Bell II Resort to Nugget City, Yukon ~ Big Creek

Later start this morning than expected. I was using my smart phone at night for a clock and with no cell service it didn’t update automatically for the correct time zone causing us to get out of bed later. Helen made her great on the road breakfast and off we started toward the Alaska Highway. The route was again scenic with mountains many lakes… wild flowers lining the edge of the road. We had picked up literature that said that the 500 miles on this route was paved except for 10%. They weren’t correct; we only had about 600 feet of unpaved road, great!

One Float Parade

Today was Canada Day. The locals were celebrating in a small town where we stopped for gas. We ended up having lunch at the concession stands across the street from the gas station. We had two extra-large hamburgers for five dollar donation; of course fueling up the truck was a letdown at $5.75 a gallon, the highest price so far on the trip!

Midafternoon, we stopped at Jade City mine and watch them cutting rock and explaining how the jade was processed into jewelry. I already had a piece of Jade from our trip to New Zealand so we didn’t buy any today.

The termination of route 37 was just a mile away and we crossed into the Yukon. It had been a wonderful experience, no Wal-Marts, McDonalds and hardly any civilization. The intersection at Nugget City had a service station to fill up our hungry truck. Here I talked to big RV owner who was also filling up, and he lived in Alaska. We started talking about the haul road to Prudhoe Bay, and the subject came up about “Ice Road Truckers” show on TV. He said he has a company that trains drivers for Carlisle Trucking (the show is based on this company). He had also driven trucks with Lisa Kelly’s’ father (Lisa is a regular on the show). He went on to say that Carlisle has over 1000 trucks running in Alaska.

Campfire Adventure Chatting!

We stayed in a Provincial campground (self-register and pay) and met campers who were leaving Alaska and others who had been there many times. The camp fire helped keep the many mosquitos away as we chatted about each other’s  our adventures.

That is what we did and saw