Kluane NP & Kluane Lake

The other folks camped at the rest area left early, so it was quite peaceful there this morning.  

      

There are many rivers in the Yukon, & their water flow varies a lot, so they are often fairly empty. The spruce in this forest is a variety that grows tall & spindly. 

This memorial explains that James Quong designed & oversaw the building of the original temporary wooden bridges on the ALCAN in the early 1940s, then he designed the 133 permanent bridges in later years. 


The section of the ALCAN I drove last evening & this morning is notoriously the worst section of road in Alaska & the Yukon, but I managed to escaped with no noticeable damage - whew!


A display outside the museum tells about a wildfire that threatened the town in 1999; I love that the display boards are posted on the charred remains of the trees.

Most of the local museums in Alaska & the Yukon are very good, & this one is no exception. The wildlife dioramas are amazingly well done. 




Local indigenous artists donated many beautifully crafted traditional items. 



The afternoon drive featured Kluane Lake on one side & the mountains of Kluane National Park on the other side, which combined to make a beautiful show. Kluane Lake is the biggest lake in the Yukon. It was a mirror today, but winds can make it treacherous for boaters. 




The ground in the valley at one end of the lake looks very different from anything else around, as it's sandy with patches of short grass. A glacier used to feed a river that ran here, but an ice dam melted in 2016, & suddenly all that water went into a different river leaving the river bottom dry & exposed. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

boat tour to wildlife & glaciers

Image
I can now die a happy woman! The boat trip was fantastic in every way. (Major Marine 8.5 hour tour on Orca Song from Seward to the Northwestern Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park) We saw SO MUCH wildlife, including several rare sightings & behaviors.  Here is the first of 3 sea otters we saw.  This is the sea cave & rocks where we got very close to see sea stars & jelly fish - many, many of each.  A dozen Dall's porpoises swam & played near our boat for a while. They swam so fast that they were hard to photograph, but we saw each one many times. This group of Stellar's sea lions is typical of what one sees in Alaska, that is no babies, just a group of adults hauled up on shore.   Though humpback whales are often seen in this area, they are mostly seen alone or perhaps a mom & baby. Not only did we see a whole pod, we saw them engage in what is called bubble net feeding. Many pods around the world do not engage in this type of feeding. There are...
Read more

Alaska!

Image
Top-of-the-World Highway This road runs from Dawson City in the Yukon into Alaska. The 110-mile drive today was a dirt road with the exception of a 9-mile long paved stretch in the middle - seems odd to have a short paved stretch in the middle of a long dirt highway.  arrived in Alaska! I've wanted to come to Alaska since I was 14. My day trip to Skagway last week was to a small corner of Alaska, but that corner isn't connected to this main part of the state, so this feels like my official arrival.                                         Chicken, Alaska Apparently, the original residents here wanted to name the town after a chicken-like bird called a ptarmigan. However, they couldn't agree on how to spell that, so they compromised on "Chicken". It became a small town when the Pedro Dredge (now a National Historic Site) was set up here to dig for gold. Besides a few crazy tourists who...
Read more

The ALCAN & Cassiar

Image
Most of today's drive was on the section of the ALCAN east of Whitehorse, which I'd driven on the way out, so no scenery pics.  There are still some gas pumps in Canada that don't take credit cards. It amazes me that you pump first & then go in to pay.  The Stewart-Cassiar Highway is even more desolate than the ALCAN, so everyone turning south onto the Cassiar stops at the same gas station to fill up. While pumping gas there, a heavy duty truck camper pulled up next to me. Even more than the rig, the map on the side caught my eye. This guy has been on the road for 15 years & been to all of the places on this map - amazing! I got so distracted by the map that I forgot to take a pic of the rig. He bought the truck in Australia with another camper on it. That camper fell apart in South America, so he took the truck to the Netherlands where they built him a custom expedition-style rig. He's now back "home" in northwestern Canada for a while. A short distan...
Read more