South Klondike and Cassiar Highways

Saturday, July 11, 2009 – We drove to the main part of Skagway and did a little shopping before stopping for lunch at the Sweet Tooth Café. We checked out of our campground just before 2:00 PM and then headed north on the South Klondike Highway. We crossed out of Alaska and into British Columbia about 20 miles north of Skagway. The crossing went fairly well with the usual questions about alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. In addition, the border agent asked if we were retired, what our jobs had been, if we were full time RVers, and whether we had more than $10,000 in cash. We answered all of his questions and then he asked to come on board. He wanted to see what alcohol we had and asked if we had a safe for our valuables. We told him we had no safe so he wanted to see where we kept our money. I showed him what he wanted to see, he thanked us, and we were on our way. The South Klondike Highway is a well maintained road through picturesque mountains and past several beautiful lakes and rivers. We took the Carcross Road cut-off which rejoins the Alaska Highway a little south of Whitehorse. We stopped at Yukon Motel and RV Park for the night. It is a nice campground right on Teslin Lake in Teslin, BC. Tomorrow we will continue retracing our path down the Alaska Highway to the junction with the Cassiar Highway.

Sunday, July 12, 2009 – We woke up early so got on the road by 8:00 AM continuing to retrace our route on the Alaska Highway to just west of Watson Lake. We stopped for lunch and fuel at Nugget City before starting south on the Cassiar Highway. We have heard wildly varying stories about the driving conditions on this particular highway so we were not sure what to expect but given some of the roads we have traveled it couldn’t be worse at least. As expected the first 16 miles was under construction and had numerous gravel breaks. From there the road continued mostly narrow paved roads with an occasional gravel break or frost heave but overall a decent road. We made a couple of stops at Jade City which claims to produce and export 90% of the world’s supply of jade. We also made a short stop to look at some moose in one of the numerous lakes, ponds, rivers, and creeks along the route. It was approaching 5:00 PM and both guys were tired of driving so we pulled in to the Dease Lake RV Park. It is a nice enough park with water, electric, and free wi-fi for only $22 and best of all very few mosquitoes. Alaska is notorious for their mosquitoes which are jokingly referred to as their state bird and British Columbia is almost as bad. We have all come to hate the nasty things as we are covered from head to toe with nasty bites and welts and will be surprised if we don’t come down with malaria or West Nile Virus.