2005/07 Alaska Trip - North to Alaska - Kluane and beyond |
|||||
The rain continued through to Haines Junction. I’d planned to stay there for a couple of nights and do some walking in Kluane national park, but we decided to drive on and look for some sunshine. I’ve included a foggy picture of the mountains in Kluane to show how splendid they are, but we didn’t see them again after I’d taken this picture. Kluane Lake was beautiful though, still a blue-green colour even without any sunshine. We spent a lot of time looking at the lake as we were making slow progress through the road works along the shore. The road was already narrow, so there was little room in the mud holes for both us and the road machinery.
 |
Alaska Highway (Whitehorse, Haines Junction, Kluane Lake) |
|---|
Beyond the lake, we saw vast areas of fireweed. Also, the road became very bad, with lots of frost heave, gigantic pot holes, and some very unfriendly cambers. We passed a big Holland-America tour bus that had gone off the road backwards and was suspended with its tail in the ditch. The passengers were being unloaded to another bus. This one came bouncing past us shortly after, probably with the driver trying to make up time.
The only wildlife we saw all day was a moose on the far shore of a lake. It saw us too, but didn’t seem to be as 
excited. We’d wondered last year if we just weren’t seeing the wildlife and we were looking forward to having two others on board who could do a better job of scanning. But it hadn’t happened. I think there is a lot of wildlife, but it’s spread over a vast area. We didn’t even see any roadkill and that’s usually a good measure of the wildlife population.
We stopped for the night at a lake at Snag Junction, with a nice view of the lake. The rain had eased off a little but the bugs discouraged us from sitting outside.