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Saturday 7 July 2001Over 400 miles and $160 worth of petrol to the Yukon and Downtown RV Park, Watson Lake which has all the charm of a municipal car park. This is just above 60° latitude which is where you can start to see the Northern Lights, but yet another disappointment was in store. It was so close to midsummer that it never actually got dark at night; at around 1.00am it became a little gloomy but then it started getting light again. However, we went to the Northern Lights Centre - a kind of little planetarium thingy - to see what it would have been like. By this stage the trailer had a thick coat of mud, as well as two vertical strips of dents at the front where gravel had been thrown up against it by the truck wheels (over 100 miles of today's roads were unpaved). We used the low pressure hoses supplied by the campsite to get the worst off, but next day had to go and use the commercial truck wash anyway. We were now beginning to understand why the vehicles returning from Alaska looked like they did.The following morning after the truck wash, made a quick visit to the Signpost Forest ...
... containing over 30,000 signposts from around the world. The novelty wore off after about five minutes, but it is Watson Lake's only tourist attraction unless you count the Northern Lights Centre. Neither is likely to pull the tourists 1,000 miles north just to see them, but I suppose they have to make an effort. The Yukon Territory is about twice the size of the United Kingdom, but has the population of a modest town - around 30,000, two thirds of whom live in Whitehorse. There's a bit of mining, a little agriculture, and huge amounts of empty rock, ice and snow. That's it for the Yukon. Back to British Columbia. |
