August 19 - Alaska Highway Day 2

At the end of our first day on the Alaska Highway, we spent the night at a nice, new boat launch with 3 other campers, including these folks in the combat-style RV that we saw earlier up the road.  It had "two-vagabonds.de" on the doors, so we'll have to look them up next time we have some spare internet time.

After an uneventful (surprise!) stop at Canadian Customs, we were seriously on our way down the Alaska Highway on another cool and rainy day.

The section from the border to about Haines Junction is supposed to be the worst stretch - lots of frost heaves and potholes.  Some are marked with red flags, some not.

As if we needed any more incentive to slow down other than having our equipment beat to death by the bad road, someone decided it would be a good idea to set up this fake Royal Canadian Mounted Police cruiser along side the road.  Did the trick though - you couldn't tell from a distance if it was real or not.  So watch out for Smokey....

....then we had to watch out for this bear and it wasn't Smokey the Bear.  It was just snacking away along the road.  It had a red sore on the right side of its rump if you look close at the first picture.  We wondered if it got in a scuffle with another bear or with a car.

Along with the serious terrible roads, We bucked a pretty serious headwind along this stretch - not much fun when pulling a big trailer.  There were some pretty good whitecaps on Kluane Lake, which is about 40 miles long.

We were glad to get around the south end of the lake and behind some mountains to block the wind.  We spotted quite a few Dall sheep up on the mountains, just little white spots on the mountain sides.

There were lots of thick patches of this cotton grass along the road.  Some different scenery.

We finally got to Haines Junction, Yukon and hopefully better roads.

Our original plan was to stay here for a couple nights and take a drive down to Haines Alaska, which is just across Prince William Sound from Valdez.  With a forecast of 45 degrees and rain though, we decided to drop that part of the plan and keep driving.  Came across the sign for this campground....whoa we can't be home already!

We found some cheap diesel in Whitehorse, then stopped at about dark to camp about another 100 miles down the road in Teslin.  A tough 500 miles for this day.