In the hotel there were plenty of people discussing the Alaskan Highway. This made me think that it would be pretty populated and busy the whole way. Boy, was I wrong! Almost as soon as we got on the road we were out of town and alone. Totally. No one headed in the same direction and only occasionally passing a vehicle headed back to town. I can't emphasize enough how alone you re. We would drive an easy 40 or 50 miles before even seeing a connecting road! No gas stations, no houses, no businesses whatsoever. This really is a wild frontier. The road quickly began hitting mountains. Small at first and then later some incredibly majestic panoramas. It's hard to tell from the pics we posted but it was all very incredible. In the most incredible section of mountains we were caught in construction. The trail was being worked on, so road crews stop traffic for 30 minutes or so, and then open it up in one direction only. In this particular section the right side of the road was an immediate mountain (this is where we took the pics of stone sheep walking on the road and standing on ledges) and on the left was a cliff. It literally dropped off at the edge of the road with no rail or anything. This was all in the northern Rocky Mountains.
After we got through the majority of the mountains we were still seeing tons of moose, caribou, wild horse, and bison warning signs without actually seeing any animals. Finally, we saw these boys out eating:
From the time stamp you can see that this pic was actually taken much later in the day. The first few times we saw bison walking the road we didn't have a chance for a picture. We came around the corner and they were standing on the edge of the road. Later, we started seeing more and more of them. Actually, for miles we had been seeing animal poop on the sides of the road. I kept wondering what made it (probably all the stone sheep) when we finally saw that the bison were all out wandering around. These guys were down a hill, about 50 feet from the road.
Eventually, we both had our fill of bison and were hoping for more exotic wildlife. I kept crying to SweetPea about how I HAD TO SEE A BEAR! She was probably ready to kill me. After hours of driving she suddenly yelled, "I just saw a bear!" We were in a series of sharp 's' turns (with cars on our tail) and no where to turn around at. SweetPea said it must have been a cub because it was so small. I was really annoyed that we didn't see our first bear together. Oh well. It wasn't long though before we were driving through another section of hills when something caught my eye. This time we were alone on the road so I immidiately whipped it around and went back. This is what we saw:
As we pulled up we could see that something had his (maybe her!?) attention:
The bear laid down and began eating on this piece of roadkill. I guess the size of a bison kind of lends scale to the bear! I had just said something to the effect of, "Oh wow, it must have come out to eat the bison" when we noticed the swarm of flies. It was about a heartbeat later that the smell hit us! SweetPea said, "That's enough of that, let's go!"We headed on down the road a little ways when we spotted this one along the right side of the road:
This time we were fortunate enough to see a mamma bear and two cubs. She led them out of the woods and they picked in the grass for a few minutes before we finally headed on down the road. I promptly told SweetPea that I was unimpressed by her size, and my target now is a real Grizzly bear. I'm sure if I saw this small bear in the woods, without a truck between me and her she would still terrify me. But, in hindsight I can at least act brave. SweetPea ended up seeing another bear as we were driving along but I didn't catch a glimpse of that one.
When we got into Watson Lake, Yukon Territory, Canada, we stopped off at the Signpost Forest (the pic at the top of this post was from there). Legend has it that in the 40's when U.S. soldiers were building the Alaska Highway one in particular made a makeshift sign pointing to his hometown with the mileage on it. After that, everyone else began adding their signs as well. Nowdays, people are encouraged to bring a sign when they visit. There are license plates and signs from all over and some people even make make-shift signs out of what they have in their vehicles. One was a Tupperware lid with a family name and homwtown written on it.
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