2005/07 Alaska Trip - North to Alaska - Yukon River Crossing |
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Initially the Dalton Highway was disappointing. The scenery was good, but very similar to what we’d seen in the rest of Alaska: mountains, lakes, and billions of trees. It began to change when we crossed the Yukon River.
The river connects many famous places in Alaska and the Yukon Territory. It begins near Lake Bennett, where the Klondike stampeders built their rafts for the journey north through today’s Whitehorse and Carmacks to Dawson City and the Klondike River. Then it turns west and flows past Eagle and across the centre of Alaska to empty into 
the Bering Sea. We were at the Yukon River Crossing, which is the last road access to the river before its mouth, hundreds of miles downstream. It had grown to a massive river, with a long dilapidated bridge. We had to detour left around a repair crew and then we could see how many deck timbers were broken and missing! John wanted me to get back on the left hand side of the bridge where there were more timbers, but I pointed out that hitting the oncoming gasoline tanker wouldn’t be good either!
Yukon River Crossing has a single roadhouse, a converted mining camp that provides fuel and food. After letting Sandie loose on the riverbank for a while to collect agates, we had coffee and cakes and one of the servers insisted on telling us their bear story.
He said that the roadhouse closes down in the winter and is boarded up. Apparently the guards on the bridge (yes, since 9/11 the bridge and pipeline are continually guarded) had noticed bears around the building but hadn’t done anything. Some of the locals though saw that it had been broken into and went in to investigate and found an old boar grizzly hibernating in the kitchen. Hibernating bears wake up really quickly so they “harvested” it while they had the chance. The server said that most of them hadn’t much idea how to use a gun and it was a miracle they didn’t miss the bear and shoot each other!
Further investigation showed that the first bears in had been a sow grizzly and her cub, and they’d later been evicted by the boar. The three bears had completely trashed the inside of the building, ate the freezer and some snowmobile seats, and spoiled most of their stock of tee shirts. They were now having a “bearly-used sale” of the peed-on tee shirts, but we didn’t think they were worth the money even if this was their most exciting event in decades.
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