Fergie Road Trip

Tok River Campsite #18 Traveled the rest of the way on Tok Cut Off Road towards Tok, today. There were no traffic stops for road construction but we had to slow for damaged road and gravel road areas. Even though the speed limit was 35 mph, some cars and trucks go way faster and they shoot up the gravel.  Luckily, we made it through without getting a cracked windshield again.  Stopped for breakfast at the Sourdough RV Park. Unfortunately, breakfast was over and they were serving lunch. We were looking forward to having some of their sourdough pancakes again. We were the only customers and had a long conversation with the cook and park hosts (from Idaho) about RV traveling, while we ate lunch. We learned some things about winterizing our RV.  We stopped outside of Tok for the rest of the day and overnight at Tok River State Rec. Site. Cost: $20 for dry camping. We checked in just after everybody checked out so right now it's pretty empty. In the morning when we get up...

Grizzly Lake/ Mt. Sanford Today was a long day. We usually don't drive for more than 50 miles but today we drove 182. Most of the day was spent waiting on the Tok Cut Off road in construction area lines where only one direction of traffic was allowed on the road at a time. The road has a lot of frost heave and huge pot holes. They must work on it all summer every summer, it looked a lot better than it did 5 weeks ago. We were at the other end of the cutoff road, (the Tok end) but at that time it wasn't a road we wanted to continue on due to the bad condition. After seeing the Wrangle Mountain Range, we were hoping to find a campsite that had a view of those snow topped mountains. We ended up at Grizzly Lake with a beautiful view of the Mt. Sanford. We were so close to the lake we could fish from our picnic table. We didn't catch anything. Darn! No worries, we are still eating the salmon we caught on the Kenai River.

Young bull moose in Denali National Park We stayed in Denali Park for 5 days and it was an incredible experience.  We saw lots of wildlife and met people from different parts of the US and different countries. The first day we took a tour bus from the Denali Bus Depot to mile 62 where the tour buses turn around. The trip takes 9 hours with a 15 min bathroom and walk about break every hour or so. Sometimes there were so many buses stopped at the same place, you only had time to get in the long bathroom line. On that trip we saw moose, caribou, grizzly bears, arctic squirrels, willow ptarmigan and saw a slice of Denali Mountain.  The mountain was hazed over for most of our stay here. After the bus tour we drove our RV to our campsite at Teklanika. The next morning we set off on our bikes into the interior of the park. We rode for about 2 hours and decided to hop on a bus for the return trip.  They have shuttles that run through the park and if they have room for you,...

Miles Basalt Canyon, Whitehorse, YT Deb - Headed to Whitehorse early today and stopped at the rest stop before the blue Yukon River Bridge. We hiked up to the view point where we could see, Marsh Lake, Marsh Lake Dam and the Yukon River.  We stopped at Miles Canyon and hiked across the bridge and along the lower trail looking down on the Yukon river, barreling down the basalt canyon. It was a tilted gravel narrow path and I slipped half way down and went down to my knee. (Geez, I hate falling!!!) I totally scraped my knee and had blood streaming down my leg. I limped the rest of the way along. Darrel went on to the other trail and I went back to the RV to cry in private. My whole side, knee, hands and elbow hurt. Darrel got it all on video as he was pointing the camera at himself narrating and I was behind him. We next drove into the outskirts of Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon and got a site (#107) at Hi Country RV Park.   Darrel - I had no idea that ...

hiding porcupine We stopped at the trail head to Rancheria Falls and did the short hike to the Falls. We encountered a porcupine who immediately scurried under the walkway bridge to hide. We also had a red squirrel accompany us for part of the walk.  We traveled on towards Teslin and as we approached the Nisutlin Bridge we got cell service and of course we stopped at the turn out to view the river and lake and catch up on Poke.  We passed up the Yukon Motel/Lakeshore RV park right at the end of the Nisutlin River bridge (where the Nisutlin River and Teslin Lake meet) and drove on to the government camp. We are still next to the lake but you can't see it from out site. It's a very short walk from us, though. This is a dry camp but we could work on the computer because amazingly we still have cell service and we can use our phones as hot spots to work on our laptops. Some interesting things about the Canadian highway: there's no trash along the road and t...

Bison along the Alaskan Highway We left Liard Hot Springs and turned onto the Hwy 97 and saw a herd of Bison. As we headed to Watson Lake we saw more Bison, Black Bears and Stone Mountain Sheep. We saw one little rabbit on one of the trails we walked on today. We arrived in Watson Lake and for the first time in awhile we have cell service. : ) We visited the Visitor's Centre and watched a movie about the construction of the Alaska Highway. It was build in a hurry after Japan bombed Hawaii and the US entered into World War II. The construction was slow until Japan bombed Attu in the Aleutian Islands off Alaska. The effort to get the military highway constructed exploded and the job was completed in 1942.  link to pics