Alaska Highway 2 - Animal Day!

We started off today in rain but when you have mountains, even rainy, foggy weather can look kind of interesting.

Today was an extra long driving day due to numerous areas that were under construction. Some sections of the highway were being dug up to fix drainage. In other areas, they were doing seal coating. It seems to be a northern thing. They put down hot tar, add gravel, roll it, and repeat. You end up driving on unfinished sections in virtual dust storms at ridiculously slow speeds for many kms. On the plus side, when the highway is clear, the locals seem to think that the speed limit is just a suggestion so you can move along nicely!

Here are a few shots of what we saw.

In some of the dustier areas, they make you follow a lead truck so that you don't crash into people coming the other way or drive off the road. Interesting...

Eventually, we passed that section and stopped for gas at one of the small lodges along the highway. If we thought the price of gas was high yesterday, we were sadly mistaken. We paid up to $1.89 per litre today. I thought the sign on this pump was funny, even though the price wasn’t.

The highway continued to gain elevation until we reached the highest point at Summit Lake. There was a beautiful campground and a number of hiking trails. And there were warnings about meeting bears while using the trails! Since we plan to hike in Whitehorse and Juneau, we've picked up some bear spray. You might notice that some yahoo has taken a couple of shots at the bear sign. 

Driving today was more fun than previous days. I was wishing the RAV was a Porsche as we were on many twisting, turning roads that hugged cliff faces or lakes or both. Once again the photos don’t give you the true feeling of the ride but you can get the idea. And, you can tell that I wasn’t scaring Marilyn too much because she was taking the pictures of the scenery and the animals! 

There were a number of bridges that had steel grate decks. They were very noisy in the car but these warnings were for bikers who apparently got shaken quite a bit.

There was constant beautiful scenery along every section of the highway. We were told that this would be our most impressive drive and it definitely was.

Our next stop was the apparently famous Liard Hot Springs. Due to some geothermal heating and special rock formations, there is a large pool with 40 degree water. We just wanted to look and I’m glad that’s all we did. I did take off my shoes and try it out and it was freaking hot! If it was a bath, I would have jumped out. However, it was very popular with the crowds of people who were swimming in the pool! There were way too many speedos on old guys and the sulphur smell was not pleasant at all. I guess we aren't spa people!

Now for the animal day part. So far on this trip, we have seen hundreds of signs warning about deer, moose, caribou and now bison. But, to date, we had only seen one measly deer. Today, we started off seeing one live moose crossing the road and a dead moose on the side of the road. Later, when passing through Muncho Provincial Park, we saw numerous caribou, some mountain goats, more moose and a couple of herds of bison. The bison were very nonchalant and walked all over the highway. The caribou tended to stay at the sides. It was pretty exciting for city people to see animals in the wild that we normally would only see in a zoo. I’m ok with not seeing bears or wolves though!

This is the lodge where we stayed last night. It was overlooking a lake and some of the Rockies. It would have been a nice place to spend a few days. 

This was the view at the back of the lodge.

We're off to Whitehorse tomorrow!