Today we awoke to low hanging cloud in the little mountain town of Skagway, AK. We had planned a hike up the Dewey trails this morning but it appeared even that little hike would take place in the clouds.
We got straight out there and saw it was drizzling as well, so we added some rain gear and went up to the trail. It was essentially straight up the mountain to start and none of us, including our friend Jebo had any pep in our step. With the rain, the slippery rock and the pitch, and a bit of fatigue in the legs on these early climbs, we called it quits pretty quickly.
After a quick breakfast and showers we were packing up and hitting the road again. Not that there was a huge day of driving ahead but we were on Alaska time which is an hour behind PST, so we did want to get on the road.
As we were leaving town, we felt that this was a place we would like to return to someday, in the practical sense it seems unlikely but our day getting to and visiting Skagway was definitely a highlight of the trip so far.
As we left the town proper and started the long climb up to the summit at White’s pass, we could see we would make at least part of that climb in the thick of the clouds above. About halfway up the climb we encountered a group of cyclists coming down the descent. It was a mixed gender group on a variety of bikes, this looked like a tour group rather than a group of seasoned cyclists. Frankly some of these folks looked cold and frightened. I have done a fair bit of cycling in my day and had my share of bad weather rides, but I think I would have been cold and terrified in that group knowing that there was a 15 mile descent on wet roads in a cloud with tour busses trying to pass, YUK.
The visibility got even worse as we approached the summit, so much so that you could barely read the road sign indicating we were passing the summit with elevation of 3,292 ft.
But as we descended back towards Canada Customs the visibility improved. For some reason, and maybe just for space reasons, neither US or Canada customs actually sit on the summit border line, but rather about 5 miles inside their borders respectively, leaving about a 10 mile dead zone here. After clearing Canada Customs we started our drive in earnest towards Watson Lake YK.
Essentially this day was all retracing our steps, and with the cloud covering the mountains tops, this was a good Spanish day. We really didn’t take any pictures, did our lessons, I wrote some stories, and we pulled into our Nugget City cabin just before 5:00.
This was not one of our nicer spots to stay, however it has over 80 acres to walk the dog so we gave Jebo a good walk when we got there, had some wine on our porch, and an early dinner. Sadly, I think the highlight of this stay was discovering how good Yukon beer was, we each had one with dinner.
We got to bed early, we were resting up for our trip back to BC, next stop Fort Nelson
Our trip so far looks like this, 47:47 hrs, 4,011 km
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