Fantastic views above Carcross, Yukon

We wanted to get our hike in early, and we had overnighted at the trailhead, so we were on the trail at 8:15am.

We've been using a great website called Yukon Hiking and they listed this trail as "moderate". Well, maybe it's moderate to a 25 year old, but for us we would have rated it "difficult". We sure wouldn't want to do a hike any more difficult than this one!

Good thing we didn't meet any oncoming traffic!

We went into downtown Whitehorse on Friday morning, filled up the fuel tank, and emptied the holding tanks. Also did some stocking up at both the grocery store and the liquor store, There aren't many services along the Cassiar Highway so we wanted to be prepared.

Then, we headed back down the highway that takes you to Skagway, Alaska. Only as far as Carcross though! I had read about a fantastic hike in the area, and we wanted to have a better look at the town as well.

Ready to hit the road!

We've been parked up at our friends Art and Jean's place in Whitehorse, Yukon for the past 4 nights. They've let us use their water hose to give Sherman a much needed clean up!

Even though we had used a pressure washer when we were up in Tok, Alaska to get rid of some of the Dempster Highway mud off Sherman's underside, there was still a lot of it that I didn't get at the time.

Day trip to Skagway, Alaska

I can understand why people choose to live in Whitehorse. Especially in the summertime, when you've got so many daylight hours! There is just soooo much to see and do within a two hour drive.

Yesterday, our friends Jean and Art took us in their truck for a day trip down to Skagway, Alaska... only a 160 km (100 mile) drive each way.

July Expenses

Well, not a bad month considering we spent almost a thousand dollars on fuel! We knew that was going to be our major expense up here in the north, so it's not that much of a shock.

We spent a total of $2,069 CAD ($1,600 USD) for the month.

Here's how it all broke down...

Chinook salmon in the Yukon River

The Yukon is still experiencing a heat wave. It's beautiful though... sunny, clear blue sky and the temperature yesterday was about 28C (82F). Supposed to be the same today.

We had parked up in downtown and I took the bikes off to go for a ride to the fish ladder. They have a nice cycling and walking path here in Whitehorse that runs on both sides of the Yukon River.

We are back in Whitehorse!

We left Whitehorse on June 15th, so we've been off exploring the Yukon for about six weeks. And of course, that included a few days in Northwest Territories and Alaska as well.

Since we left Whitehorse, we have driven about 3,700 kms (2,300 miles), and much of it was on dirt roads!

Much better than a busy campground...

We headed further south in order to do more exploring of Yukon's Kluane National Park. There were a couple of other hiking trails along the way we wanted to do. The first one was listed as "a short 0.6 km hike to the rock glacier", so we stopped there and got to the trailhead where the sign said it was 1.6 kms each way. Hmm.

So, we went back and got some water and set off to do it anyhow.

A steep hike in Yukon's Kluane National Park on the King's Throne Trail

We had made plans to meet up with Dan and Isabelle at 9:00am down in the day use area at the Kathleen Lake Campground in Kluane National Park.

We left our motorhomes parked there, and we set off on the King's Throne Trail. There are two sections to the trail... the first part leads to "the seat" of the King's Throne... and then the trail branches off to the summit of the mountain. But the summit is 19 kms (12 miles) return, and it's a rated as a difficult day hike.

Doing some camping in Kluane National Park

There's not a whole lot to see in Haines Junction itself, other than the visitor's center and the fact that it's a fairly scenic location. But, it does have an interesting little church as well that's worth a stop...

Up close on the Kluane Icefields and Canada's Highest Mountain

Wow. What a day we had yesterday! I don't even know how to come up with the right term to describe it. We thought the scenic flight we did in Yukon's Tombstone Park was spectacular (and it was!) but this may have been even better!

The largest non-polar icefield in the world is located in Yukon's Kluane National Park. The ice and snow stretches for further than you can see, and in places, the ice is over 700 meters thick.

To see it all up close is a very surreal experience!

Grizzly bear sighting!

You may have noticed that we haven't mentioned a lot of animal sightings lately. That's because we haven't seen any! Well, that's not totally true. We saw a couple of caribou off far in the distance on the Top of the World Highway. And a few rabbits and other small mammals. But other than that, we hardly saw anything all the way up to Tuktoyaktuk and back... and we hadn't seen a bear for over a month!

Until yesterday...

Money in Monaco – a quick traveller’s guide

Even if you’ve never heard of Monaco, you’ve probably heard about Princess Grace. She was an American actress named Grace Kelly, and she won the heart and crown of the Monaco monarch, Prince Rainier III. She was a big Hollywood star from age 20 to 26, when she retired from acting to marry her Prince. Also, Monaco citizens are called Monégasque. This is the ethnicity and language of indigenous natives, though Italian, French, English, and Occitan are also common tongues.

The shores of Kluane Lake, Yukon

Another gorgeous day in the Yukon, which along with Alaska is experiencing a northern heat wave. Yesterday was 28C (83F) and sunny where we are.

We drove from our beautiful boondocking spot near Snag Lake down to the community of Burwash Landing, and then to Destruction Bay. Lots of gorgeous scenery along the way...

A dead end with a beautiful view...

We slept in Sunday morning... didn't  get up until almost 8am. And by the time we had some breakfast and got ourselves ready to go around 10am, the campground had pretty much emptied right out!

Still, we wandered down to the waterfront before we left to see if there was any wildlife about.

I bet we were carrying 500 lbs of mud!

The town of Tok is not a tourist destination. It exists to service travelers as they pass through on their way to a tourist destination. So there's not much to see or do there. And other than the mountains that are visible far on the horizon, it's not that scenic of a place.

However... it has all the travelers services you would need. A couple of full service RV parks, 3 or 4 fuel stations, a big visitors info center, some tourist trinket shops, a couple of mechanics, a couple of motels, a grocery store, and a small airport.

Made it to Alaska!

Yesterday's post was late due to lack of decent internet. If you missed it, here it is...

http://www.travelwithkevinandruth.com/2018/07/we-struck-it-rich-and-now-were-off-to.html

Woke up to rain showers Friday morning, but they quickly cleared up and it became a decent day although it was pretty windy as we neared the top of the Top of the World highway on our route to Alaska.

We struck it rich, and now we're off to Alaska!

A little late posting... the following is based on our Thursday July 19th activities!

We were up early Thursday morning because we had an appointment to find some gold! We arrived at Klondike Experience at 8:15am, ready for the 8:30am departure to Bonanza Creek, the area that sparked the Yukon goldrush of 1898.

We met our guide Sandra and then our minibus picked up 5 other couples at various hotels around Dawson City, and then we did a short tour of the city itself before heading out to the gold claims area.

It was tougher than we thought it was going to be!

Gorgeous day yesterday, so we made plans to go for a hike. We decided we had better go up to "The Dome", as they call the viewpoint look off above the town of Dawson City. Of course most people drive up there, but we needed to get some exercise.

I mapped out the route ahead of time, and at 10 kms (6.2 miles) round trip, it didn't look like it was going to be that tough of a hike.

I tried to order a new camera yesterday...

Amazon in the United States gets a lot of great deals, but not so much at Amazon in Canada. So yesterday was Prime Day at Amazon, and we're in the market for a new camera.

Our Nikon P520 is now 5 years old and it has taken thousands of photos for us. And while most people would agree that the photos we post here are fine, I'm not totally happy with them. I have to do a lot of adjusting after the fact to get them to look natural. The photos the camera takes on it's own do not often look the way they should.

A nice day in Dawson City, Yukon

In the morning, we walked over to the Dawson City Museum. We were actually a little later getting going than we wanted to be, but when we got there at shortly after 10:00am, we learned that it only opens up at 10:00am... so our timing was just fine.

The museum has been a museum since 1962, however the building has been there since 1901 when it was constructed as the Territorial Administration Building.

It's a small world...

We like that header photo so much, I think we'll just leave it there for a couple of days!

Through this blog, and facebook, we sometimes meet up with people who know us. Well yesterday, we met a bunch of people who know us, and some who we know through other people. Really strange!

Beautiful hike to end our time on the Dempster Highway!

We got up at 6:30am Saturday morning and started driving right away. We only had to do about 70 kms (43 miles) to get to our hiking trail but we also had to stop in at the Tombstone Park visitors center and we knew that it didn't open until 9:00am.

The visitors center had lent us some paperwork and we had to return it. We arrived there at just after 8:00am, which gave us lots of time to have breakfast before they opened.

We can see the light at the end of the tunnel!

It had rained hard Thursday night, but we think it stopped around 4am Friday morning. When we got up, the ground was still soaking wet, even though the sun was peaking through the clouds occasionally. We decided to wait out the morning and let things dry out a bit more before finally hitting the road again.

We had been parked up at Eagle Plains, Yukon for about two and a half days by the time we finally left at around 11:00am.

And the road was actually drier than we thought it was going to be.

The skies are clearing...

First of all, we are a little overwhelmed by the response to our Mexico RV Caravan news from yesterday! We have received 19 emails so far from people interested in joining the trip! Wow!

It's going to be a great trip. We are looking forward to finalizing things over the next couple of weeks.

But, lets bring you back to the present for now...

Exciting news! Your chance to Travel with Kevin and Ruth!

Any of you who had read our daily reports about the Mexico RV Caravan trip we did in January through March of 2018 know that we weren't totally happy with a few things on that trip. Mainly, that it was too rushed, and it didn't include enough relax time. And there was quite a bit we didn't like about the route itself.

We have not been able to come to an agreement with the people who organized that caravan to do another trip through them this upcoming winter.

So we are going to run our own Mexico RV Caravan, with our own route and time schedule!

Back in the Yukon!

We did 178 kms (110 miles) yesterday heading south from Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories to Eagle Plains, Yukon.

Definitely some rough roads along the way, and it's amazing how much they could change from the time we were on this road heading north almost two weeks ago.

It is truly messed up.

We're in bed, sleeping... and there's a "knock, knock, knock" on the door that wakes us both up. Ruth says "one minute!", and I get up and quickly throw some clothes on. I open the door, and it's light outside. Momentarily confused, I think maybe it's morning.

There's an older teenage boy, and he says "what are you doing, sleeping?"

We're cutting it close, so hopefully we'll be okay.

We did some grocery shopping in Inuvik yesterday, making sure we had sufficient supplies to do us at least the next five days. We're hoping to be in Dawson City by Friday, but that may or may not happen due to a storm that's supposed to affect the area between here and Dawson City on Wednesday. We were originally planning to spend a couple more days in Inuvik, but our delays in Tuktoyaktuk, plus the upcoming storm are making us head south quicker. We tried to get into the big community greenhouse in Inuvik, but it's closed on Sundays.

We're hoping that storm isn't as bad as they're forecasting because we would end up stuck in Eagle Plains again waiting for the road to dry up... the same way we did on the way north!

We have begun the journey south!

The forecast called for clearing yesterday afternoon, and so just before lunch I took a 4 km roundtrip walk up the road to see what it was like compared to the day before. It was a definite improvement, so we decided to have some lunch and then make a run for it!

We had watched quite a few vehicles coming in during the morning, and none of them looked very muddy. They were calling for rain again yesterday evening in Tuktoyaktuk, so this was our chance.

Stuck in Tuk!

The weather has not been co-operating here in Tuktoyaktuk. And not helping the situation is that the weather forecast changes by the hour. They obviously can't predict it, and the changes come so quickly I don't understand why they bother trying.

The problem of course, is the highway. Which is not really a highway, it's just a dirt road. And the first ten kms (6 miles) leading out of Tuktoyakyuk are not graveled yet. So when it rains, it becomes a mud road, not a dirt road!

Extending time in your RV without hookups...

It was a wet, rainy, windy, miserable day yesterday. We had been parked overlooking the Arctic Ocean, and when the cold front blew in overnight... it blew in hard! We were both woken up by the wind rocking Sherman, and howling through the electrical cables we were parked near.

Winds were averaging 50 km/h (30 miles per hour) and gusting to 70 km/h (42 mph).

Life in Tuktoyaktuk

We tried again to get in touch with our "cousin of a friend" contact who lives here in Tuktoyaktuk. Still no answer on the phone, so I tried an email address that I had been given, and got a response right away. But it wasn't from Maureen, it was from her daughter Rebecca. She asked if we were parked out at the point, and I said yes.

She said to meet her around noon at the tent snack bar set up right here at the point!

Way up up up up up in Tuktoyaktuk

As they forecast, things got cloudy and cooler up here in "Tuk" as it's often called. But, we still managed to get out for some exercise to explore the town a little bit.

We stopped in the grocery store and even bought a couple of things! Then, we tried to look up a friend's cousin who happens to live here!

Wow. We can't believe we made it!

As you can see from today's header photo... we made it to the Arctic Ocean!

For those of you who don't know, the Dempster Highway has been able to take you as far as the town of Inuvik since 1971. But the village of Tuktoyaktuk (pop 900) on the Arctic Ocean has only been accessible via air, boat, or an ice road that operated only in the winter.

Made it to Inuvik for Canada Day!

We only had 40 kms to drive to get to Inuvik, and we made it in time for their Canada Day parade!

Inuvik is a town of about 3,200 people located 200 kms (120 miles) north of the Arctic Circle. The town has a fairly broad demographic, with 39% Inuvialuit (what we used to call Eskimos when I was growing up) 18% First Nations, 37% non-native. There are even about 100 Muslims, and they even have a small mosque here.

June Expenses

About what we figured it would be, so no great surprises. We spent a total of $2,279 CAD ($1,750 USD) which is not bad considering we started the month in Dawson Creek, British Columbia and ended it to Inuvik, Northwest Territories!

And as expected, the biggest expense of this trip is fuel. We drove a total of 2,925 kms (1,813 miles) during the month.

The biggest surprise of the monthly expenses? Groceries!

Nice to be able to help some fellow travelers in need

Slept great at the Fort McPherson Airport. One lady drove up at about 8:00am and went inside the tiny terminal building, but otherwise she was the only person we saw the whole time.

We woke up to blue sky and sunshine and it's supposed to be that way for the next couple of days.

Oh... and good news! Remember when we entered Yukon, we began to have problems with our Telcel Mexico SIM card working in the phone? Well, as soon as we crossed into Northwest Territories and got ourselves close to the Fort McPherson cell tower... we connected again!

North of the Arctic Circle in the Land of the Midnight Sun!

Once again, we woke up to a drizzly overcast day on Friday morning. We were parked up at the roadside Dempster Highway community of Eagle Plains, and with a decent source of internet, we were happy to simply wait it out.

Heading north out of Eagle Plains the road has a long steep downhill, and there is a lit up sign warning of slippery conditions and especially for motorcyclists to exercise caution. So we figured we were better off to wait until things dried out a bit.

Tire repaired, and better weather coming our way!

(This is our 5th blog post in the last two days as we get caught up after going 4 days without internet. If you missed any, you'll want to go back a day or two!)

Still no sunshine, and in fact we have been about five days now without seeing the sun. Sure, the days are very long but they have been long cloudy and overcast days! But, at least the rain stopped and the road was a little more solid as a result.

So yesterday morning I topped up our still leaking right rear outer tire, and around 8:15am we set off with the goal of making it to the roadside stop of Eagle Plains (population 9!).

Third day driving on the Dempster Highway... we didn't get very far!

The Dempster Highway is an unpaved highway stretching 736 km (457 miles) from Dawson City, Yukon to Inuvik, Northwest Territories. They started building it in 1959, and it was completed 20 years later in 1979.

I had read that the Dempster Highway is "well maintained", but I guess that is all perspective. When it rains, it is not "well maintained", and the highway becomes a mud pit in a lot of places.

Our second driving day on the Dempster Highway...bald eagles, and moose!

We've been without internet for the past four days so we're just getting caught up with the blog posting. If you missed them, you'll want to go back to the first two posts today...

1) http://www.travelwithkevinandruth.com/2018/06/our-first-taste-of-dempster-highway.html

2) http://www.travelwithkevinandruth.com/2018/06/beautiful-views-hiking-in-tombstone.html

Tuesday, June 26

Our second driving day on the Dempster Highway. The less than ideal weather continued, despite a forecast that had said otherwise! Still, it wasn't raining (yet!) so the road was in okay condition in most spots. However, I found that it was in worse shape overall than it had been the first driving day, and that a suitable speed was more between 40 to 50 km/h (24 to 30 mph) rather than the 50 to 70 km/h (30 to 42 mph) that we had been able to do the first day.

Beautiful views hiking in Tombstone Territorial Park...

This is the second post today. We were without internet for 4 days in a row, so we're just getting caught up. Go here to click on the first post if you missed it...

http://www.travelwithkevinandruth.com/2018/06/our-first-taste-of-dempster-highway.html

Monday, June 25

My older sister's birthday. Happy Birthday Elaine... we did remember, but of course had no way to communicate our birthday wishes. Hope you had a good day!

We had planned on doing a long day hike on the Grizzly Lake Trail, but the day started off windy and overcast. It's supposed to be a spectacular hike, but we would like to do it with blue skies. So we have put it off until our return to the area on the way back south. However, we still managed to do two hikes that totaled 14.8 kms (9.2 miles)!

Our first taste of the Dempster Highway!

(We've been offline for 4 days in a row! Can't tell you the last time that happened. We are now only 37 kms (23 miles) south of the Arctic Circle! Here's Sunday's blog post... I'll try and get you caught up with more in the next few hours...)

Sunday, June 24

The last thing we had to do on the way out of Dawson City was to fill the gas tank. By filling it when it's still above half, you don't get as much of a shock. But once again, we knew that gasoline would be the major expense of this trip, and it is what it is. So we topped it up at $1.49 CAD per liter ($4.30 USD per gallon). We went to the public AFD Cardlock station on the outskirts of town. Far cheaper than the stations in town that were selling for $1.67 per liter!

And so, with a full fridge, empty holding tanks, a full fresh water tank, and a full fuel tank, we set off on the Dempster Highway towards the Arctc Circle, Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk.