Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
North to Alaska
(Part 2)
…gold in suitcases and leather grips, gold in boxes and packing-cases, gold in belts and pokes of caribou
hide, gold in jam jars, medicine bottles, and tomato cans, and gold in blankets held by straps and cord, so heavy
it took two men to hoist each one aboard…
—Pierre Berton,
The Klondike Fever
Day 4: Fort Nelson to Watson Lake
The reason we drove like madwomen yesterday was so Sharyn could spend two hours par-
broiling herself in Liard Hot Springs. I went for a walk instead, along a boardwalk
bordered with wildflowers that had no business growing at this latitude, including an entire
marsh filled to the brim with what I think were violets.
We were on the road again by 4 p.m., a section of highway with multiple personality dis-
order. One minute it arrows down through a spectacular granite gorge where stone sheep,
including four rams with full curls, a dozen ewes and one lamb, are licking up salt at the
sides of a road that is more patch than pavement and your car shares the lane with alders
and aspens. The next moment the road widens to a highway with shoulders as wide as the
lanes and you're going over the top of a mountain with a view all the way south to Banff
and all the way north to home. The next you're traveling through a river that has over time
been reduced to a mile-wide corridor of gravel with a moose cow and calf standing hip
deep in the only remaining channel and three RVs trying to ram each other for the best site
from which to take a picture.
Into Watson Lake by 6 p.m., where we washed clothes with a mother-daughter team who
had left Maine on April 28
th
and had since put 15,000 miles on their van. Kinda makes our
327 miles today look a little puny.
Day 5: Watson Lake to Whitehorse
