5 August 2018. Road to Atlin B.C.
We left Skagway and were looking forward to retracing that scenic drive.
We made a quick stop at an overlook of town to do a last e-mail download, as we’d be leaving Alaska and staying in Canada for the next couple of weeks.
Canada cell phone plans suck if you’re from the US. Ours does at least. We’re with AT&T, and our plan charges you $10 per 24 hour period the instant your phone pings a Canadian cell tower. At that point you have unlimited talk, text, and data for those 24 hours. So the minute we approach the Canadian border, our phones go into airplane mode and stay there. We look for locations that have free wifi. If we’re staying in an RV park instead of a campground, they usually have wifi, but we’ve run into several cases where you only get an hour or two per day. Larger towns that have Visitor’s Centers will usually have wifi. Larger towns with name brand retailers (think McDonalds) will have wifi. But our route has been planned to avoid the big towns and stay in campgrounds as much as possible. This is why the Blog updates come in groups, and why it can be several days before we respond to texts and e-mails.
The road out of Skagway is mostly uphill for the first 30 miles, and despite seeing three cruise ships in port, we were lucky and avoided getting stuck behind any tour busses. The guy at the border crossing was a bit of a PIA. Hey, I just don’t know exactly where I’m headed in your wonderful country, it depends on whether Canadian Ford mechanics are any good, and I’m retired damn it. Those guys have no sense of humor.
The drive was as wonderful in the opposite direction. We were surprised to still see smoke coming from the hills across the Windy Arm of Takisha Lake. We got up to a town called Carcross and hung a right to work our way east. The goal was to go east for a bit and then turn south and go another 60 miles to a town called Atlin in British Columbia. It’s on the shore of a huge lake and is supposed to be pretty neat. You have to go out the way you came in (kinda like Skagway but without the cruise ship harbor), so it’s not visited by many tourists.
The 60 mile drive south was pretty routine. We’d occasionally catch a glimpse of the lake (which was really neat with mountains rising steeply on the opposite shore), but the road had lots of growth on both sides and views were limited.
Atlin turned out to be a bit smaller than expected. Getting there mid day Sunday didn’t help the feeling that no-one lived there…. We found the RV Park that was on the shore of the lake, all ten sites in a gravel lot. The “facilities” was a porta-potti at one end of the lot. What it lacked in ambiance it made up for in views however. We got a spot on a small peninsula that look out across the lake. The wind was blowing and the sky mostly cloudy, but it was a neat place to sit and relax. And dry, despite the threatening clouds, it stayed dry…
We’ve been lucky the past week and have been mostly mosquito free. Much of our Whitehorse stay was at the Ford Dealer in town, Skagway was on the ocean, and for some reason Atlin Lake has been light on bugs. We started our trip to Alaska with one can of bug spray that we bought when the boys played summer soccer (yeah, THAT long ago). We now have four cans of bug spray stashed so there’s always one where you can get to it quickly. Those buggers can turn a fabulous scenic view into misery pretty darn quick!!! We’re doing our part to thin the herd though, the coating on the front of the truck and camper is building up as a warning to the others that we will show NO mercy