We left
Whitehorse under a blackening sky on the
Alaskan Highway (
Yukon highway 1) but we never had any rain all day.
In the afternoon it became very windy but for us it was a quartering tailwind so it did not affect us badly.
The ride was a succession of mighty rivers, beautiful lakes with mountain backgrounds and incredible beaver dams. We even saw two bears: a yearling that I captured on a photo crossing the road and whom we observed browsing for a while and its mother. The sow was impressively big; her mask was dark brown and her pelt black, shiny and full. When we lost sight of her we moved on because she was not very far from us.
We crossed a Continental Divide this afternoon, but I cannot say which watershed it represents (Arctic Ocean vs. Pacific?).
We ate lunch in Teslin and spoke at length with an Australian couple traveling two-up on an older BMW 1000 GS. He told us that he was 60 kg (132 lbs) over gross and they were headed for Prudoe Bay, AK to begin a journey south all the way to Tierra de Fuego, Argentina. We wish them success; it sounds like a grand adventure. He has done several adventurous rides in various parts of the world. They mentioned the Air Force Lodge as a good, impeccably clean place to spend the night in Watson Lake. They had heard it from a couple traveling the AlCan in a 1940 Ford. The people traveling the AlCan form their own little community with its own “grapevine”. It is rather interesting. Often we find the same people at our hotel that we had lunch with earlier in the day or a day or two before. We hear about someone and then a day or two later we run into that person and can say:"Yes, so-and-so has told us you said this!"
We were blessed to find a vacancy at the Air Force Lodge where I am writing this. Total mileage was just under 300 miles (or as Julia says: 460 km).
Watson Lake is where there is a park filled with some 60,000 signs. It began with a recuperating soldier in 1942 who posted his hometown and distance on the highway sign post.
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