July 14: A Rainy Day in the Yukon Territory

Wednesday July14, A long day’s drive: We drove all day in the rain, with limited visibility of the Canadian National Park called Kluane to the left of the road. There was plenty of time to ruminate over the landscape. There are spruce forests as far as the eye can see. These aren’t Colorado Spruce, but small columnar Black Spruce packed tightly together like fields of spikes. The trunks and branches looked black in the rain, and the needles a somber dark green. In the lowlands, the trees were really miniature - just a few feet high, due to overabundant water. Water was the other big feature of the landscape. Lakes stretched for miles. Riverbeds were hugely wide channels of dark grey, sharp rocks with multiple streams of lighter grey, foamy water meandering and branching though them (they’re called braided rivers – quite apt). Small ponds and bogs were everywhere.

The evening before, we had learned that the permafrost is melting, and where it does, the ground sinks and water accumulates. Trees along the edges of the new ponds lean inward, or fall in and die. Examples were everywhere. The road, too, was a lesson in the heaving and sinking of frozen land that now thaws in summer, the roughest road we’ve encountered so far. The day’s bright spot was spying a Trumpeter swan family in a pond beside the road. Beautiful, huge birds with their small grey offspring.

As if by providence, the sun came out as we waited in line to cross back into Alaska. We continued on to the first Alaska town of any size on the Alcan, the forgettable town of Tok. Fast Eddie’s large salad bar was a wondrous site to see! West of Tok, we finally gave up and pulled over onto a side road leading to a gravel pit, and got some rest.