June 20th, 2014 – Whitehorse, AK to Liard Hot Springs, BC ~400 miles
As you follow the 1, you end up going in between British Columbia and the Yukon Territory back and forth several times. But no matter what province we were in, we were constantly showered by rain.
We eventually made it to Watson Lake in Yukon, which is home to one of the coolest stops on our trip – the Sign Post Forest.
Because it was raining so hard, I was reluctant to take my camera out, and when I did I was shielding it from the rain.
Because of that, I won’t be able to show you just how vast this place really is…there are currently 72,000 signs and growing.
The short story is that engineers building the Alaska Highway would usually put up a sign post indicating how far certain communities were from their given camp. A Private Carl Lindley was hurt during construction and went to Watson Lake to recover. During his recovery, he repainted the sign post, but he also decide to add a sign from his hometown of Danville, Illnois – I have no idea how he had that with him.
That started a tradition where other people added a sign from their hometown, creating the “forest” you see before you.
Again, this place was truly huge. And they have maintenance workers constantly working and setting up new posts for the forest for more people to seemingly steal signs from their hometowns and then bring them here.
Hello, bison.
Bui finally found something that makes his GS look tiny and nimble.
Everyone I told about this trip that had done something similar before told me that I had to see Liard Hot Springs.
Conveniently, there’s an overpriced lodge right across the street.
Though the sun had recently come out, this was yet another day of pouring rain, so we borrowed a fan from the front desk and tried to air dry all of our gear.
The lodge has quite the interior design theme going on:
But we were there for the hot springs, so we decided to head into the park and explore.
“A fed bear is a dead bear.”
Earlier in the day we saw a guy on this sweet KTM, he had been exploring all over the area and we coincidentally ended up at the Hot Springs together. He ended up taking off early to continue riding – I think he was averaging 550-600 mile days.
Once you get in the park, you have a 800m walk on this boardwalk.
Then you get to the good stuff.
Back at the lodge, I saw this adorable photo in a newspaper.
That night, I was trying to figure out why I felt like I was seeing more mosquitoes than I expected. When I examined the window to see if there were any holes in the screen, I saw a bison just outside of our building. I ran outside to get a closer look. My camera didn’t do great in the low light, but this has to be the closest I’ve ever gotten to one of these things, even if I was basically hiding behind a car.
Go to Day 18
June 21st, 2014 – Liard Hot Springs, BC to Pouce Coupe, BC ~480 miles
Go back to Day 16
June 19th, 2014 – Tok, AK to Whitehorse, YT ~385 miles