Wild Places and Open Spaces

June 25th 11:30am arrived long last at the Yukon. Strangely it doesn’t seem that remarkable. The great thing about driving places is getting the opportunity to see things between point A and point B. Unfortunately upon arriving at your destination you’ve been desensitized to the changes in your environment due to seeing so many spectacular places and watching your surroundings change so gradually. Don’t get me wrong, we’re still very excited about our arrival!

Standing here and reflecting on our journey since our last entry at the California/Oregon border, things have changed dramatically. Fuel has risen about $0.30/L, camping has once again become cheap, the snow line has changed elevation from 8000ft to 1000ft, chippies and squirrels have become marmots and voles, elk and mule deer have become black bear and grizzlies, giant sequoias have become matchstick black spruce, turkey vultures are now bald eagles, the forests of california have become even more lush in oregon to heavily logged lush forests in Washington and the south Yukon, and of course now it doesn’t get dark until about midnight…and even then not so dark. Some things haven’t changed much though. It’s still cool, gray and rainy, there are still plenty of the ever present crows, ravens, robins, mallards, junkos, thrushes, and of course the squaking, bold stellar jays so common on the west coast of North America.

We’ve covered 17,000kms so far, and are still managing to survive on about $75.00 (Canadian) per day. We sometimes tire of the monotony of similar meals, public laundromats, public showers and toilets, and the never ending shopping for groceries – which have been fairly reasonable in the price department so far. We also have to unpack our car/home, set up camp, cook and repack everything daily. During packing and unpacking, we have lost quite a bit of stuff – our bird book, Nikon screen cover, our funnel, MSR fuel bottle, brush cleaner for camera…and we are sure that the list will continue to grow.

We were pleased with our drive up the Oregon coast with its many quaint fishing villiages, many state parks, good camping – cheap too – and amazing sand dunes (sorry Per and Jacquie, our budget never allowed us to go dune buggying). We’ve seen lots of seals and elk and spotted some gray whales on their migration north. We enjoyed reading about the Lewis and Clark expedition in Northern Oregon once we figured out that Fort Clatsop was where they wintered in the west coast before their overland journey back to St. Louis. Everewhere Lewis and Clark even let a fart is recognized as a National Historical Park in South Washington and North Oregon. We followed the bait several times before we made it to Fort Clatsop – naturally just a reproduction.

One small note: Kristin’s bladder infection never cleared up so we had to pay $156.00 for a confirmation that she did indeed have one and get a prescription (another $17.00) which fixed her up. (our medical insurance is in the process of getting our money back….less of course the one time $100.00 deductible…..)

Washington State’s coast is not much to write home about, but under the circumstances, I guess we better give it some mention. I myself certainly pictured things differently. It would best be described as one “big red necked yacht club”. It’s a working environment with logging being the main staple. We found the towns kind of grubby and maybe some of the locals too. I always pictured the coast as very rugged and fertile, which it is neither. The lands seem a bit lower that what we had seen and the tidal pools we visited were quite sparse in the critter department.

We intended on spending some time in Olympic National Park, but due to cool temps and inclement weather in the rainforest – gee you would have thought we would have seen that coming! – we only stayed one night in the Hoh Rainforest. The term temperate rainforest has always conjured up fascinating visions in my mind, but essentially it is just a regular moss covered forest where it rains too much.

We caught the M.V. Coho from Washington to Vancouver Island on June 15th. Kristin was worried about being sea sick, so she took some anti-sea sick pills and caught a nice buzz! It never gave her one the next boat ride though unfortunately.

Got stopped at BC customs and were forced at gunpoint to eat our apples before entering Canada – I just made up the gun part to make it sound more interesting.

Victoria, like all west coast cities is very expensive to live and there were a lot of people living at the campground we stayed at. I wonder where they go during their holidays? Uncamping? Anyway, it looks like a good way to live to us. Victoria was not very impressive to us, as it is just another city allbeit a pretty one. We visited the famous Butchart Gardens, but never got out of our car because when we got to the main gate where you had to pay we were shocked to learn it was $23.00/person so we opted out.

We made our way to Pacific Rim National Park and camped for 2 nights. It had great beaches, surfing and tidepools loaded with starfish, anemone, sea urchins, clams, barnacles and crabs. We visited Tofino which we found to be a horribly touristy little town, then Ucluelet which was a very nice little town which is on it’s way to being touristy. We watched the Edmonton Oilers blow a great Cinderella story at a pub there and had some great wings and fries for supper – one of the few times we have eaten out.

We made our way north to Port Hardy where we would catch a car ferry to Prince Rupert. We camped in a great little campground called Wildwoods and had to set our alarms for 3:00am to catch the ferry which was late departing anyways (due to technical difficulties….which kind of made us shudder, since a ferry on this route sunk just a few months earlier…..).

The inside passage was picturesque and we saw a few killer whales frolicking with each other. It took 15 hours to make the journey which we enjoyed fully, especially because we weren’t in our car! Despite being on a somewhat less luxurious ship – The Queen of Prince Rupert rather than the sunken Queen of the North – we had a great time, but we knew exactlly where all the life saving equipment was in case of another emergency!

Arrived at 10:30pm in Prince Rupert were we stayed in an expensive little hostel before finding our way north on Hwy 37. We took a side trip to Stewart BC which proved to be our most scenic drive to date. Beautiful snow capped mountains and a couple glaciers. Stewart was a nice village which receives ridiculous amounts of precipitation!! Annual precip. 188.4cm/74in, record 24hr snowfall was 105.7cm/3.5ft, record 24hr rainfall was 123.77mm/4.87in. Too wet for our liking! We took a cool trip to see some glaciers via Hyder, Alaska. Hyder is the only unpatrolled border in the U.S. Our camphost told us that was because the U.S. doesn’t want to admit they own it! There is no police, no school, no fire dept., and just 75 people living cut off from the rest of the U.S. The salmon and bear glacier were great to see, and we had them all to ourselves. We saw a bunch of marmots on our steep scenic drive up the mountain.

The rest of the drive up barren 37 was scenic with lots of black bears chomping on grass on the side of the road. We camped at the emerald waters of Boya Lake Provincial Park.

It has been a great trip so far, and time is flying! We’re looking forward to continuing our adventure in Alaska and the Yukon. Hope all is well and everyone safely enjoys their summer holidays.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 30th, 2006 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.