Today was one of the hardest days we’ve had yet. We only drove 189 miles and it took about 7 hours. After we left Lake Kluane this morning we hadn’t gone very far before we started getting into a lot of areas with frost heaves. A frost heave is where the roadbed is built on permafrost and in the summer as the ground thaws there is a lot of expansion on the roadbed. This plays havoc with the road. It causes dips, splits, and humps to the blacktop/asphalt surface. Most of the area we were going through is built on muskeg which in the summer is a swamp and in the winter is frozen over. Some of these areas are marked with signs or flags or both but not all of them. When we encountered these areas we were slowed down to anywhere from 15 to 25 mph so we wouldn’t tear up the RVs and since they all weren’t marked we didn’t go over 45 to 50 mph in any area. We also had some areas where the road had been completely torn out and was gravel while they were preparing the roadbed for hard surfacing again. Still overall I have been amazed at how good the roads have been. No, you don’t need to be afraid to bring a large RV to Alaska. Mine is 41 foot long and I haven’t found any areas where it was in danger if you drove the appropriate speed. We may have had a total of 50 miles of gravel road in over 3600 miles.
With that said, we did see a couple of grizzly bear but were only able to get pictures of one. We had no sooner left our camp on the shore of Lake Kluane than we came across a grizzly on the side of the road.
He didn’t bother us and you can see we didn’t bother him or her, we didn’t care to find out which.
As usual we saw lots of pretty country.
Yes, we finally made Alaska. One sign of Yukon, one sign of Alaska, and one picture of Twila with one foot in each country.
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