It was only a couple of days ago, but I’ve already forgotten most of the drive between Whitehorse and Tok, which probably means that not a lot happened. We have been listening to the audiobook of Stephen King’s Mr Mercedes as we drive along. Great book and we’ve finished that one, but have Silkworm, the new JK Rowling/Robert Galbraith book to listen to next.
The scenery is amazing! For a while, it was a lot like Norway: huge snowy peaks, blue lakes, tree-covered slopes. A picture postcard around every bend in the road.
Oh, but I’ve just remembered something that we saw just out of Carcross, where we found the sourdough bakery. Just on the side of the highway is a sand dune. We both looked at it, thought ‘what the …?’, and did a U-turn to go back and make sure we weren’t imagining it. No – it really was a sand dune that was imaginatively called Carcross Desert, even though there were heaps trees and a lake just down the road a bit. Apparently when glaciers form, they cover a layer of sand and silt, and then when the glacier recedes, the sand & silt comes to the surface and forms dunes in very unlikely places. Like the middle of The Yukon in western Canada. There were a couple of interesting plants there too – Baikal sedge-grass and Siberian lupins, from just across the Bering Strait.
We stopped at Tok, which is an important junction in Alaska – south to Anchorage, north-west to Fairbanks, north-east to Chicken. Fuel there was the same price as in LA. Then we headed south along the highway and camped about 20kms south of Tok at a state forest campground.
Camped 20 km south west of Tok in the Eagle Creek campground
Carcross Desert with Snow covered mountains in the background
On the road north-east of Anchorage. There are snow capped mountains everywhere
