loading area. I hiked up to the open pit coal mine looking for fossils while Sandie was looking for geodes (hollow rocks full of crystals). The coal mine was a long canyon with large rocks teetering on top of the cliffs. I found a number of sheep skeletons, but no fossils, mainly because I didn’t want to walk under those rocks! Sandie, though, had found a vein of opal in the road cuts, so I was set to work with hammer and chisel, and entertained the passing traffic. We dug out some opalized rock but it looked to be mainly potch, with no colour. I don’t think Lightning Ridge or Coober Pedy need to worry about competition from Canadian opal.
We set off traveling after lunch along the Campbell Highway towards Watson Lake. This is a gravel road that runs east-west and parallel to the Alaska Highway, and a few hundred miles north of it. There are no towns or even buildings for nearly 400 miles, but there are two small towns on side roads.
 |
Robert Campbell Highway (Pelly River, Faro, Ross River) |
|---|
The highway runs initially between the mountains and the Yukon River. It would have been spectacularly beautiful if it hadn’t been for the smoke that obscured most of the details. We took a side trip, crossing the Pelly River to Faro. This is another mining town that is trying hard to turn itself into a tourist attraction, but it’s too new to be interesting. It’s a company town with grim looking townhouses, and our impression was that most of the people had already left.
Their tourist attractions are the mine and the local sheep. They have mounted a massive mining truck at the entrance to town. Their zinc mine is still operating but now with even more gigantic trucks, four times the size of the one on display. We took the bumpy track out to the town’s sheep viewing platform but the sheep were off on their summer hols and nowhere to be seen. These are Fanning sheep, the guys that do the head-on collisions, so maybe they were all lying down with headaches.
We left Faro and camped down on the gravel bars of the Pelly River with a great view of the cliffs on the other 
bank. The Pelly is a big river in August, but it must be ten times that size in the spring as we were a couple of hundred yards from the water’s edge. The Pelly gravel includes thousands of colourful agates, so Sandie was busy gathering. I went off to investigate some loud splashes, thinking that maybe there were moose or horses in the river. It turned out to be some very large fish jumping for bugs. It was dark under the trees so I couldn’t see what kind they were, but they looked to be a good challenge for a fly fisherman.
Wednesday 18th August
We did some more rock gathering in the morning. The picture shows what I collected without really looking, just picking up what caught the eye. I guess we’ve found the limiting factor for these trips. Every few months we have to return the camper to base to dump out the rocks.