Day 13: Whitehorse YT - Dease Lake BC

Things to do in Whitehorse on a wet Sunday morning:

1) Photograph the urban fox licking his 'nads outside the hotel

Yes, it's a rubbish photo.  I think the camera auto-focussed on the (closed) window instead of Foxy-Woxy, but if you install Hollywood-OS™ you will easily be able to count the hairs in his big furry tail.

2) Visit the SS Klondike, parked on the bank of the Mighty Yukon and tended this morning by a chap with a bushy black beard and an eye-patch.  He looked pretty fierce so I did not inquire as to the wellbeing of his parrot.

The Klondike (more accurately, the Klondike II as the Klondike I ran aground somewhere on the river and was cannibalised to build this one in 1937) is the big sister of the Keno, and is 64m long, 12.5m wide and draws a mere 1m when fully loaded¹.

3) Get on Robert Service Way and hightail it out of town.  Robert Service, aka "The Bard Of The Yukon", was born to Scottish parents in Preston and didn't fetch up in the Yukon until he was thirty and only spent eight years there before clearing off to Paris, but is revered for his "verse" in these parts - he was careful not to refer to it as "poetry" though it was still dismissed as doggerel by the literati.

From Whitehorse it was more or less a straight retrace back to Watson Lake, except for the bit I missed out with the diverfsion via Tagish and Carcross on the way up.  This bit does not look any different to any of the other bits of the Alaska Highway in the Yukon.  I went back to Watson Lake for two reasons:

a) To buy a sandwich, and
b) To check out the Sign Post Forest, which I had driven right past without noticing last week.

This was started by a Private Carl K. Lindley of the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1942, during the construction of the Alaska Highway.  He added a sign pointing to his hometown of Danville IL to an existing signpost he had been ordered to repair, other squaddies added to it and now it covers a Several of acres.

Retrace 20-something km again to J37 and turn south onto the Cassiar Highway, leaving Yukon for good shortly thereafter.  The road is narrower than the Alaska Highway and the parsimonious British Columbians have saved a few bob by not painting a line down the middle, and the Cassiar Mountains are a lot more in-yor-face than anything to be seen on the main road.  In spite of this, I still found myself in danger of falling asleep so stopped for a snooze and hence didn't get here until 17:30.  Travellers should note that if you stick to the posted speed limit in this corner of Canada you will be, barring the odd outsize motorhome, the slowest thing on the road and probably travlling faster than Josh Homme's new business venture too:

1: All fakts are korekt for a change