Yukon Ho!

June 24, 2006

July 14, 2006 on 10:54 am | In Uncategorized |

Biking time: 11:00AM to 8:00PM
End: Alaska Highway
Distance: 121km

We started today with a trip to the store, talked to the ladies there for a while, and even met a customer from Saskatchewan who gave us a free admission to his Drive-In theatre for when we drive back across Canada.

Because we’d stretched our distance the day before,  the logical overnight stops on the way to the end of the Cassiar didn’t make a lot of sense. Good Hope Lake (pop. 35) was only 20km from Jade City, and Boya Lake Provincial Park was only 35km. So our tentative goal was a BC Forestry Recreation Area (nothing but a fire pit and a picnic table usually) at the 65km mark.

At Good Hope Lake, we stopped at their only store and bought some Hungry Man meals to microwave for lunch (anything to avoid cooking for ourselves). We also drank coffee and worked on their jigsaw puzzles for a few minutes. Outside, I filled our camp fuel (41 cents worth) and spoke to a weird guy from Idaho who was deperately trying to complete some paperwork to move with his family to Good Hope Lake. I guess he fell in love with it during his two days of camping there.

Onward to the entrance to Boya Lake, where we pedalled right past without even considering the 2km side trip to see the campground and lake. At the 65km mark, we didn’t even see a sign for the BC Forestry site, so we just kept going. Somewhere along the way we officially left eh Cassiar Mountains and entered the Yukon Plateau, which was nowhere near as flat as we’d hoped, but much flatter than yesterday’s ride. At the 95km mark, we pulled into a small rest area to talk to a solitary cyclist who was eating there. His name was Paul and he was cycling to San Francisco after having flown to Alaska to start. He was travelling really light… serious headwids had made him reconsider a lot of his gear, and he ended up completely removing his front panniers and rack, carrying everything he needed on the rear alone. He told us there were some rolling hills ahead but that we were close to the junction. We had already mentally prepared for going the entire 120km so we bid him goodbye and trekked on. Mud Hill was still to come, and though we were expecting it, what we were not expecting were 20km of non stop up and down rollercoaster hills. The problem with these “rolling hills” is that you never get back the energy that you put in, so you feel like you are forever digging yourself out of a ditch. Finally at 116km, we reached the Yukon. That’s right, we finally climbed our way out of BC. Fr some reason, the Yukon put their welcome sign at the top of a gravel hill, so we couldn’t get a picture with the bikes against it. Morons. However we did virtually coast the entire way from the sign to the junction of the Alaska Highway where we wasted no time gettig off the bikes and going to Sally’s Cafe for burgers on homemade buns. Normally I’m not a fan of ground beef, but they were literally out of stock of everything else, and it turned out to be a damned good burger (especially after not eating for 100km).

After dinner we started talking to another patron named Glen, who was a real life mountain man. He showed us pictures of a walk he took last winter. An 80 mile round trip walk into the woods in January, where he lived in a cabin alone for a month and a half. He was building himself a cabin on some land that he’d bought down the road, and by the looks of it, he had some sort of relationship with the cafe owners because he stayed when they left, and he appeared to eat for free at the very end of the day when all the customers had finished.

As they closed up, he told us about a lake only 500 metres down the road, so we headed there and camped with the most mosquitos we’d seen on our entire trip… even more than in Bonus lake (a.k.a. Mosquito Lake, where we thought our stomachs were a bear).

Click here for today’s pictures