Arriving in the yukon

We got up decently early at the campsite but a guy came by and talked to us about our trailer for quite a while, as well as our ancestry and his boat tour of Holland so we left a bit later than we had hoped to.

We got up decently early at the campsite but a guy came by and talked to us about our trailer for quite a while, as well as our ancestry and his boat tour of Holland so we left a bit later than we had hoped to. 

The most expensive gas we found along highway 37 here was $1.70/L at a resort. We passed by but i ended up paying almost as much in the town of iskut- $1.67/L.

Thats the equivilant of $4.88usd/us gallon for you americans.

In iskut where we gassed up there was a cool mountain with what looked like a landslide down the side of it.

A little further on we saw a brown bear on the side of the highway which we stopped to watch and it ended up in the video from the last blog post.

We were most of the way up a super long hill- which we were going up slowly since the bear we stopped for was at the very bottom- when we saw the 2 australian girls that laughed at our car when they gassed up with us in iskut. They were on the side of the road with their hood up. We stopped and they said the car overheated but they had no idea if they were out of oil or coolant or where coolant would even go. They flew in from australia, bought an early 90's honda civic in whistler B.C and were touring the country from b.c to yukon to montreal. They ran out of coolant going up the hill and it took more than a gallon to refill, which is pretty crazy. I hope they make the rest of their trip allright.

The scenery slowly changed from the big, tall and green trees to short black spruce. 

There was a Rail line started from dease lake to Prince George in the 70's and then abandoned after a huge amount of money went into it. In this photo you can see part of it. After driving this highway and seeing how almost no humans live down that road it doesnt make sense to me to build a railroad to dease lake (population 300) unless it was going to continue and link the Yukon and alaska to Prince George, Prince Rupert, Vancouver, Seattle and so on. But that wasnt mentioned in what i read. 

In Dease lake we stopped at the college for lunch and wifi.  Some people were trying to drive from whitehorse to Kelowna in one day (2300km/1400 miles) when their car broke down in dease lake going by the college. I dont know how they intended to do that in one day but they were in dease lake at noon and expecting to be in kelowna that night. Their new ford focus wouldnt run in any gear except park. I had no idea what the cause could be and couldnt help them, but in the end they found resetting the computer would let them "drive" (more like lurch) the car about 100yds. So thats how they planned to get it to a mechanic who was 5 miles away if i remember right. They refused a tow from me so i hope they made it. 

Also in Dease lake we saw a guy with a huge camper behind a mercedes SUV. The mercedes sounded pretty tired-creaking, rattling and squealing. People think i am crazy for towing what i do, but that looks scary to tow to me.

Later on we saw this really cool looking lake and a road that possibly went to it. I turned down the road and that was a mistake. The tree branches were scraping both sides of the car and trailer very quickly with no way to turn around. I stopped at one spot where there was a little bit of a clearing i figured i could disconnect the trailer and spin it around and ran down the rest of the road. There was a little turnaround at what was now the end of the road which was nowhere near the lake. Maybe at one time it went all the way but the path on from there was too overgrown to even walk down, but you could still see it had been a road once.  The turnaround was maybe 4 or 5 feet larger in diameter than my car and trailer is long so we managed to turn around. No more off road exploring with this trailer for me though.

This is the lake we wanted to see.

We came to Jade city which is a pretty cool place. There is a big jade mine there that puts out a lot of jade, their mine is on top of 75% of the worlds jade. I believe they said 90+% of the worlds jade is in British Columbia. Anyway, i have never seen so much jade. Outside you can buy large jade rocks up to a couple tons to carve yourself, get those custom cut to any size, buy precut rocks or go in the store and buy carved and finished jade. We spent quite a while there and bought some chunks of jade to try sculpting and polishing at home. Any of the nice carved stuff would have broken before we got home.

I had wanted to visit Cassiar and Centreville-2 ghost towns- but was told Cassiar was blocked off to visitors and i couldnt find Centreville. 

We drove through what had been a massive forest fire which went up until around the boarder crossing.

We bought gas at junction 37 where highway 37 meets the alaska highway and decided to continue on instead of going to the populated town of watson lake for laundry, showers and wifi because it was 15min in the opposite direction we needed to turn and Teslin would have all that the next day.

We got to big lake government campground and it was pretty bad. It was a loop with little pullouts parallel to the road to camp on. Small lots which were far from level with huge picnic tables.  Lots and lots of biting bugs and pollen. Set something down for 5 minutes and it had a thick layer of pollen on it. That night wasnt too bad, it was the next morning that was bad.

Here is some scenery from our drive north through B.C https://youtu.be/shHEFgJFkzY