On The Road With The Bradys

08/30/05 Tuesday

We traveled in a group of three motor homes today. Our buddies were Tom and Joyce Knight and Dick and Ann Mulford from Maine. Tom and Joyce are from Melbourne, FL. and Tom is a brother to Ed Knight one we traveled with yesterday. This is our first day to travel in a group of three and we left at 8:00 AM as the three-vehicle group always does.

The rough road from yesterday continued, and it was cloudy and rainy for a lot of today. We didn’t get very good pictures, but I think we did get a good picture of some sheep that were way up high on a mountain. It was really a pretty sight because it was a big herd of Mountain sheep scattered along the mountainside. There was a visitor’s center at the location where we stopped, and the mountain is named Sheep Mountain because it is the winter range for the sheep.

It sounds funny to say the sheep were on their winter range, but it is almost winter here. The colors of fall are becoming brilliant and the nights are really getting cold. Every morning for the last three days there is a little more snow on the mountaintops. In the office at Kluane they told Mary that by the end of next week the leaf color would peak and they start to fall off. The sheep are all the wildlife that we saw.

We continued to follow along beside the Kluane Mountain Range and had some pretty looks at some of the large snow capped mountains, but I don’t know how well the pictures turned out. We did see some interesting things on the trip. We drove a big curving route around Lake Klusne, the largest lake in Yukon Territory. We did get some good pictures here of the lake and the mountains. We also crossed a small river named Slim’s River. The legend of the river is that it was named for a packhorse that drowned in the river during the 1903 Kluane Gold rush. Every creek, mountain, valley and mountain pass has some kind of colorful history to the name it was given.

We drove through two large construction sites on the road. At the first site we had to sit and wait about 15 minutes while they were doing something with machinery. The second group caught up with us as we waited and we ran in a group of five for a while. I had to have a bathroom break and the second group continued on and got to the campground ahead of us. It rained as we were pulling into the RV Park and I had to set up in the rain. This is our second visit to this park and it poured when we were here last. I mentioned in an earlier note that we were covering a section of the Alaska Highway that we missed when we went north. We finished it today.