From: Whitehorse, YT
To: Watson Lake, YT
Miles today: 280
Total miles: 11696
Today was another overcast day with occasional cold
showers, but this time the dominant environmental factor was smoke from some
very intense nearby fires. I have heard
that part of the Alaska Highway ahead of me has been closed because of it, and
because of the fire itself. I will be
going a different way, south from Watson Lake into British Columbia. The road
today was lovely in spite of this; good surface, mildly curvy, and as scenic as
these migration routes between mountain ranges usually are. Just another three hundred miles through the
Taiga. Once again, briefly, I am struck by the fact that if I turn left (north)
off of this road and go cross country, it would be at least a hundred miles
before I hit another road. (That road would be the Campbell Highway, unpaved,
which I drove earlier on this trip.)
 |
| One last photo post from "North of 60." Alaska Highway, Yukon. |
I crossed the 60th parallel going north on
June 14. Today is my last day above
it. So with the exception of one night
in Fort Nelson, BC, I have been “up north” for 26 days, almost four weeks. I am glad I got to spend this much time up
here; I do feel like I got just a little bit of the flavor of what it is like
to exist here, at least for the brief summer season. I have sort of gotten used to it being light
at midnight, and I like knowing that when I walk into the one bar in a town
everyone is almost instantly my friend. I
have developed a sense of the smallness and limited variety in the towns, and of
the great distances between them. I am a
city kid at heart, and I don’t think I would really ever consider moving to a
place this isolated, but I feel like I am getting some sense of what the
attraction is.
One thing I
definitely look forward to getting back to, though, is fiber optics. I think I will probably have to finish with
interior British Columbia before I get through with that.
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