ALASKA – Beaver Creek/Haines

July 17 Tuesday Left Valdez this morning and we are facing two long days of driving to reach Haines. Our stop for tonight will be at the Beaver Creek RV Park which is actually in the Yukon Territory so we will be crossing the border into Canada about 20 miles before this stop. The day is sunny so our drive back through Thompson Pass was much nicer. We backtracked to Glenallen, which is where we turned off to head to Valdez two days before. This time we went about 8 miles beyond Glenallen and took the Tok cutoff. Not too much to write home about here. We reached the Canadian border crossing around 4pm after driving 8 hours. Crossing the border, we lost an hour, since the Yukon Territory observes Pacific Time, but tomorrow we will cross back into Alaska so we will be back on Alaska time.

July 18 Wednesday Headed to Haines this morning. Another beautiful sunny day. We traveled some extremely rough roads for about 3 hours from Beaver Creek to Destruction Bay. Lots of frost heaves and construction. While traveling slowly we caught sight of three moose across a lake. Also got some nice pictures of Kluane Lake-- reflecting the mountains & clouds. 

A real nice stretch of the road...NOT! Mr. Skunk probably wonders where we are going!

Three moose!

Reflection on beautiful Kluane lake

We stopped for lunch right before Haines Junction...just pulled into a turnout along the road. I got out to take a picture of an unusual flower I had been seeing along the road. Right after I stepped back into the RV to sit at the table and eat, Gary saw a grizzly bear just a few feet away from the RV! He was getting some pictures of it just as some motorcycles went past and the bear meandered back into the woods.

 We crossed back into the US about 40 miles north of Haines. Mountains were just beautiful heading into Haines. Our car was so dirty from today's drive...just had to take a picture of it as we parked at the Haines Hitch Up RV Park. This is one of the nicest parks we have been stayed in and we will be here until Saturday when we board the Alaska ferry with the RV & car and head down the inter-coastal waterway for the next stage of our trip.

Driving into Haines

One dirty car!!