Gold seekers in the 1800s took ships from San Francisco or Seattle up the Inside Passage to Skagway, Alaska. Then they loaded all their possessions on their backs and carried them across the Chilkoot Trail to Bennett Lake in the Yukon, usually in winter. When they got to Bennet Lake they dumped all their gear on the ground and spent months building boats and rafts. At the spring ice breakup in late May, a flotilla of miners set sail through a chain of lakes and rivers to the great Yukon River. They braved rapids and rocks on the swift river as they floated downstream to the north for over 300 miles to Dawson and the Klondike gold fields.

An alternate route to the Chilcoot Trail was the White Pass Trail, which also began near Skagway. The Chilcoot was shorter, though much steeper, than the White Pass, and so was preferred by most prospectors eager to reach the gold fields.

If there's money to be had, entrepreneurs are soon to find it. On a big scale, four men agreed to build a railroad over White Pass at the height of the gold rush. By the time it was finished in 1900, the biggest fever of the Gold Rush had passed. However, there was a great need for freight to be hauled into the Yukon interior, and gold to be hauled out. White Pass and Yukon Railroad was there to do the job and make lots of money for its investors. We rode the White Pass and Yukon Railroad today.

The train originally ran from Skagway to Whitehorse. Freight was transferred to riverboats and barges to be hauled downstream on the Yukon River almost to the Bering Sea. The riverboats and barges are gone. We toured the last one, the Klondike, two days ago. The White Pass and Yukon no longer carries freight to the Yukon at Whitehorse. But it does still run up and over White Pass from Fraser, British Columbia, to Skagway, Alaska, as a popular excursion train. You can board the train in downtown Skagway for the ride over the pass to Fraser, and ride a bus back. Or, you can ride a bus from White Horse to Fraser, ride over the White Pass into Skagway, and take the bus back from Skagway to Whitehorse. That's what we did.

A bus that read “Yukon and Alaska Tourists Tour” across the front picked us up at our campground at 8:00 a.m. We traveled through the mountains, ever gaining altitude, for two and a half hours. I overheard a couple in the seat in front of us tell the driver that they had been turned back from Tok and Dawson City on two routes because of the smoke. It made me glad we had left when we did.

Along the way, we stopped at the small settlement of Carcross. Prospectors coming off the White Pass and Chilcoot trails landed near Carcross on Bennett Lake. Gold seekers were using the passes as early as the 1820s, long before the discovery on Bonanza Creek that set off the 1898 Gold Rush.

Before we got off the bus in Carcross, the driver announced that the rambling general store and abandoned hotel next to it date from the Gold Rush Days, and the railroad station (now a visitor center) was built only a few years later. The tin building behind the visitor center, he told us, housed a gold jewelry store, Indian arts, and an Indian-run canteen that had outstanding fried bread. We had twenty minutes to see it all.

Bob broke for the fried bread first. He knew his priorities. I trotted around the central area of the settlement and behind it to Bennett Lake, snapping photos right and left. The general store was open, stuffed with T-shirts and tourist goods. I went in the east door of the store, took a quick inventory, and went out the west door. Bob was coming towards me, his arms outstretched. In his right hand was a cup of hot chocolate and in his left half of a huge hunk of sugary fried bread. We boarded the bus with happy smiles on our faces and sugar and breadcrumbs down the fronts of our pile vests.

There were only fourteen of us on the bus. The season for this tour is closing down. too. On September first the train will stop running. White Pass will know the quiet of snowfall until man returns in April to clear and repair the tracks for season's opening in May.

The fourteen of us waiting on the train platform chatted and looked down the tracks for the train. We were in Fraser, British Columbia, and had to stay there until the train came. Across the tracks was Alaska. But we hadn't cleared customs; so Alaska, just a few feet away, was forbidden to us. The station was on a high plateau near a lake, with the usual spectacular backdrop of soaring mountains. The air was absolutely clear, and smelled cold and crisp in the pale northern sunshine.

After an interminable fifteen minutes, we heard the train whistle from afar. Soon it clattered and roared into view, a mountain spirit in bright green and yellow with a native emblem on the front of the engine. We fourteen had a vintage rail car to ourselves, so everyone got a window seat on the preferred side of the car.

An American customs agent came through and checked everyone's ID, then the train slowly pulled away from the platform for the wilds of White Pass. In no time we were up above the tree line, in the land of rocks, glaciers, and nearby snowy peaks. I took a couple of pictures through the window, but soon bagged that and headed for the outside platform between cars. That's where I spent nearly the entire hour and half's ride. It was another communion with nature, though nature was moving by at eight miles an hour or so this time.

Small meadows of tundra and great stretches of stark ragged boulders mark the top of the pass. Patches of snow glistened in the sunlight. When we started down, the mountainsides fell off to deep valleys and canyons far below. The train snaked along the mountainsides, across trestles and through tunnels. I got a number of pictures of the front cars of the train curling around cliff walls ahead of us. From my platform view, I could smell and feel the icy air and the moisture coming up from the valleys.

Below the tree line, the spruce were so close to the tracks I could have brushed their soft needles with my hand. We passed through deep forest, then a sudden opening in the trees revealed a rushing river canyon or spires of rock with gaunt spruce clinging to them. A woman from Switzerland stood on the platform with me much of the time. She could hardly speak English, but still we shared in the excitement of traveling through the immense landscape, the beauty of the Far North.

There are historic markers along the way. A black cross marks the resting place of four rail workers who are buried under tons of stone that fell on them in a construction dynamite accident. At several points, a few feet beyond the train tracks, the trail of the gold seekers can still be seen in the tundra. Not only did we have the beauty and excitement of the train ride, but also we traveled with the spirits of the men and women who climbed the pass to follow their dreams.

The day was gloriously sunny until the train rolled into Skagway. On cue, rain drops spattered in the dust as we disembarked. Light rain continued during the three hours we were in Skagway.

Bob had wanted to eat in the Red Onion restored saloon and brothel when we were in Skagway in July. But it was jammed with people who also wanted to hear the ragtime piano and horse around with nubile waitresses in various states of Victorian dress and undress. We couldn't get in, then.

Today, by dint of rudely pushing past other people, we got in the restaurant - and better yet, were seated at a cozy little table for two by a streetside window. A tall blonde number in pantaloons and a corset with dollar bills and her breasts popping out of the corset top took our order. She missed no opportunity to lean over tables to further expose her cleavage. Bob almost forget what he wanted to order.

Service was slow in the packed restaurant, all the better to give us time to sip our Alaska Brew Smoky Porter draft beer, listen to the music, and enjoy the antics of the girls. Our waitress flopped on Bob's lap when she handed me the fork I had requested, then I burned my mouth on my pizza I was laughing so hard. Slowly we finished an otherwise uneventful meal and had to give up our little table and pay the bill. As we stood up to leave, a gal in a long Victorian pink silky dress and matching bonnet, who was on the back stairs, pulled up her dress and slung one leg over the banister. She twirled her feather boa and announced loudly that for five dollars she would be glad to take anyone upstairs and show the bedrooms. We paused, then went out into the chilly rain.

We toured the Skagway Museum and when we went out the door, I left my blue and red baseball cap behind. The rain splatting on my head was a clue. I rushed back to where I had laid my hat down to put on my poncho. No hat. I trotted down the wooden sidewalks, then trotted in the streets when I couldn't get through the tourists, to the National Park Visitor Center where we had been. No hat. Bob suggested that it ran away with the summer sausage. I ran back again to the museum, and there was my Mackinac Island “Biked it, Liked it” baseball cap on the ticket desk.

“I knew someone would come back for that hat,” said the lady. She was right. It's my special hat.
Bob grinned and waved when he saw me fighting my way back through the sidewalk crowds with my hat on. He knew I was happy. And if I'm happy, he's relieved.

We bought some coffee at the train station, sat on a bench and read a little bit, and then it was time to return to the “Tourists Touring the Yukon” bus for the trip home to Whitehorse.

As the bus climbed back up White Pass, this time on the Klondike Highway, mists rolled up out of the valleys. Visibility soon hit zero. The bus windshield wipers swished and clacked in a regular lonely rhythm. A tape on the history of the Mounted Police droned away. When I looked out my window, all I could see was the totally inadequate little guardrail running too near the bus. The road wound and twisted, and a couple of times on a curve the guardrail disappeared in front of the bus. I was sure we were going over. I decided it was a good time to start writing this journal and not watch out the window.

Coming down off the pass, the rain stopped and the mists melted away. Sun shot through rifts in the clouds and touched mountaintops and the roadway. When I stepped out of the bus at a rest stop to take a photo, it was fifteen degrees warmer than in Skagway. Thank heavens for “the other side of the mountain.”

Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada

The smoke was completely gone this morning, and we could see the mountains across the Yukon River in their full glory. We began the day at The Talisman. Bob had eggs, bacon, sliced tomatoes and hollandaise sauce on his bannock, a monumental start for the day. I had wild cranberry jam on mine, home made by the owner's mother.

We said goodbye to the gals at the restaurant, and went on about our errands. Today was grocery shopping, errands, laundry, clean and repack day before hitting the road south. So went our day.

The wind swung to the north, and it was a much cooler day with a lot of high clouds. Bob found out that the Whitehorse Elks Club has a steak fry on Friday nights. So in late afternoon we cleaned up and drove into town. The Elks Club parking lot was nearly full. As we walked toward the building, I noticed an inordinate number of Indian men sitting on the fence or leaning on the porch rails talking and joshing folks. We made our way through them into the building's main room. The place was packed with Indian women getting ready to play Keno (Bingo.) There were a few whites and even some men, but mostly women filled the tables.

The only other public room was a small bar where a few people were smoking drinking, and watching TV. There was definitely no steak fry happening. We made our way back through the lounging Indian braves, and cast about for another place to eat.

Just down the street was a Chinese restaurant that we had tried to go to when we were here in July, but it was closed. Today, Dragon of the North was open, and we had a couple of the best Chinese meals ever. My fortune cookie paper read, “You have just had, or will have soon, an excellent meal.” I just had.

Watson Lake, Yukon Territory, Canada

10:40 a.m.

The sky is China-blue with fluffy cumulus clouds. Rows of monochromatic blue mountains mark the horizon and boreal forests of spruce and willow march along beside us. We've also been passing large areas of burned over land where a few patches of green are pushing up among the blackened spruce. On some of the far mountains, a while back, we could see smoke rising from the forested slopes.

We're on the Alaska Highway, traveling from Whitehorse to Watson Lake, Yukon Territory. I'm gong to write this postcard as we travel today. You're getting on the spot reporting, so to speak.

12:30 p.m.

We had lunch in a gravel pullover rest stop. These rest stops are just small gravel spots at the side of the road, or maybe a strip of gravel that loops off the road and back one. Some of them have outhouses and trash cans, some just trash cans, some nothing. Theses are truly rest spots, places to get off the road to nap, or eat, or spend the night. You can spend the night at almost any place you can get off the road. Times when we have left very early in the morning, we have seen RVs perched and tucked into all sorts of off-road spots. The rest stops are the best places to stay. They are a God-send, a sanctuary even, along a road that is miles and miles of unrelenting wilderness.

1:30 p.m.

It has clouded over and is raining on us, just like that. The temperature, from a high of sixty-three, has dropped to fifteen degrees. Some of that is due to altitude. We've been going gradually uphill, and my ears have popped a couple of times. There's been some rock writing on the gravel slopes created by highway construction. We just passed “Tom + Martha.” We haven't passed even a roadhouse in a long time. Those kids must drive miles and miles to do their roadside graffiti. Happily, it's graffiti of the non-scarring kind.

An hour after we began today, we had to slow down for construction. But it wasn't road construction. A cable was being laid along the side of the road, about thirty feet back from the shoulder. That was hours ago. The scar of fresh dirt, maybe two feet wide, still follows us. It looks as if modern communication is coming to the sub-arctic.

2:30 p.m.

The rain has stopped, but the clouds persist.

9:30 p.m.

We got into Watson Lake around 3:15 p.m., very near to my seven hour predicted time for the trip. After setting up camp, we walked to Watson Lake's biggest attraction, the Sign Forest. During the construction of the Alaskan Highway by the army in 1942, a homesick soldier erected a post and nailed a sign to it pointing to his hometown in Illinois and showing the distance to home. Others added signs to the post. Now, some sixty-odd years later, there is a literal forest of posts and signs, more than 11,000 signs from all over the world. We strolled through much of the forest, picking out signs of towns and places we knew.

Behind the forest is an information center about the Alaska Highway and Watson Lake. We spent some time in the really informative and well-designed displays, three rooms of them, about the building of the highway. It has to rank as one of the most amazing engineering feats of modern times. A well-done DVD slide/video show reinforced the exhibits.

After we had exhausted the resources of the information center, we strolled back through the sign forest to Little Moby for supper. Speaking of forests, Little Moby is almost hidden in a forest of huge motor homes that surround him tonight. Even if he stood up tall and puffed out his chest, Little Moby couldn't come close to the size of these monsters. We just have to hope one of them doesn't run over us.

After supper I went over to the public phone on the porch of the campground office to send and pick up my email. It was cool and breezy on the porch and everything went wrong with the mail business. By the time AOL (not their fault) and I had everything straightened out, I had been there two hours and was chilled to the bone. It's taking two glasses of wine to warm me up and mellow my frustration with my fellow men - and women-who send SPAM.

Fort Nelson, British Columbia, Canada

The smell of cold was in the air last night. We have been sleeping in blanket bags with the sleeping bags unzipped and spread on top of us. Last night we zipped up those bags and crawled inside. Good thing, too. At 6:30 a.m. it was thirty-six degrees outside. Even in bright sunshine it struggled to be forty-four degrees when we pulled out of the campground in Watson Lake at 8:30 a.m.

The forest verge changed throughout the morning. Spruce and willow taiga stayed with us the first couple of hours. Then yellow fall aspen crept in. By noon aspen and paper birch crowded the spruce to create a leafy woods. Large rounded, soft-peaked mountains moved back and forth. Sometimes they climbed right up from the road; other times they made a backdrop for the forest. Wide rivers twined through deep valleys. Small lakes sported borders of bright green bog grasses that ran off into the muskeg.

Bison and horses run free range along the highway from Watson Lake south for a hundred miles or so. Bison in particular follow the road. The fifty-foot firebreak cutback corridor along each side of the highway provides easy treeless travel and a lunch counter of tender clover and grasses.

At one point, a huge bull, solitary, plodded slowly along the gravel shoulder of the highway. We first saw him from quite a distance as a strange large dark shape. When we got close enough to see it was a bison, Bob said, “Get the camera.”

Well, of course, This was a primo photo op. Except that the camera was in my fanny pack in Little Moby. Disorganization strikes again.

Still some distance from the bull, Bob pulled over to the shoulder. I leaped out, ran back and got the camera. We slowly rolled up on the bull, who continued to plod along. I lowered my window and held the camera ready, my eye to the viewfinder. The bull appeared in the viewfinder - and was gone before I could push the trigger.

I wailed with disappointment. Bob could see in the rear view mirror that the bull was crossing the road. He pulled over and I popped out, right onto a cow, er, buffalo pie. A truck camper behind us had stopped right in the roadway to watch the bull. I did get a distant shot of him near the far shoulder of the highway. I started to climb back into the car when Bob, who could see the animal in his side mirror said, "He's in the middle of the road again."

I jumped back out of the car and onto the buffalo pie again. I raced around Moby and got another fair shot, but he was already back across the road and into the tall grass of the cutback. It was a good photo of a bull bison - from the knees up. I scrubbed my shoes off in the grass and got back into the car.
A few miles further we passed a group of mother bison with calves. I did get some pretty good photos of them from the car window. We passed several more groups of bison and one of horses. I didn't try to get any more pictures.

Some fifty miles northwest of Muncho Lake we drove into the Canadian Rockies. The soft mountains grew seamed and jagged. They reared their snow-covered peaks into the sky. The road rose and the leafy boreal forest faded away into dark spires of taiga spruce. Alpine valleys, tiers of frozen mountains and rushing green glacial rivers surrounded us with the icy breath of the subarctic. A new masterpiece of celestial landscape greeted us with every turn in the road.

The Alaska Highway passes through Muncho Lake Provincial Park and Stone Mountain Provincial Park as it crosses the Canadian Rockies. The jewel of Muncho Lake Provincial Park is seven-mile long emerald green Muncho Lake which, happily, borders the highway. On the north-east shore of Muncho Lake is J&H RV Park, where we had added extra days to our stay in early July just because it was such an fantastic high altitude lakeside and mountain setting.

We got to Muncho Lake at noon. With nice weather, we would have camped again at J&H for the night. However, it was only forty-eight degrees and breezy, too cold to enjoy being outside by the lake. So we decided to go on. But first we'd get gas, have lunch in their little three-booth restaurant, and say hello and good-bye to the folks who run it, whom we came to know well in July.

Well, they don't have the restaurant open on Sundays. However, there were baked goods for sale in the cooler and they offer free hot coffee all day every day. We chose a bran muffin and a slice of rhubarb pie, then discovered a ham and cheese sandwich also in the cooler. We took the sandwich and sweets and sat down in a booth to eat.

When Joey, who had been in the restaurant kitchen apparently fixing food for the family, heard us, she came out with hot tea for me, extra mustard for the sandwich and butter for Bob's muffin. Then she said she had homemade potato soup just finishing, and would we like some. Would we! So we had quite a meal, after all. We chatted, took pictures of everyone, and left with promises to keep in touch during the winter.
For the next six miles south after J&H the road runs at water level between Muncho Lake and the mountains. It is a beautiful winding drive. Rocky Mountain scenery surrounded us for the next couple of hours. Then the road climbed into the mountaintop clouds of Summit Pass in Stone Mountain Provincial Park, the highest pass on the Alaska Highway.

It was gray up there, with a light rain. Tall thin spruce trees were silhouetted against a dusting of new snow on the near ridges and down the mountainsides nearly to the road. At thirty-six degrees, that rain could have turned to snow again at any time, but it didn't. A young caribou drank from a rain puddle at the side of the road. We slowed to get a good look at him, then went on. He never raised his head. There's a lake way up there, Summit Lake, with a little provincial campground on the gravel moraine next to the water. Three RVs were parked in the campground. Wouldn't be my choice of campsite at this time of year, thank you.

We came down from the pass out of the clouds and rain and into the sunshine again. The emaciated taiga spruce once more disappeared into a frowsy, leafy boreal forest. Though we never got into real high passes again, the stunning mountains and rivers of the Rockies stayed with us for several more hours. Towards late afternoon the mountains pulled back and the land opened up. We passed fenced meadows and even a field with rolls of baled hay. It was almost unreal, making the transition from the rarified, stark, mountain terrain into bucolic farmland so quickly.

We decided to call it a day in Fort Nelson, a small town of over 4,000 souls in this vast valley, and the only town within two hundred plus miles north or south on the highway. Little Moby found a home for the night in a small camping area behind a motel in town. It turned out to be a good choice. The showers are free, which was not true of other campgrounds in the area. Best of all, the shower house is heated, which, in fifty degree weather, is a gift from heaven.

Dawson Creek, British Columbia, Canada

The cold snap continues. It was in the thirties again last night. Even the natives are complaining. While we were at Muncho Lake yesterday nearly everyone who came into the office to pay for gas or get coffee had something to say about the weather. Joey, like me, said she had smelled the cold coming in Saturday.

This morning it was forty-two degrees and overcast at 9:15 a.m. while we were getting gas before leaving Fort Nelson. The boy manning the pump said, “Why does it have to be so cold?”

Bob told him that we were heading for Florida. The boy asked if we had room to take him along. These folks in the Far North are looking winter in the face, and the present touch of icy breath reminds them that it will come all too soon.

It was a sunny/showery day. The temperature never got above forty-three degrees. For a few miles we saw early season snow again, this time beneath the woodland spruce along the roadside.

By a fortunate happenstance in timing, we got to Mae's Kitchen at Mile 147 just at lunchtime. We had stopped there for gas on the way up in the first part of July. We remembered seeing folks with bowls of chili and monster slices of bread when we went in to use the restaurant washrooms. Mae's is where a huge date bar called to Bob and he couldn't get out of the door without it when he paid for the gas last time we stopped.

This time I ordered that chili and got a quarter loaf of grilled garlic bread. Bob went for the hamburg steak special. There was so much homemade and delicious food that some hamburg steak, steak fries, and a pile of inch-thick garlic bread went out the door with us, along with a slice of crumble-top strawberry-rhubarb pie.

For the long and peaceful afternoon we drove through pleasant forests and hills. The weather continued with quick showers and glimpses of sunshine. I crocheted hot pads and kept up my assigned job of shoving music CDs into the player. Bob tapped the steering wheel in time with the music and chewed gum. And so we sailed into Dawson Creek, Mile Zero of the Alaskan Highway. Tomorrow we begin the last phase of the journey, finding our way back to Florida on the back roads of Alberta and the lower Forty-Eight.

Whitecourt, Alberta,Canada

I wanted to stop back at the Dawson Creek information center this morning to make sure that I had all the brochures and info I wanted to use for later reference when I clean up this log. Then we shopped for a couple of grocery items, so it was after 10:00 a.m. when we pulled out of Dawson Creek, In a few miles we went into Alberta, and across into Mountain Time, so it was now 11:30, not 10:30. We stopped in Grand Prairie for lunch at a Wendy's, the first Wendy's we'd seen in weeks and weeks, and had our usual spring salad and chili. He gets chili and I get a salad and we split them both.

We decided to push on to Whitecourt, even though it would get us there after 6:00 p.m. We usually like to be into a campground before 4:00 p.m., as after that the sites fill up quickly and we could end up in a spot without amenities. However, we found a campsite that was a pull-thru, despite our late arrival. That meant that Bob didn't have to back the trailer into the site around trees and other campground hazards, which made him happy. However, the sewer hole location was awkward in that it stuck up in the air about six inches. This did not allow for drainage, as camper sewer hoses usually just lie along the ground. So Bob scouted around the campground, a rather junky place, and came up with cement blocks and boards to create a Rube Goldberg sort of a drain arrangement. That done, we locked the door and settled in for the night.

Havre, Montana

The wheat on the plains of Alberta and Montana is truly golden now. Huge combines and threshers move across the fields. We passed abandoned houses and old barns that gave way to the huge storage silos dotting the plains. One house today, slouched near the road, was so forlorn. The glass was broken out of the single gable window. I could imagine a young girl or boy gazing out that window at the endless rolling prairie and dreaming the extravagant fantasies of youth.

Scattered cumulus clouds floated in a layer overhead, gray on the bottom and the purest white on top. Like the fields, they went on for an incredible distance in every direction until they met in a flat even line far, far, away.

The villages of clustered houses gathered around a huge grain elevator and its companion railroad are as fascinating to us as ever. This is the true American Gothic, where values are simple and unchallenged.

We stopped for lunch at a dusty little café in one of these villages a ways north of the Canada/U.S. border. A young woman at one table in the café had three small children for whom she provided day care. She was taking them out for a lunch treat. When not busy amusing or feeding the children, she chatted with a fellow in a black leather jacket and cowboy boots at another table. He, also local, told her about the birth of his granddaughter, and how his son said that his wife took more time birthing than any of his cows did. He said it in a rather embarrassed manner, and the young woman agreed that it was pretty rude.

Another couple came in, greeted folks, and sat down at the table behind us. She, like the other women, wore jeans with a crisp cotton shirt loose on top. Her husband sported a baseball cap that never left his head. She wanted fish today because she didn't get it the last time it was on special - but just half an order or fries, please. While they waited for their meal, the gal read paragraphs from what sounded like a local paper out loud for the entertainment of the waitress and customers.

The other daily special, besides the fish, was a fried egg sandwich. Bob wavered, but ordered a hot roast beef sandwich. It came, predictably, on soft white commercial bread. The salad was out of a bag. But the fries were all different lengths with the skin on, obviously hand cut. They were a treat. The meal and the chance to listen in on the lives in a world so different from our own is one of the delights of casual travel on back roads and country byways.

We have found out one thing about ourselves this trip. We've grown to like our social amenities, and seek them out. We've passed up wilderness parks with, I'm sure, beautiful wooded campsites on river or lake in favor of hot showers and a datajack. Wilderness camping is fine for a couple of weeks, but when we're on the road for months at a time, we like our creature comforts.

Having said that, we wallowed in creature comforts last night. We were camped on pavement in Havre, Montana. There was no sand or gravel to track into the camper. The public showers were roomy, tiled, complete individual bathrooms, warm and brightly lit. Here is the best part. I sat in a Queen Anne chair at a desk of dark shiny wood in the comfort of a hotel lobby to deal with the eighty-seven pieces of email that had accumulated in my mailbox over the last five days. None of this braving the weather and bugs at an outside pay phone to hook up to cyberspace tonight, I lounged in the lap of luxury.

We also got “Buy One, Get One Free” coupons for the saloon/casino in the hotel, but didn't take time for that. Bob went off to get BlueVan a quick oil change while I scrubbed out Little Moby. A box of soy milk had come unglued with the road bumps and run out of the frig and all over the floor. Ugh. We had a late, light supper. I did the email, and then it was time for bed.

Williston, North Dakota

Route 2, from the Idaho border across the Rocky Mountains and east to North Dakota is marked on maps with little dots to signify a scenic route. We picked it up east of the Rockies on this trip, coming and going, and traveling it is the essence of the West.

Miles upon miles of gently rolling rangeland in muted earth tones sprinkled with pale green sagebrush stretched to far-off low blue mountains. Wandering lines of cottonwood trees followed creeks. Sometimes the landscape pushed up into flat-topped buttes or fell away into jagged arroyos. Black-eyed susans made spots of brightness along the roadside. One time we saw a group of cattle gathered around a water hole. They were the only livestock we saw. All the rest must have been hidden out on the far reaches of the range. I said to Bob that just as some mountains begged to be climbed, the rangeland beckoned. I just wanted to hop out of the van and start walking towards the mountains, to surround myself with unlimited space and fresh air.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “You can get hooked on this country.”

We are staying in Buffalo Trail Campground near Williston tonight, where we stayed on the trip out. We got into the campground at twilight, set up camp, and buttoned up for the night.

Medora, North Dakota

Route 85 took us south from Williston through comfy, calm, undulating prairie under crystal-blue cloudless skies. Golden wheat stubble, rolls of baled hay, and brown rangeland grasses lay quietly in the autumnal sun and evoked visions of roast turkey and pumpkin pie.

For over fifty miles we cruised through this calendar-picture high prairie. The road climbed a gradual hill, took a bend to the right and Wow! The earth on our right fell away into vast eroded buttes and coulees that carved away the land clear to the horizon. We wheeled into an immediate overlook and got out to digest the view. It had happened so suddenly that it was like being dropped onto another planet. The North Dakota Badlands had grabbed us.

Once we were in The Badlands, it wasn't far to the entrance of the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. We followed the signs to a small visitor center building made out of brick that blended into the hills behind it. Bob chatted with the ranger behind the desk while I scanned the nature exhibits along the walls of the room. Rabbit bush, that was the yellow-flowered plant we saw so much of along the road. I knew that bush once, but had forgotten it. Now I knew it again. We watched the film about the park, chatted a little longer with the ranger on duty, then set out to drive the scenic road into the park.

Within just a few miles we came upon a large group of bison lazing around on both sides of the road, taking a break from grazing. We stopped, of course. I took pictures from the car window, of course. Not that I needed more photos of buffaloes. I've got buffaloes upon buffaloes. But they are fascinating, especially when you can safely get so close to them.

A mile or so beyond the buffalo was a small parking lot for the Caprock Coulee Interpretive Trail. What a great place for lunch! Nearby buttes filled our right and front camper windows, and a Badlands vista spread beyond our left window as we sat down to our sliced apples and cheese in Little Moby. It must have been the apples that brought them, because suddenly our windows were full of buffalo instead of Badlands. A large bull put his head right up to the glass and gave Bob the once-over. Bob replied in kind.

They milled around us for a while, then lumbered off towards trailhead and straggled down the trail. That pretty much decided us that we weren't going to walk that trail soon, especially when a mammoth, hulking, solitary bull plodded by the camper about ten minutes later, paused at the trailhead to nibble, then followed the others. We did the dishes and drove on down the scenic road.

There are just about fifty miles between the North Unit and the South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. After we finished the twenty-eight mile North Unit Scenic Drive, we traveled on down Rt. 85 to the town of Medora at the entrance to the South Unit, got a campsite, and unhitched Little Moby. Little Moby had got into the spirit of the West and had brought along souvenirs from North Unit. His lower front was spattered with gobs of buffalo dung.

Just south of Williston we went back into Mountain Time Zone, so gained an hour in our day. Instead of its being 3:30 p.m. when we got to the campground in Medora, it was 2:30 p.m. and we had half an afternoon to sightsee. We decided to start with the de Mores Chateau.

The de Mores family maintained chateaus in France and Europe and also, in the nineteenth century, a fashionable home in New York, and were prominent in the social scene there. The Baron and Baroness von Hoffman, also wealthy New York socialites, had a daughter, Medora. Medora and the Marquis de Mores met in New York, and married in France. Theodore and Martha Roosevelt, also wealthy New Yorkers, begat a son, Theodore junior. The families all knew each other in New York society circles.

In 1883, the Marquis de Mores stepped off the Northern Pacific Railway at a settlement called Little Missouri on the Little Missouri River in North Dakota. He had come to establish an empire in beef packing. Medora joined him a few months later. They built a twenty-six room “hunting lodge” on a hill overlooking the Marquis' newly created town of Medora, staffed it with servants, and enjoyed busy social summers entertaining friends from the East and settlers to their new town.

Also in 1883, young Theodore Roosevelt came to Little Missouri to hunt buffalo for two weeks at the Maltese Ranch. He stayed in a rude cabin five miles south of the de Mores town and hunting lodge. He bunked with the ranch hands and lived the rugged outdoor life. Before he left, he not only got his buffalo, but also had bought a large interest in the Maltese Ranch.

Theodore Roosevelt visited and dined with the de Mores in Medora. The de Mores worked at their empire. Medora von Huffman de Mores built a school and a church in the growing settlement, and de Mores started a stage line between Medora and Deadwood. Theodore Roosevelt bought the Elkhorn Ranch north of Medora, and invested heavily in cattle at both his ranches. He spent the winter of 1884-5 at his ranches.

Just three years later, in 1886, the dreams were all gone. Through outside factors he couldn't control, the Marquis de Mores' projects, all of them, failed. The Marquis and Medora went back to France. Theodore Roosevelt's ranching efforts began to go downhill, and then his herds were nearly wiped

out in a bitter winter. He sold what was left for a fraction of his investment, and went back to New York.
But those three years left a mark on North Dakota and the history of the U.S. Theodore Roosevelt said his “Dakota Years” are what made him President, and a better President. The small town of Medora, thanks to the creation of Theodore Roosevelt National Park and tourism, still lives.

The “Chateau de Mores,” the western lodge that Medora called “Our Dakota Home,” still stands, just as it did in 1886, on the hill above town. We spent the rest of the afternoon of our arrival in Medora there.

We got up to the chateau just a few minutes before the season's last performance of a monologue by Karen Nelson, who has extensively researched the Dakota epoch of the de Mores. Medora, as a widow, came back to Dakota Territory one more time, in 1903, for six weeks to relive the “happiest days of my life.” Ms. Nelson, in period dress taken from a photo of Medora during her 1903 visit, presented the monologue as if she were Medora in 1903, and we were her houseguests. She did a splendid job. She was Medora.

We talked for a few minutes with “Medora” after the show, and I took her picture. Then we toured her house. The de Mores were passionate hunters. Medora, particularly, was a hunt trophy collector. The biggest room in the house is the “hunt room,” twice the size of the living room. It is filled with rifles, shells, traps, trophies, and other hunting paraphernalia. A perfect stream of guests came to hunt at the chateau and live on the Dakota range in the deMores' days there.

The West was the Disney World of the nineteenth century. The whole world wanted to be ranchers and cowboys. The deMores and Teddy Roosevelt gave it their best try.

Getting Started

Michigan
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Malta, MT

Alberta, Canada
Fort McLeod
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Seward

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Yukon Territory, Canada
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Tok

Yukon Territory, Canada
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Yukon Territory, Canada
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Alaska
Tok
Valdez

Yukon Territory, Canada
Whitehorse
(and Skagway, AK)

British Columbia, Canada
WatsonLake
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Alberta, Canada
Whitecourt

Havre, Montana

North Dakota
Williston
Medora

Valdez, Alaska

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Rt. 20 across Nebraska

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