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.

Calgary

We stayed in Cochrane two nights.  The RV park is right on the Bow River and had a nice path along the river to walk on in the mornings.   We visited the site of the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics. 

It was amazing that the site was so small, with all the skiing events right next to each other.  The TV shots make one think that the events were scattered, but that was not the case, as you can see from the pictures; the jumps were next to the downhill, the moguls, the luge, and bobsled runs.  Even the skating events building was at the bottom of the hill.

We then wandered into downtown Calgary, and back to Cochrane, which was named about a cattle baron, who brought 6800 cattle from Montana in 1881, and managed to loose 2500 the first winter, and then brought another 4000 head, and they arrived in October in a big blizzard, and he lost even more, so the ranch was gone by the late 1880's, but the ranch headquarters named the town.

On The Road

We left Fort Peck Friday morning, the 9th of May, Roberta's birthday.  Good day to start the trip.  Our first day was to Havre, MT.  We stayed at the RV park across the street from the Duck Inn.  A nice park, but sandwiched between the Highway 2 and the railroad yard, with a lot of train traffic all night.
It started to rain that evening, and so we drove the next day to Wild Horse border crossing and on to
Medicine Hat, AB.  We then joined the TransCanada Highway to Cochrane, BC, just west of Calgary.
Some of the RV parks, that we have visited haven't had very good internet service, so I am late with this blog.  I will try to do better as we go on.