Day 123 & 124 – July 12 (Alaska Day 32 & 33) – On the Move

We left Valdez on a raining morning with fog and low clouds.  Our plan was to drive to Tok, about 240 miles away.  That isn’t very far in the lower 48 states, but up here that is a hard days drive.  We bounced along the Richardson Highway until we got to the Tok Cut-Off, we ran out of the rain once we left the coastal area.  Then we bounced our way on that road.

At one point a truck camper was pulled over to the side of the road, so we pulled behind them to see what they were looking at.  Way off in the distance, through the trees you could see a bull moose eating grass (or whatever grows in a river) from the riverbed.  We did our best to get a photo, but it was a challenge to find the moose with the lens zoomed all the way in on it.

We finally made it into Tok, Rick was running on fumes.  He had stopped at one station and put in enough gas he hoped would get him to Tok.  Forty dollars got him a little over 8 gallons of gas.  When we filled up in Tok he still took 72 gallons to fill up the 75-gallon tank.

We ate supper at Fast Eddies in Tok and then moved to a pullout area about 10 miles out of town.  We spent the night there in the pullout with 2 other campers.

The next day we pointed the campers towards the Canadian border, heading to Haines, Alaska.  To get to Haines, you have to leave Alaska and go into the Yukon Territory first and then re-enter Alaska from the Haines Highway.  Most of the locations in Alaska are serviced by a single land road; like Homer, Seward, Valdez, Haines, Skagway and so on.

The border crossing went off without a hitch.  The Alaska Highway was in very rough shape just inside Canada for about 100 miles.  The pavement was pulled up and the road was gravel with washboard potholes.  I drove between 20 and 30 miles an hour and at times Dorrie was telling me to slow down.  Rick drove faster than us, going 40 to 50 miles per hour and they were soon out of sight.

We stopped at Beaver Creek to see a church made out of a left over Quonset hut from the road construction in the 1940s.

It was different and the lady at the Visitor’s Center said it has a ghost – a woman was killed and her body was left on the altar of the church.  Her spirit is still in the church according to the woman at the visitor’s center.  We stopped but the door was locked so we moved on.

The scenery, as always, was great and we took a few pictures along the way.  We stopped at Burwash Landing to see the world’s largest gold panning pan.  We were looking for anything to get off the bouncing road, as you can tell.

We are spending the night at Congdon Creek Campground in the Yukon.  The campground is located on a lake – you thought I was going to say creek didn’t you.  The wind has picked up and the lake has white caps on it but it is still beautiful.  Tomorrow we go back into Alaska.