Back to Yukon and British Columbia

It is an incredible ride from Tok, Alaska, to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. For about 100 miles the road is often deformed by frost heaves, forcing especially trailers to a speed of sometimes no more than 20 mph, definitely making for an interesting ride otherwise ;-) .
 
Claudia and I love Yukon, lots of  space, nice people should you happen to meet some, magnificent landscapes! As the road via Chicken and Dawson City is closed near the Alaska-Canada border due to  a washed out road since spring, we return the same way we went up to Alaska.

Wildfire smoke at Highway 37 near Boya Lake

When we entered British Columbia shortly after visiting Whitehorse again, we just made it onto Highway 37 South to Prince George and later Whistler and Vancouver. Shortly after we passed the junction onto HW 37 wildfires closed that junction and it remained closed for the next 3 days. We saw the huge smoke clouds from quite a distance in the evening, an amazing sight. Initially I thought it was a thunderstorm brewing but it became clear not much later that this must be a wildfire... and actually an early end to our trip through British Columbia.

Salmon near Hyder, Alaska

We stayed for 2 nights at this beautiful provincial park on Boya Lake before returning to the road. On our trip South it became more and more obvious that there must be a lot more wildfires because the sky got hazy first and then smoke was clearly visible against the mountain tops and later like fog down to ground level. We decided that it can't be healthy to stay in that smoke for a prolonged time and rather rushed through to get out of it.

 Marshland near Stewart, British Columbia

A short relief from the smoke came in form of  a little side trip to Stewart and Hyder in Alaska again, at the Southern end of Highway 37. Stewart is a nice little township on the Canadian side of the border with Hyder being in Alaska. In Hyder, there is another Salmon spawning creek where grizzlies are supposed to wait for them and .... You get the picture! Again, there were of course no grizzlies, at least we saw some 30 or so salmon swimming around and preparing their nest, whatever they do in those creeks. However, some really good thing came of our trip to Hyder: unbeknown to us there is a glacier, called Salmon Glacier, where you can drive a gravel road up to a peak high in the mountains with a beautiful vista over the glacier and the surrounding mountains. So that's what we did and boy, was it worth the drive and even more the cleanup required on Shorty afterward. All that dust.....
If I have never mentioned it before: Alaska offers some incredible landscapes!

That's the road up the peak at Salmon Glacier, the glacier below

 IT was also very interesting to drive through Hyder. We spoke to a local running a kind of visitors information 'office' and he told us that there is actually no law enforcement in that part of Alaska, nobody pays tax, no police, no nothing, just a couple of ramshackle huts and some tourists indulging themselves on cheap booze.

Some 50 kilometers on that road got some dust on good old Shorty

After this side trip it still took us a couple of days to get out of the increasingly dense smoke as it only cleared out when we approached Squamish and Vancouver. This was a real shame as we missed out on the views on a beautiful stretch of road on Highway 99 from Lilloeet  to Whistler.

 Salmon Glacier, it definitely was worth the effort!

We had stayed in Vancouver for a week last year so this time we only did some shopping for groceries before continuing to the Canada-USA border.