High overcast clouds cloaked the sky as we drove along Highway 43 this morning; temps were in the low fifties, a gray, chilly day. Shortly after we left Valley View I was studying the maps when Bob hit the brakes and yelled, “Look!”

A black bear, a big one, came out of the woods on our left and ambled onto the highway. When he realized he was out in the open and saw us, he broke into a loping run past us and disappeared back into the woods on our right. And where was my camera? In the camper, of course. In all our travels, it was our first encounter with a truly wild bear. We've been having extraordinary luck this trip with wildlife sightings, and we haven't even started into the great wilderness of the Alaska Highway.

Grande Prairie was probably the last town of any size we'll see in a long time, so we decided we'd better stop if it had a Wal-Mart or Pamida and get some supplies. It had a Wal-Mart (They're everywhere! They're everywhere!) and I had a “Wal-Mart list.” Like a grocery list, I always keep a running list, even in Florida, of needed items for whenever we come upon a hardware or variety store. I call it my “Wal-Mart” list because it has everything on it.

Before we went into Wal-Mart, we climbed into Little Moby and replaced our shorts with jeans. The wind was just plain cold under the gray skies. We also slipped on windbreakers and zipped them up to our necks. Boy, that felt better. Quite a few of the natives were walking around in t-shirts and sandals. They didn't fool me. They were freezing, but just too proud to show it.

By the time we had wandered around an unfamiliar Wal-Mart trying to find the items on our list, exotic things like a hose shutoff and Superglue, it was almost noon. The small McDonald's in the store didn't offer salads and we wanted salad. There was a Smitty's restaurant across the parking lot that looked pretty good. I guess it was. People were lined up to the door waiting for tables. We didn't have that kind of time. So we climbed into the van to take our chances down the road.

Very soon we reached the edge of town. Ahead of us stretched a panorama of green, green forest and empty road. We knew that once we drove out onto that road, lunch would have to be canned fish in a cold, dim camper at a highway pullover.

But we were saved! There was a single restaurant at the edge of town. You guessed it. Another McDonald's. It never looked so good.

The restaurant was clean and bright. Children clambered and slid in the big Play Place behind our table. There was a full menu including salads and protein plates. Not only that, but while we dug into our Fiesta Salads, Bob was able to read in their complimentary newspaper that the Russian teen had defeated Serena Williams at Wimbledon, a burning question that had bothered him all night.

We drove through a couple of small towns on our way to Dawson Creek, Mile 0 of the Alaska Highway, which is just over the border into British Columbia. I felt a sameness that I have noted before in the small towns of more remote areas. There's an austerity that makes a small town in northern Alberta and British Columbia have the same feeling as a small town in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the feeling of The North. The air has a certain clarity, as if the Winter Warlock is hovering just over the horizon, even in summer. Buildings are smaller, plainer, and more utilitarian than in warmer climates. Nature surrounds man's small incursions with its vastness and challenges. The forest, the mountains, are never farther away than the edge of town. It's a splendid isolation whose culture is survival.

We were in Dawson Creek two summers ago on a tour of the Northwest and Pacific Coast. Dawson Creek was as far north as we went on that trip. As the jumping-off spot for the Alaska Highway, Dawson Creek is a slightly larger town offering the services needed for those heading out into the wild - namely tires, gas, and food.

What changes two years hath wrought! A spanking new Wal-Mart greeted us at the edge of town today. They are everywhere! In a way, it was a disappointment. It changes the tenor of Dawson Creek from a well-worn outpost town with personality to one with boring urban conformity. There is a new McDonald's, too. The Mile Zero signpost near the Tourist Information Center hasn't changed, though, and today there was a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman in his red jacket posing with tourists at the signpost as they have done for over fifty years.

The campgrounds, too, are the same, rustic and overcrowded with folks going to and coming from Alaska. In order to meet the demands of the bigger and bigger RVs, the campground we are in had converted as many of their back-in sites to pull-thru sites as they could by the expedient of taking out a few trees and driving across the grass until it was beaten down into a track. The results were pull-thrus all right, short pull-thrus with the existing electrical, water, and sewer hookups now in all the wrong places.

The first site they sent us to was one of these conversions, a short, newly manufactured pull-thru. The two tracks of it were a sea of mud from the constant rains. Bob sloshed the van into the site and I jumped out to signal him where to stop to line up with the utilities connections. There were two sewer connections. That was unique. If he lined up with the first one, Little Moby's behind would be in the narrow dirt lane. So I signaled Bob to move forward to the next one. He moved forward. Not enough. I kept waving to move forward while watching the camper sewer caps for when they would line up with the sewer opening in the ground. Bob stopped. I looked up. The van was out into the other lane and blocking in a Class C motor home in another site. This would definitely not work. The owners of the Class C might get sticky about it if they wanted to go somewhere.

"I'll get another site," Bob shouted out the van window. He stepped on the gas and sloshed out of the site, around the looped track, and back to the campground office, leaving me standing in the mud.
I ran across the campground and jumped in the van as he came out of the office with a new site number. The second site had some gravel left in the bog, a real improvement. We lined up with the utilities and fit into the site, just barely. A larger rig would have been out of luck again. We are crammed, I mean crammed, into here. I can hear what they're saying in the next camper and hear their radio. I don't particularly care for the station they're listening to, either.

Nor have the arrangements for internet access improved. The phone jack at the campground we stayed at two years ago was on the side of the shower house. There was a shelf about a foot wide below a public phone with a datajack on it. You put your computer on the little shelf and plugged in, exposed to the dripping eaves above you and the mosquitoes around you.

We're in a different park tonight, two years later. Where is the phone jack? It's in the side of a dataphone on the outside wall of the rec room. Below the dataphone a three-sided box about four feet high, cobbled together out of particle board, sits in mid-calf high grass. Five or six warped, very rough planks make the top of the box, and they're covered with a torn-off and ragged old plastic tablecloth. Since the tabletop is so uneven, a smaller piece of grey, weathered plywood lies on top of the tablecloth. There's a little roof over the phone on the wall, but no protection over the table. So both Mac-Babe the computer and I were exposed to the elements while I worked. The elements by late this afternoon, though, had improved to mostly sunshine and the mosquitoes weren't out yet. I was exposed, though, to a couple using the regular public phone that was on the wall about six feet from the dataphone. They were making their every-Sunday calls to their aunts, uncles, cousins, and many offspring, and I got to hear every word of it.

It's 10:00 p.m. now, and just beginning to slide into twilight. The days are getting longer and longer as we go farther north. When we go to bed around eleven, the camper is still light enough to see everything in it. Doesn't bother me, but the light keeps Bob awake. He has to wear one of those sleep masks they give you in airplanes for red-eye flights. His is a bright lime green one, compliments of Virgin Airlines. With that mask topped by my red ski cap sticking out of his green sleeping bag, he looks like some exotic giant caterpillar, ugly enough to scare a moose.

Fort Nelson, British Columbia, Canada

The sky was a radiant blue and warm sunshine poured over me as I stood at the makeshift table beside the rec hall sending email this morning. Bob was testing and pumping air into the tires on the car and trailer. The word was out around the campground that the highway was open all the way through the Yukon, and people who had been evacuated from the fires' threats were returning home. It was time to head north.

Did I mention that Little Moby has a nice patina of smeared dust and mud splats? During those rains a few days ago Bob went out with a brush to scrub the dirt off Moby. The scrubbing went fine, but the rinsing wasn't real effective as the rain stopped before he was done. You can even see the brush marks in the remaining dirt. The van? It rinsed off better and is almost blue again. Thus we start the journey up the 1,400 miles of the Alaska Highway already stained and worn, seasoned travelers crossing into a new frontier. But before we headed out into the veldt, we had to make stops in Dawson Creek at a hardware, the Safeway Super Market, and a gas station.

We checked the hardware store for a brace rod that goes across the front of a fridge shelf so that when I open the fridge door at the end of a day on the road, the butter and dill pickles don't tumble out onto my toes. We have two, but need a third one. The store was out of them.

The shopping at Safeway went smoothly. It would have been nice if the deli had had bulk olives, but oh, well. On to the gas station.

While Bob was pumping gas, I went into the convenience store and chatted to the lady behind the counter about the Alaska Highway and the great weather. Bob came in to pay for the gas and I went out. The van sat in a huge wet stain of gasoline. Gas made tiny pools in the pockmarks and cracks of the pavement. There was a trail of splattered drips of gas from the big puddle back to the pump.

I stood by the stain and waited. Bob came out. The catch to snap off the pump when the tank was full - didn't, he said. Bob was at the front of the van when it happened and by the time he got back to the gas tank, the place was awash with gas.

There was a bin of absorbable pellets labeled “For Emergency Gas Spills,” but the van was sitting over the spill. We looked for a hose or bucket to wash the gas down with, but found nothing. The van had to be moved. Luckily, there was a slight slope down of the pavement in front of the van. Bob got in and put it in neutral. It rolled all of four inches.

I walked around to the back of the van, leaned against it, and pushed. It moved! I kept pushing; it kept moving. Superwoman to the rescue! Suddenly the rig stopped. It must have come to the end of the slope, but that was ok. We were out of the puddle of gas. Bob started the engine and pulled the rig well out of the way.

I went back and stopped a motorhome from driving onto the gas. Then I trotted to the Emergency Gas Spill bin and scooped up paper cups-full of the pellets and sprinkled them on the spill, starting with the little standing pools. Within a few minutes the gal from inside the convenience store came out with a bucket, dipped it into the bin, and threw the stuff around wholesale. I stood with my empty cup and watched. When the spill was all covered, I handed her my empty cup and left. I had done my duty.

Bob, meanwhile, had been cleaning up the car around the gas cap. We climbed into the van and made a dignified departure. It was some time later that Bob mentioned he had pushed the van off the spill. So much from my Superwoman image. We had, unknown to each other, both pushed the rig to safety.

Traveling the Alaska Highway is beautiful, just like the pictures in the brochures. We were in valleys ringed by mountains and on high bridges over wide chasms. We hugged cliffs beside the road that spiraled down and down to wide rivers. Miles upon miles of tall pines, stands of white birch, trembling aspen, and spruce of many colors followed us along our route and carpeted the valleys and hillsides. And that was just today!

The trees and brush are cleared back maybe thirty feet from the road wherever possible. This gives moose and motorists a better chance of seeing each other before the moose trots out on the highway. I suppose the cleared area is also to push snow into during the winter. It's pretty hard to cram it among pine trees. Perhaps its most important use is a firebreak to, hopefully, keep fire from jumping the highway.

We stopped twice at places that had gas signs out in front before we found one that actually had gas. It was at Mae's Kitchen, a large converted farmhouse that is open year around. We went into Mae's Kitchen to use the restrooms, and walked past diners wallowing in big bowls of chili and two-inch thick slices of buttery grilled homemade bread. Bob couldn't stand it. Before we got out of there he had bought a large square of homemade date bar and a cup of coffee.

Signs warning us of caribou on the road were now added to the moose alerts. Wouldn't it be something to see a caribou at the edge of the forest? That would be a gold star on my life-list of Animals I Have Seen in the Wild. We did pass a black bear munching berries in some roadside brush and enjoying the seventy-eight degree weather. Later another one crossed the road in front of us again to get to the berries on the other side. This time I had my camera ready, and Bob slowed down, but the shot through the windshield didn't show much but a largish black spot on the road.

The Alaska Highway is, as I said, 1,400 miles long. We drove only 290 miles of it today. There are some sights along the highway we want to visit, so it'll be days before we actually arrive in Alaska. The Milepost, the essential guide to northwest touring, begins the eastern approach to Alaska at Great Falls, Montana. Going There is a major attraction of Driving to Alaska. We're enjoying every mile of it.

Muncho Lake, British Columbia, Canada

We did! We did see a caribou standing alongside the road today, a female. We got close enough to make positive identification before she turned and disappeared into the woods. What an addition to my wilderness wildlife list, which runs heavy to porcupines and coons.

As I sit here in the camper at 4:30 p.m., the rains come down as they have come down all day without ceasing. The temperature outside my window is forty-eight degrees. Luckily, today was another short hop, relatively speaking, from where we were in Fort Nelson last night to Muncho Lake today. It was just 180 miles, so we knew we'd get here early and be assured of a campsite. Also, we thought we'd do some sightseeing the rest of the day and during the day tomorrow before moving on. Scratch today. The only sight we're seeing is the inside of Little Moby, where it's warm and there's food.

I mean that literally about seeing only the inside of the camper, even though our campsite has a view of Muncho Lake. The windows are steamed over, and we're constantly wiping up the condensation from them that runs down the walls. Wet raincoats and wet towels hang in the miniscule bathroom. Wet jeans and wet socks hang from the clothesline across the room, and wet shoes sit by the door. The humidity is wonderful. I expect it to rain from the ceiling any minute.

But what a trip we had today! We turned west into the majestic peaks and deep valleys of the Canadian Rockies. Wisps and clouds of white mist floated along the ranks of great shadowy lines of mountains that nearly covered the sky as they faded into the grayness. The highway threaded through a remote and pristine wilderness. We were almost lost in the immenseness of the land.

It never rained so hard while we were driving today that we couldn't see our closer surroundings; in fact, we had a good half mile of visibility. Nature dons a special cloak in the rain. Roadside brush is shiny and dripping; little streams appear on the riverbanks. Colors are muted. We drove along between mountainsides and rain-fed hurrying milky rivers. One long riverbed was a wide stretch of gravel with meandering streams that parted and came together, never quite making up its mind whether it was a river or just a gravelly plain of willow-covered islets created by the rushing rivulets.

Other times we were far up on the side of the mountains, looking down into bottomless valleys. Many of the mountainsides up here in the North are treeless, just long slopes of rock and scree. As we came around a curve today, we could see two high, high bare mountains verging the road ahead of us. Rushing rain-streams made a lacey pattern on the dark slopes of their sides. Narrow falls plunged hundreds of feet, ran along as a stream, then plummeted over an escarpment again as the water found natural paths down the mountains. Mother Nature puts on shows like that only in the rain. A car ahead of us kept braking to look, and finally just pulled over to watch the display.

We had lunch at a turnout near a river. I stood for a few minutes in the rain on the way from the van back to Little Moby, just breathing the fresh air and absorbing the beauty of dark evergreen silhouettes against gray mountains. It was cold, though. We cozied into Little Moby and heated up vegetable soup and peppermint tea for lunch. The rain pelted onto the roof and for a few minutes we could pretend we were in our oft-dreamed-about log cabin hideaway.

This afternoon there were small rocks dislodged by the rain scattered on the road in several places. I began to regard the roadside slopes with apprehension. We passed a parked truck and two fellows walking alongside the road in the rain, looking up the mountain slopes. They had orange reflective vests on and were obviously checking the condition of the mountainsides. That was reassuring.

There were no towns in this last 180 miles, not since Fort Nelson; and there won't be any for a while. We passed a couple of isolated “lodges,” which are a large central building housing a restaurant and a few rooms to rent, some outbuildings, and a few campsites. We're at one such place now. The door is locked. We're in for the night. Let it rain!

Muncho Lake, British Columbia, Canada

We had planned to explore the Muncho Lake area today and Mother Nature cooperated. We woke to sunshine - at 3:30 a.m. There are only four hours of real darkness these nights, so the caterpillar with big lime green eyes sleeps in my bed every night.

First things first, though. We took advantage of a day off the road to defrost the fridge and do laundry. My computer and I walked down to the public phone booth at the dock to do email. The booth was a tiny log shelter house. Under the gabled roof over the phone was a foot-wide strip of open lattice, then below that were log walls that ended a couple of feet off the ground. The front was open, of course, and inside was the phone and a phone jack box fixed to the wall next to the phone. There was a log bench hung from the side wall, and a small triangular shelf for the computer on the other wall. It was all the comforts of home, as long as it wasn't blowing rain. It took a long time to connect to AOL, not surprising as phone service in this isolated area is by satellite.

A diesel generator provides all the electricity used at the lodge; that includes the office/café building, nine motel rooms, washrooms, campsites, and the owners' home. They also sell diesel fuel and gasoline. They must have huge underground storage tanks. But out here, when it's gone, it's gone, like the couple of lodges we stopped at earlier that had no gas left to sell us.

It was close to lunchtime when we were finished with our chores. The rest of the day was a play day. To start it the fun, Bob wanted to have lunch out. We walked from our lakeside campsite up to the main building for lunch at the café. There were three booths in the café, lined up against the kitchen wall. We took the one near the window. Hot coffee came to us in large flowered cups while we studied the menu. When it's 200 miles to the nearest grocery store, the items are limited to foods that keep well. The choices were pretty much meats, cheeses, French fries, bread, and gravy in various forms. We chose grilled cheese and fries. Everything came with fries, so we had fries, the vegetable of the day.

We chatted with the cook/owner while she fixed the meal. Bob asked about the weather.

“We take it as it comes,” she said. “There's no local weather forecast. At this altitude, it can snow any day of the year.”

And Bob wanted to get out of The Far North before September in case of snow? Maybe we should turn around right now.

After the grilled cheese, we wandered around the gift and used book shop. Bob bought a t-shirt. I sorted through the used paperbacks. Doesn't anyone read anything but romances on the road? What's wrong with a good old-fashioned murder mystery? The highways and byways are awash with women dreaming of the perfect lover through pocket romances. Men apparently don't read at all.

We left Little Moby alone to enjoy the view of Muncho Lake, and headed north in the van to Liard River Hot Springs Provincial Park, thirty miles up the road.

The scenery for the first fifteen miles was breathtaking. The landscape is immense. Towering mountains border the road, then slide back to ring deep, chasm-like valleys. We glided down winding curves to bridges over churning milky waters, and then climbed into receding ranks of steep slopes scarred by erosion streambeds.
The last few miles to the park were merely extraordinarily beautiful. The mountains pulled back and heavy spruce/fir forest moved in. Liard Hotsprings Provincial Park hiking trails began at the road and vanished into the woods. We passed another black bear strolling through the roadside greenery.

We weren't sure what to expect at the hot springs. We've visited a number of hot springs, from tiled pools to muddy puddles. We had heard there were pools there for bathing, but thought we'd probably just take a look.

The first thing we did when we got to the main part of the park was to walk through the campground. The campsites were little nooks tucked into the woods, each site hidden from the others. There were strong well-kept picnic tables and a level spot at each site for your unit, be it trailer or tent. It was rustic camping. You got water from a hand pump down the road, and followed paths to pit toilets. The massive caravan going to Alaska is moving along. We saw rigs at Liard we had camped with at Dawson Creek.

A half-mile boardwalk that led to the actual hot springs crossed a warm water slough and meandered through the woods. People going our way were carrying or wearing bathing suits. People going the other way were wearing or carrying bathing suits.

“We should have brought our bathing suits,” said Bob.

The hot springs runoff was crystal clear over a pebble bottom. It rose somewhere in the woods to the right, ran down to form a pool behind a small dam, then flowed over the dam and off again into the woods as a wide stream. The rivulet was waist deep, and there were split log benches in the water where you could sit and luxuriate in the flowing hot water. It looked too wonderful. There was even a changing house, a large, single roofless room for each sex, with clothes hooks along the walls.

“We could do it,” I said. “Back at the van in the suitcase of “things to go home” is that bathing suit I bought in Michigan. You can just go into the pool in those psychedelic polyester boxer shorts you're wearing.”

I dashed back to the car, rummaged and threw stuff around in the back end and found the bathing suit. We carry two old towels in the car for cleaning off chocks and hoses and such. I gathered them up and bounded back onto the boardwalk. When I came around the bend to the hot springs, there was Bob on the deck by the pool in his Greek fisherman's hat, his glasses, and a dripping wet pair of red, purple, black and green boxer shorts.

I ran into the changing room, ripped the tags off my new suit, jumped into it, and shot down the stairs and into the springs. Holy Mackerel, was it hot! I backed up so fast I bottomed out on the steps. There was a lot of splashing before I got my balance and could get myself up out of that cauldron. Back on the deck, I took a deep breath. Then I descended into the pool again, only more gingerly. Bob followed me into the water. We worked our way towards the dam and climbed the steps over it. The flow was cooler there. Still hot, mind you, but not skin-searing. There was a log seat under the little spillway big enough for three or four people. Bob and I sat on it and just let the hot water pour over our backs. Life was good.

After we had cooked long enough, we toweled off, dressed, and strolled back along the boardwalk. Across from the provincial park was a large log building, another highway lodge. We drove over to it and bought a Diet Pepsi. The pale northern sun shone on the forest behind us as we sat at a picnic table in front of the lodge, drank our Pepsi, and finished up the last half of the date bar Bob bought at Mae's Kitchen a few days ago.

We got back to our campsite on Muncho Lake around five. There was just time for a quick supper before we met the 6:00 Muncho Lake Boat Tour at the dock. The boat arrived at 6:20. There were two of us standing on the dock. We got on the boat and waited a while longer. No one else came.

These are the great opportunities. We had a tour for two. The waters of seven-mile long Muncho Lake are a crystalline green. They were smooth tonight, like glass, and our thirty-passenger boat with only two passengers in it glided over the surface of the lake. Near shore, we could look down through seven feet of clear water to see chewed logs scattered in front of a beaver lodge. We sat by the captain and learned about the biology and geology of the lake and mountains surrounding it. He had samples of rocks and fossils that we could study without having to share them with twenty-eight other people.

In a small bay, we spied an animal swimming near the shoreline. It was too small for a beaver, too big for a mink. We drifted close enough to get a good look, and still didn't know what it was. We, meaning Bob and I. The captain knew.

“Marten,” he said.

A pine marten! In the wild! Another gold star for my life-list. The marten glared at us, and identification was complete. Even I recognized it. He dived, then came up again, and swam towards shore. As he clambered up the bank, he gave us one last dirty look, then disappeared into the forest.

Watson Lake, Yukon Territory, Canada

The day started out overcast after night-long rain, but sun occasionally broke through later on. At least it didn't rain any more.

I needed to work on yesterday's log as we drove, but didn't want to miss a minute of the scenery. So I'd write a few lines in a notebook, then watch the passing scene for a while. We passed a couple more black bears. We've seen so many now that you'd think we'd be very blasé about them.
“Oh, it's just another black bear.”

But that isn't true. They still are a thrill to watch and realize that we are peeking into their wild and natural lives.

We also saw a herd of wild bison today. There were fifteen or twenty of them near the roadside. A mother suckled her calf, one or two were grazing, the rest lay in the sunshine and ignored us as we coasted by. Many miles later we came upon a big bull lying in a wallow he had pawed out about twenty feet from the highway. I wonder what the many bikers do when they come upon a bear or a buffalo like that.

Another highway phenomenon is the bikers, I mean the kind who load up their bikes with panniers and packs and pedal over the mountains and through the wild. Male and female, young and middle-aged, they come to ride the Alaska Highway. We'll see a half dozen of them in a days' drive. Most of them are alone, pursuing their dreams.

Bright fireweed clumps make hot pink splashes along the edge of the road. The fireweed here is shorter by half than the fireweed in Maine or Ontario. Life is tough on a far northern mountainside. There's pocatello, Indian paint brush, and lupine. It's not like the meadows of wildflowers like you see farther south; here there is just enough color to splash accents on the dark forests and green verges.

We got into the campground early enough today for me to take an hours' walk around the campground under the tall firs. To get in an hour's walk, I just have to walk around and around the campground. It's not that boring. There's always something to watch. Around 5:00 campers begin to come in off the road, and by 6:00 it's a steady stream. The deserted campground I walked around earlier becomes a busy community by dinnertime. Awnings are unfurled; clotheslines go up, and grill pop up on the picnic tables. Chairs are set up outside and the people flopped in them chat with their neighbors and others who stroll by. Evening has begun in life on the road.

Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada

About an hour and half after we left Watson Lake this morning we drove into the smoke from the fires we had been hearing so much about. Southbound travelers we met two days ago said the smoke was so terrible they could hardly breathe. We had the car closed up, and it wasn't too bad today. The mountains were just shadows in the smoke haze. For the first half hour, there was at least a mile of visibility and we could clearly see the wide stream following the road, the roadside forest and the fireweed.

The smoke got much worse after we passed the Continental Divide. A grey haze swallowed the mountains and sunshine. We passed miles of burned-over forest on both sides of the road. Firefighting trucks were parked on the shoulder at one point and I could see smoke rising among the blackened trees.

Nearly all the wildflowers have disappeared save the fireweed. It makes a hot pink band along the wayside, sometimes so wide it fills the thirty-foot wide cutback area from highway to tree line. Roads, lodges, and even a bookstore in Whitehorse are named after the fireweed, the signature wildflower of the far north.

After an hour and a half we drove out of the worst of the smoke. The mountains were still hazy, but the smell wasn't so bad. In another hour we realized the haze on the mountains wasn't smoke, it was impending rain. And it did. Rain, that is, off and on for the rest of the day. Again.

Our timing was really bad. We got into Whitehorse the first day of their big rodeo. There are 33,000 people who live in Yukon Territory. Twenty-three thousand of them live in Whitehorse. The other 10,000 came to Whitehorse this weekend. The first campground we tried was full. They were kind enough to call another campground that hadn't filled up yet and make us a reservation there. This was at 3:30 in the afternoon, long before campers usually get off the road. We dashed to the other campground, and were directed to a spot on a large gravel strip that was already wall-to-wall with campers.

The units are so close together that you can hardly open your door without hitting the motorhome beside you. There is a post between each two sites with electrical and water hookups on it and a sewer hole at its base. Only the width of the posts separates the sites. It's like a refugee camp for recreational vehicles. The showers are clean and hot though, and there's a twenty-four hour modem access for me to send email which is inside, not stuck on the side of a building. So things aren't all bad, and we do have a pretty much grizzly-safe place for the night.

Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada

I sat up this morning, pushed back the curtain, and looked at the thermometer on the window. It was forty-six degrees. I didn't need to look out the window for the weather; I could hear the rain on the roof. I closed the curtain and slid back down into my sleeping bag.

When we decided we had to face the day a couple of hours later, the rain was still coming down. It wasn't pouring, just a steady, cold, miserable rain. After breakfast I went up to the campground office to get directions to a grocery store and a hardware store and - most important, some weather information. The forecast was for rain all day. I tugged my credit card out of my jeans and signed up for another night in the gravel field.

After breakfast we unhooked Little Moby to take the van and go play in Whitehorse to pass the rainy day. Half-way out of the campground, I realized that I had forgot the map of Whitehorse. We turned around and went back. As we came around the corner of a row of massive motor homes, we both started laughing. There sat Little Moby all by himself, like a lost puppy in a herd of St. Bernards.

It seems like ninety-five per cent of the recreational vehicles going to Alaska are motor homes or fifth wheel campers, each one bigger and with more slide-outs than the next. They roar past us on the highway on their way to somewhere important. Then there's us, a blue van and a tiny white trailer puttering along at fifty miles an hour. Just two Florida old folks going to Alaska.

Two years ago, when we were in Dawson Creek on our way across British Columbia, we stopped at their information center. I was at the desk when a fellow came up and asked the lithe young thing behind the desk if many people came into the center.

“Oh,” she answered, “just old folks going to Alaska.”

Well, here we are! The rush is on!

Today, though, we were stalled in Whitehorse. That was fine. I had heard so much about Whitehorse, legendary in tales of the Klondike, that I welcomed the chance to explore the town.

We drove down to Main Street and parked the van. Whitehorse is on the Yukon River, the watery road to the Klondike for thousands of nineteenth century gold-seekers. Many of the buildings have the old-style facades. There is a surprising lack of tourist traps. The old-style buildings house ordinary businesses. The station of the Yukon and White Pass Railroad is a large timbered structure on the river, and a white paddlewheel ship being restored sits at a dock not far away. Several of the more modern buildings have professional-looking murals on them of the Gold Rush and Indian totems. We walked all over town in the soft, cold rains, enjoying the ambience and looking for a Chinese restaurant.

For us, Canada means Chinese restaurants, of which Bob is very fond. We found one, the Northern Dragon. It opened at 4:00. It was 12:30 and we wanted lunch.

There was The Talisman, a small restaurant near where we had parked the car. We had seen it, but Bob wanted Chinese. There was no Chinese. We went back to The Talisman. What a happy accident. It was a small artsy restaurant with outstanding food. The walls, moldings, and even the light switches were painted in an array of bright colors. Every wall was a different color, and the moldings another color again. The furniture was rustic wood, though I will say the flat plank chair seats were a bit hard on our curved derrières. The restaurant menus and the sign outside had Indian totems on them. The walls inside, however, were decorated with large Celtic hand-drawn and lettered artworks done by a local artist. The name Talisman fit with all of it, the totems and the illustrated bardic writings.

After the late lunch playday was over. We went back to the campground, I to unpack groceries and redd up the camper, Bob to work on his sewer pipe project. Since the makeshift campsites in so many parks have the sewer hookup in the middle of the site, far from Moby's sewer drain, we bought a sewer pipe extension. We really don't have a place to store it, so Bob is making a case for it out of black plastic plumbing pipe. It will be tied to our spare tire with white clothesline, giving a true Clampett effect to our rig.

The rain had slowed to a drizzle by the time we got back. As Bob worked outside, the drizzle became sprinkles. At around 7:00 p.m., the sun flashed its rays for a half hour. The sunset was red. “Red at night, sailors' delight.” We can only hope. Tomorrow we leave Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, for Haines, Alaska.