Here's a map of our route from Haines, AK (where we started in our last edition) to Destruction Bay, Yukon where we'll end in this one.
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Shortly after lunch we drove across the border into the Yukon. They have very flashy signs to make sure you’ve noticed.
10 klicks further on (yes, we’re in Canada and you need to get with the program here), we came to the Million Dollar Falls Campground. There was a nifty photo of the falls in the Milepost so of course we had to take the turn off and go see. The campground was lovely including a kids playground (they have them in all the Yukon Provincial Parks we discovered) and it was empty. I’m not sure who exactly would camp here since it’s literally in the middle of nowhere but, hey we appreciated it being there. We parked and took the trail to the falls overlook.
The trail continues along the rim of the canyon where you can go down some steep stairs to another viewing platform (you can see it on the right above). This is the view from the platform STRAIGHT down. There was a LOT of water and it was definitely worth the stop.
Later in the season the campground is often closed because bears come to fish here—or so they say on the internet. I was looking for the story of why it’s called Million Dollar Falls and couldn’t find anything.
There were nice wildflowers in bloom along the trail including Showy Jacob’s Ladder (Polemonium pulcherrimum).
And these Small-flower Anemone (Anemone parviflora) growing on the rocks in the gorge.
And the tiniest Kinnikinnik (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) I’ve ever seen.
There were bluebells (Mertensia paniculata) in bud that hadn't opened yet.
We drove on through the gorgeous scenery and took a break at a rest stop with signs telling you all about the Tatshenshini River (in English, French and local First Nations). This highway follows an old traditional route used by the First Nations People. I took this photo of the mountain view. A lot of the mountains in this area has the black and white zebra striping that you see here.
Here’s a panorama shot just to give you a taste of the scale of things. The mountains just go on and on.
The main wildflower along the road through here is the dandelion. Miles and miles and miles of them. Here’s a shot of just a few of them with the wacky zebra striped mountains in the background. The whole area was carpeted in dandelions.
I consider the Haines Highway to be one of the prettiest roads we drove on the trip. It was a gorgeous day and we saw bears which does color the whole experience. After about 150 miles the road makes a junction with the Alaskan Highway, otherwise know as the Alcan. You reach the small town of Haines Junction and if you stay awake you realize that you have to take a hard left to join the highway and continue on to Alaska, otherwise you’ll end up heading the wrong way out into the Yukon. Going straight FEELS right but it’s not!
Here’s the view from the turnout just before you reach Haines Junction—the sign on the right says welcome to Haines Junction.
The dandelions gave way to this lovely pink wildflower along the roadside.
It looked like a form of vetch to me and the next day I asked the ranger at the Tachal Dhal Visitor’s Center in Kluane National Park what it was. The locals call it Wild Sweet Pea. It’s botanical name is Hedysarum boreale and it’s other common name is Northern Sweet-vetch. It carpeted the roadside all along the Alaskan Highway to the Canadian border.
The road turns north and follows the edge of Kluane National Park on the west side of the road and Kluane Lake on the east.
Here’s the view of mountains in Kluane National Park.
And here’s the first bit of a view of Kluane Lake.
We opted to camp at Congdon Creek Provincial Park at Destruction Bay on the banks of Kluane Lake. We got the last campsite with a sliver of a lake view and set up camp. There’d been a bit of construction that we’d been through and we got an interesting mud pattern on just the driver’s side of the trailer.
As you can see the passenger side just got a little dirty. Not to worry, tomorrow they’ll both get completed coated with mud as we go through several miles of wet gravel road.
We went for a little walk on the beach after we set up camp.
The water was a wonderful aqua color but those clouds looked kind of ominous.
An hour later it was pouring. But before that we I managed to snag photos of some more flowers! This is Alpine Milk-vetch (Astragalus alpinus), a form of locoweed.
And this is Hairy Arctic Milk-vetch (Astragalus umbellatus).
We got back to the trailer before the sky opened up and had a nice nap listening to the sound of the rain beating on the roof. When we awoke I heard water rushing but didn’t think too much about it. There was a creek nearby after all. In the evening, some folks walked by our campsite and stood looking north but I thought they were looking for the nature trail. The next morning, we realized what they’d been looking at. The creek had overflowed after the storm and was running all over that section of the campground.
There had been several sites that had been closed off with red cones the day before and now we realized why. They were flooded!
The lake had a streak of ground fog hovering over it that made it kind of spooky.
But the sun was out and starting to burn it off quickly. This is the view looking south along the lake and the rocky beach.
Here’s the view of the mountains in Kluane National Park from the campground. Pretty swell place, huh?
There were tons of bluebells (Mertensiana paniculata) in bloom all over the campground. You can see that these were in an area that had flooded.
We’d planned to spend 2 nights here but it didn’t look like there was really that much to do. We drove back south a ways to the Tachal Dhal Visitor’s Center in Kluane National Park. Tachal Dhal (Skin Scraper Mountain after the rocks found there that make good skin scraping tools) is the First Nation name for a mountain that used to be called Sheep Mountain. There are herds of Dahl Sheep that gather on the south facing slopes in the spring but they were gone. They’d still be there the week before but now they’d move to the high country and out of sight.
We talked with the rangers (nice French Canadian ladies) about potential hikes and escaped as the first bus of cruise ship tourists descended upon the tiny visitor center. There are almost no trails in Kluane National Park. It’s a huge wilderness national park (and World Heritage site) that runs to the border where Wrangell St. Elias National Park in the US starts. There are ‘routes’ you can take up through the mountains that follow old traditional First Nations trade routes but very few actual trails.
There was a ‘nature trail’ just up the road and we decided that would be just about our speed. We thought it would just be a little historical walk along the old original Alaskan Highway roadbed to the place where they had the official opening of the highway in November 1942. It was that but it also turned out to be a fantastic wild flower walk!
So in Part XVI, we’ll take you on the Soldier’s Summit hike and show you all sorts of wonderful flowers and then we’ll drive on north and cross the border one more time to enter the interior of Alaska at last.