Thursday, April 9, 2009

A long drive north

The Wife and I made the drive up to Anchorage from Lander a bit ago. Our trip took us through Billings, Great Falls and nearly to Calgary on the First Day. With snow falling over night, we decided to stay on the main highways on the second day, driving through Calgary, around Edmonton and into Dawson Creek, British Columbia. We had great weather and dry roads for the rest of the trip, completing our journey in five days.

The Alaska Highway officially begins in Dawson Creek. Dawson Creek is a small town that can't seem to decide if it wants to be a tourist destination or just another oil/gas boom town. While I'm sure it gets inundated with motor homes in the summer, it was pretty quiet while we were there.

Since I've let too much time go by since our trip, I'll keep this short on the narrative and long on the pictures... Not far into our third day we spotted our first caribou:The highlight of the trip for Karta:
We worked our way through Stone Mountain Provincial Park and came across these stone sheep. The little bugger sure was cute:
Moving along, we eventually made it to Laird River Hot Springs. We had heard about these springs from various friends who had made the trip. Our original plan was just to take a look at the springs and move on, but Karta promptly dropped her ball in the springs "forcing" The Wife to go for a swim to retrieve it.
We got to see our first wood bison:
We spent the third night in Watson Lake, Yukon. Let me tell you, we should have just kept on driving--or better yet, just stayed the night at Laird Creek Hot Springs.
The Wife and I had a friendly wager on how many moose we might see. I bet 17 and The Wife went with 20. While at one point it looked like The Wife was a sure lock to win, the sightings slowed toward the end of the trip and I sneaked away with the win.
After touring around Whitehorse for a bit, our fourth and final night was just over the border in Tok, Alaska. This place boasts the highest number of hotel rooms and campground spots per capita of anywhere in the U.S. Since it was the off season, there were plenty of vacancies.

Excited to be in Alaska and realizing we had nearly no pictures of us, we posed for this shot (no Karta did not take it):
As expected, the drive was beautiful:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks like a killer trip. Great weathers, very scenic, lots of wildlife, and without any breakdowns... not too bad! I’m sure you are glad to be done with your audacious trip, hope it did not enervate you too much! Yea, so i am busting our some neologisms, have to try out the new GRE vocab on you… you know to show I am not obtuse but rather erudite. Here I am, beginning to prattle. Well congrats on starting the next part of your lives and i look forward to seeing the future posts from the North Country.

Take care,

Josh

schnitzerPHOTO said...

Do you have a goddamn email address? Good to hear from you via the blog, but I'm anxious to get a little more intel on the new sitch in AK.
Glad the trip went smoothly. Kelly's going to try and get Nelli hammered tonight.