August 14th - Day 17 - Haines Junction to Beaver Creek

I am writing this from our hotel in Beaver Creek, Yukon, where there is no Internet connection. So I will be posting this tomorrow from Fairbanks, Alaska. Then, for the next five days it will be unlikely that I will get an Internet connection, until we return to Fairbanks.
Today we had a drive of just under 200 miles, heading more or less north-west towards the US border. We left our hotel at about 11am after I spent nearly an hour at a local café posting yesterday’s blog onto the web. Before we left Haines Junction we drove round the few streets that make up this small town. We passed this building, The Museum of Nostalgia!

On one corner was this bizarre antler signpost.

Five minutes later we were on our way.

The drive was again through beautiful wild country, with mountains to our left and wide open country to our right. The pine forests stretched as far as you could see. Every mile or so there was a lake and after about an hour’s driving we came to Lake Kluane.


We took a short detour off the highway down to the lake shore and passed these abandoned cabins. We wondered if they were old gold miners' cabins or merely a derelict resort. We preferred to think they were the former!

Shortly after we came to a very small community called Burwash Landing, which had the Kluane museum of natural history. This small museum was a delight to visit. It showed all the wildlife of the Yukon as well as giving the history of the region, especially the native Indians. Wendy took this photo of the polar bear exhibit. It might be the only polar bear we see!!

Outside there was a display describing a bad wildfire that went through the area in the 1990’s. There was also this mini- bulldozer with a statute of a mining driver at the wheel.

We returned to the highway and continued for the next couple of hours. We stopped when we saw this collection of old vehicles parked in a campsite by the side of the road.

Just before we reached Beaver Creek we saw this sign for a hotel called Buckshot Betty’s.

We ended our journey at Beaver Creek, which is about 20 miles from the US border.

The hotel, which is owned by the Holland America shipping line, is only open for about three months a year during the cruising season. Passengers from the cruise ships do an overland tour before the start, or at th end of a cruise and stay at the hotel. There is a show laid on each evening which we decided to see. It was a musical about the building of the Alcan Highway. At one point Wendy said to me that it was like Andrew Lloyd Webber meets the Yukon! It was fun and the two principals sang and danced really well.

We had a very pleasant meal with guests of the hotel, who were not on a cruise package. They were Jane & Roger from New York and Veronique & Daniel from Switzerland. We posed for a group photo taken by one of the waitresses.