When I started loading the car this morning, I was happy because it wasn't raining. By the time I drove away, it was snowing instead !! The weather changes SO fast round here you have to be prepared for anything. But everyone is saying that the weather this yer is really odd - Much colder and much wetter than usual for May, and as a result many of the tourist facilities, including camp sites and tours, are staying closed until it warms up and tourists start arriving. But because I was working on the past 10 year average temps and rainfall which I had carefully looked up and planned my trip around, I have been caught short. All the things I read said get up to Alaska in the first two weeks of May to avoid the crowds and the mosquitoes. Well, I have avoided the crowds and the bugs, but now find myself unable to camp, and unable to do any tour because they are not yet running this year !!! So unless the weather changes, I may as well keep heading North to Alaska !!
Setting off up the rest of Hwy 37 (Cassiar) from Dease Lake, the weather was overcast, low cloud and threatening rain (or snow) just like it had been for the past several days, since I left Smithers. I therefore planned a long day today to try to reach Whitehorse, some 450 miles NW, in the hope of leaving the bad weather behind. There is just no point in sitting around in rain waiting for things to improve !
The first 3 hours on the Cassiar were pretty slow, because the surface got progressively worse with broken up surface and frost heave in many places. The highways department are very good in that they have place warning signs at every place where the surface is bad, but you do not know how bad each is till you get there so you tend to drive pretty slowly. I was doing 30 - 40 mph for much of the first 3 hours just to make sure I didn't hit any major potholes at speed !
And it snowed, it rained and then finally as I neared the junction with Hwy 1, the Alaska Highway (Alcan), the cloud started to lift, and I actually started to see some mountains !
And as I crossed the border into the Yukon near Watson Lake, the sun actually came out and there was lots of blue sky. I filled up with fuel, and once again they only had regular, so I put in a small bottle of octane booster to see if that would help Elsie cope with the low octane fuel. Over the course of the day, it seemed to help a lot, so I might try some more of that on the next fill up. The lady at the (very isolated) gas station was telling me how she had recently had bears walking through her forecourt, and a big moose out on the road getting cross with passing cars ! Of course, no such luck while I was there !
As soon as I got into the sunshine on the Alcan, I took the roof off, and immediately felt a lot better ! I do not like being caged up in the car with the roof on all the time, but with all the recent rain I had little choice, Ironically, not 20 minutes down the road, I could see another snowstorm approaching fast, so I put the roof back on again - Only to have the road turn sharp left away from the storm not 5 minutes later, and all we got was a light dusting ! I could easily have left the roof off. Anyway, about 20 minutes further down the road, I took it off again and was able to get all the way into Whitehorse some 4 or 5 hour later with no further major showers of rain or snow, although it stayed around 5 or 6 deg C most of the time, and dropped as low as 0.1 deg C as we crossed one pass of about 1200 metres altitude.
The road N from Dease Lake was once again not too exciting due to the low cloud and poor visibility, and one area I passed through had quite a lot of fresh snow clinging to the trees and the edges of the road, so it had obviously snowed quite hard not long before I got there. But once the clouds started to lift, the mountains were revealed, and most of the lakes, many very large, are still frozen. A few are starting to thaw around the edges, but not all of them. Although there were some flat areas, generally speaking there were increasingly large snow covered peaks all the way to Whitehorse. On the other side of these montains is Skagway, and all the glaciers and fjords where the cruise ships come in during the Inside Passage cruises, and they are equally impressive on the land side. I only have about 310 kms to go to get to the Alaska Border, so if the weather is nice here in Whtehorse tomorrow, I might well try to find some cheaper (camping) accomodation and see what I can around here. (Accomodation os very expensive up here, even at this time of year, because of all the contract workers that live in the motels while they are working on roads, in forests etc.) Once again, it also depends on the weather, and what is open. But they have a big Tourist office in the centre of town that was just closed when I arrived, so I shall go down there first thing in the morning and check it out.
It was so good to have the roof off today, and to see the sunshine - It makes a big difference to one's state of mind ! Wildlife was not prolific today (yet again !) I saw one black bear run across the road about 100 yards ahead of me, and that was all - But he looked a lot less bedraggled than the ones I had seen yesterday !! But no moose, no elk, nothing - Just lots of signs warning that they were out there somewhere !! I shall have to start singing that Moody Blues song "I know you're out there somewhere " as I drive along !!!!
Pics from today here :-
https://picasaweb.google.com/117739775480775657932/DeaseLakeBCToWhitehorseYukon?authkey=Gv1sRgCJvVmreu0O2i2gE#
