The Klondike Highway crosses the Alaska Highway near Whitehorse, making a couple of choices for side trips or loops. We decided to take a side trip south to Skagway, Alaska. There is only one road to Skagway, and this seemed like the best opportunity for us to go there. We will spend a few days there, and then decide if we will come back the way we came, or take the ferry across to Haines.
View Larger Map
This is soooo easy I don't know why I didn't try it sooner. I figured out how to add a google map to the blog page. Hopefully this will help put things in perspective. This map shows the route from Whitehorse to Skagway. The straight dashed line is the 60th parallel, which is the dividing line between Yukon and British Columbia. The bent line below that is the US-Canada border. The yellow line above is the Alaska Highway (Yukon Rt 1). The area is roughly at the top of the southern tail of Alaska that goes down the coast. You should be able to use the + and - to zoom the map in and out. Zoom out if you want to see how this area relates to Canada and Alaska.
Heading South
OK, here are the inevitable windshield shots. See those mountains out there? We have to cross them later today, and then make our way down to sea level.
Emerald Lake
Yes, the lake really was that green, maybe greener. It's caused by sun reflecting off calcite deposits on the bottom of the lake. The scenery on this trip continues to amaze me.
Carcross Desert
They call this Carcross Desert, and advertise it as the world's smallest desert. It is not really a desert, but it does sorta looks like one. This is an ancient seabed, and the blowing sand has created dunes that look and at times act like desert dunes.
Bove Island
Yet another pretty pullout. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.
Dall Sheep
We pulled over to yet another beautiful pullout...
...I was taking pictures, and Dale was scanning the mountainside....
...he spotted some small patches of white on the mountainside. Could these be sheep or goats? We got out the spotting scope for a closer look. Hmmm.... Maybe, maybe not. If they are, they aren't moving.
But look - there's another group further down the mountainside, and these do appear to be moving. We were able to focus this group in with the scope enough to confirm that they were Dall Sheep, based on the horns. What fun! This is why we got the scope.
I know you can't really see much in the pictures, other than that these guys moved around a bit, but I wanted to show why we were so happy to have the spotting scope. We would have missed these guys without it. With it, we were able to bring them for a really good look. Too bad we can't capture a picture of it.
Crossing The Mountains
Remember those mountains you saw earlier? You can see we are now getting a little closer to the top. It's only abut 3,000 feet at the pass, but in just that distance, the lakes went from thawed to frozen. I'm guessing even these will melt in the summer.
Bear Butt
And here's another quick, stick-the-camera-out-the-window-and-click shot. There were a couple cars pulled over here so we had a little warning something was here, but did not know what until we got close. There was no way we had room to pull over our rig at that spot, so we settled for one shot of bear butt that almost did not make it into picture.
Welcome To Alaska
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
Anyone can comment, but I will look at all comments before allowing them to be published, so don't expect them to show up immediately. This is to weed out the inevitable spam posts. If you do not wish to register, you might include a clue in your comment so I can figure out who you are.