One of the interesting things we saw was at Delta Junction.  The Alaska Pipeline crosses the Tanana river there.  It is an impressive installation.

                                                  Alaska Pipeline Tanana River Crossing

The pipeline runs from Prudhoe Bay, AK., on the North Slope to Valdez, AK.  It's over 800 miles long, and the pipe is 4' in diameter, plus it is insulated against the weather.  We arrived in Fairbanks, a bussiling city of about 100,000 people.  We are staying at the Rivers Edge RV park, right on the banks of the Chena River, which runs through the city.  We visited the Pioneer Village, a tourist atraction, which houses the native artifacts building, air museum, a 1899 steam locomotive, the first one in Alaska, and was used in mining.  It wasn't very big, and was narrow gage.  We did the afternoon tour on the Riverboat Discovery, very enjoyable.  It travels down the Chena river to where it meets the Tanana river.  We stopped at a recreated Athabascan village and listened to native people speak about how they survived before the white man came.  There are some beautiful homes along the river, and our commentator mentioned that the land along the river was worth over $100,000 an acre.  We are under the flight pattern of the Fairbanks International Airport, and I can't believe all the aircraft go that go by.  I am including several pictures of our river cruise. 

                                                         Riverboat Discovery III

The company was started in 1898, hauling freight for the miners, and in 1950 started the excursion business in Fairbanks.  They have done freight all the way to the mouth of the Yukon in the Bering Sea, but just do the passenger business now.  Along the way we stopped at Susan Butcher's dog kennels.  She passed away from cancer, after winning the Iditirod Race four times.  They use a 4 wheeler to train the dogs in the summer time, and on the frozen river in the winter time.  Iditirod winner , Lance Macke,y was greeting people at the landing.

                                                       Original Discovery I Riverboat

                                                              New Log Home

                                                             The Chena River

                                                        Athabascan Woman's Winter Coat

This is a picture of a coat worn by the Athabascan women in the winter,  It is beautiful, with several different furs used in the construction, including wolverine for the inner hood.

                                                              Original Freight Loading Area
This is where the freight was loaded to go down the river to the Yukon and the mines and villages

                                                                   Paddlewheel
    

This picture shows how close the the shore the paddlewheeler works.  It has a draft of 3', and the paddlewheel and rudders only take 24".

This picture is of a 900' Supercub strip along the river, close to where we dock.
We have enjoyed our visit to Fairbanks, but are ready to hit the road again.  Tomorrow, we are off to Cantwell, AK and Denali Park.

We had a good time visiting Whitehorse, but it was time to head down the road.  Our next destination was Destruction Bay on Lake Kluane.  It received its name from a very bad storm in 1942 that caused lots of damage to the ALCAN Highway camp for construction workers.  Kluane Lake is 38 miles long and is famous for its whitefish and lake trout.

                                                            Moose on the roadside

                                                               Mountains at Kluane Lake
                                               

                                                                   RV Park at Kluane Lake

We overnighted, and left the next day for Tok Junction, Alaska,  The first 100 miles took us 3 hours, as the road had so many frost heaves, we could only go less than 40 MPH.  The country is beautiful, and the road dept. was working on it.  The problem is that there is permafrost here, and the ground will thaw in one spot and not in another, so that is what causes the frost heaves.  At the RV park, the permafrost is 160' deep, and his well is 170', and has to circulate all the time to keep from freezing.
One has to be tough to live up here.  As we moved towards Tok, the air became very smoky, as there is a big fire going on the Kenai Peninsula, and the smoke was traveling North.

                                                        Smoky View of Wrangel Mountains

It was sure nice to cross the US border and have the signs in miles and MPH.  I never have been a metric person.  The area around Tok is very flat, with lots of swampy areas.

                       
                                            Mirror Lake and Reflections of the Mountains

After Tok, we are headed for Fairbanks, AK, and do some touristy things.  It is light 20 hrs a day up here, now, and the day's length is 21 1/2 hrs. in June.

Some views of being in Canada.  Now that we are in Whitehorse, I would like to comment on what I see up here.  All of the Canadians we have met, are very nice to visit  with and very helpful.   I feel that they are suffering from too much government, just like we are.  The RV parks are nice, but there are charges for everything; showers, laundry, cable TV and it just goes on and on.  One car wash wanted $1 a minute for the wash.  Restaurant food is very expensive.   The price of gas is between $5 and $6 US, and groceries are at least 20% higher than ours.  I am not going to complain about Glasgow grocery stores, when I get home.  We have visited the Transportation Museum, the McBride Museum, and the stern wheeler, the Klondike.  The TransportationMuseum covered everything from the native boats, dog sleds, trains, trucks, and aviation.  One of the exhibits is a 1920's vintage Fairchild FC-2.  It is being rebuilt, and a Waco EGC-8, several Fokkers, and a good display of a pilot and his lady  passenger  that survived for 49 days, after crashing in a Howard DGA-15, and the weather was as cold as -50.  They also had a US Army tundra buggy for servicing  the Dewline Radar sites.  The tires were about 8' high and 3' across, and it is as long as a big truck.  The airport has a DC-3 for a windsock.  It was used during WWII, and finally ended up being a freighter, and then abandoned.  It was restored and set up on the pole at the airport.

                                                               Whitehorse Windsock
                   

                                                        Waco at the Transportation Museum

The McBride Museum had exhibits about the native population, from when they crossed the Bering Straits, and the wildlife here, and an exhibit called "From Gold to Government".  It was about the early days of Whitehorse to modern days.  They had a gold exhibit, showing the different golds from different regions, with the golds having different colors, due to other metals in them. An early printing press, barber shop, radio equipment, and other  exhibits.  They had on of the first steam engines to operate on the Whitepass and Yukon Railroad.  It was built in 1899, and operated until 1940.
 The Klondike paddlewheeler was very impressive.  It was 240' long and only drew 40"  of water.  The accommodations for the first class passengers were top notch, and second class couldn't come up on that deck.

  

                                    
                                                                 The Klondike
The boat sits on the Yukon Rive in downtown Whitehorse.

Our trailer has been doing well, with lots of space for kitty, Roberta, and I. The only problems we have had is a broken screen door latch, which we will have to order, because the trailer is too new, and our Dometic 300 toilet, which had an internal leak, and smelled like an outhouse.  I called the company and the expedited a toilet to Whitehorse, and I installed the new one in a half an hour.  Tomorrow, we are on our way to Destruction Bay, YT and the next day to Tok Junction, Alaska ,
and on to Fairbanks for a few days.

From Muncho Lake , we traveled to Watson Lake, YT.   We crossed the Continental Divide, where the waters go East into the MacKenzie River and into the Arctic Ocean, and just yards from that stream is the Swift River that runs into the Yukon and the Bering Sea, (Pacific Ocean).  The divide is about 3500' high.

                                                                   Continental Divide

                                                                     Continental Divide




 Along the way, we ran into Caribou and Wood Buffalo.  The buffalo were on the road and you had to wait for them to move.  The roads here would remind one of Yellowstone Park, with lots of curves and turns.

                                                                 Caribou
                                                                      

                                                                       Wood Buffalo

We stopped at the world famous Laird Hot Springs.  The water from them runs int the Laird  River, which runs into the Arctic Ocean.

                                                                     Laird Hot Springs
We arrived at Watson Lake and had heard of the Sign Post City, but were surprised ant how big it was.  There were signs from all over the world.  It takes up several acres of land on the West edge of the city.

                                                              Sign Post City
We stayed at the Baby Nugget RV park west of the city.  All the parks we have stayed in have been very good, but some of the internet connections were not good.  We are now off to Whitehorse, YT.

                                                                   


                                       
                                    

From Dawson Creek, we made our way to Fort Nelson, which is at an elevation of 1300', the lowest elevation, at the Fort Nelson bridge.  Within 100 miles, we would go over a pass at 4250', the highest point on the ALCAN. 

   This was a pass that we had to cross after leaving Fort Nelson on our way to Muncho Lake for an overnight at the Northern Rockies RV Park.  It was a long climb.

                                                           

This is a picture of the first bear we saw.  Roberta figured we had traveled 1625 miles before we saw
one.  Since then we have seen many more.
                                                                                                                                                                                      
                                             
  











This is a picture of Summit Lake, the high point of the ALCAN.  It was still partially frozen, as was Muncho Lake, where we stayed

                                                                      Stone Sheep
We came upon these Stone Sheep along the road, and I took one picture of a moose, that didn't want to be photographed.

                                                                        Moose Butt
 This is my moose picture.

                                                                        Muncho Lake RV Park.
This lodge and RV park was a nice place to stay.  They are off the grid and use generators to operate the camp.  In the summer, there is a turbine Otter and a Cessna 206 on floats that operate flight seeing trips from here.

We are in Dawson Creek, BC, the home of Mile 0 of the ALCAN Highway. 

                                                               Mile 0 Marker in Dawson
We have noticed in leaving Calgary to Edmonton to Dawson Creek, there is a lot of energy development  and logging.  The Canadians are drilling wells like we are in the Bakken, and Dawson Creek area is a huge shale gas project.  They are fracking all the wells up here, and installing pipelines to the West Coast for shipping to the Far East.

                                                                 Dawson Creek Sawmill
We saw many stacks of cut trees, ready for the mills.  One of the places we visited was a wooden bridge , built in 1942.

                                                            Kiskatinaw Bridge

It is quite a bridge, and is still in use today.  The visitor center in Dawson has a one hour film on the building of the road; you had to be tough to work up here.  I didn't know that there were 6000 civilian workers, run by the US Highway Administration working up here.  I always thought it was just the Corp of Engineers.

The roads have been 4 to 6 lanes all the way, except for the stretch from Havre to Medicine Hat, and the weather has been a mix of days of  sunshine and days of rain.  Luckly, the rain days have been when we were moving from one place to another.

                                                             Beaver Creek, AB
Today, we are headed to Fort Nelson, BC

We left Calgary on the 12th and traveled to a nice RV park at Spruce Grove, AB.  We visited the Alberta Aviation Museum, which is located on the old Edmonton City Center airport.  The city decided that the land was too valuable for an airport, so they closed it.  It's going to become low income housing.  The lady at the museum said it probably wouldn't happen in her lifetime, and she wasn't very old.  It was a shame to see it closed, as I had been in there many times and it was very handy.  The airport was ringed with hangars and aviation businesses, and most of the places were empty.

The first picture is of the RV park, still under construction, but very well done.  The next picture is of a Barkley Grow T8P1.  There were only 11 made in Detroit, MI and 5 of them ended up in Edmonton.  They were used mostly on floats.  The next picture is of a DeHavilland Mosquito; it's a flying example, but not being flown.  The next aircraft is a Norseman, a real workhorse about the size between a Beaver and and Otter,  It also is airworthy.  The B-25 was in very good shape; it was used by the RCAF at Edmonton, and the next aircraft was a Vickers Viking amphibian.  It was all wood and fabric, and looked like one would spend a lot of time pumping the bilges.  The last picture is of a pile of snow that the city of Spruce Grove had removed from the streets and piled in a field.  It looked like dirt, but wasn't, and they were using a D-6 Cat to move the top of it so it would melt.  They received lots of snow this winter.  We stayed 2 nights here.  On the 14th, we traveled to Valleyview, AB for an overnight.