Category: Alaska Yukon 2017

After 3 1/2 months on the road, we arrived home at 4:30 September 5th! We were fortunate to arrive home in nice weather which made it much nicer to unpack the trailer.

After leaving Glacier National Park, we headed across highway 2. Once again, we experienced high winds in both Montana and North Dakota. While it wasn’t a complete headwind, it did affect our fuel mileage. We were really glad to get into Minnesota and more trees to help shelter us. We also had some really high temperatures in the prairies – up mid-30’s, Celsius!

We spent a few nights on the road staying in some of the same local parks that we had on the way out – Havre, MT was a Good Sam Park but Culbertson, MT, Michigan, ND, Floodwood, MN and Crystal Falls, MI were all city-owned parks. They ranged from a parking lot with no services but free, to a wooded park with electric and water.

As we neared our last night in upper Michigan on Sunday, we saw large signs at the side of the road saying the Mackinaw Bridge would be closed on Monday morning from 6:30 to noon for the annual bridge walk. It was the first year they were closing the bridge but felt in the interest of public safety it was the best to do. We were really glad they had the signs out. This led us to some conversations about what to do though for camping on Sunday night. We had planned on a national forest campground just west of the bridge. Should we cross Sunday night so we weren’t delayed crossing the next morning? The problem might be finding a campsite south of the bridge. In the end we decided to stay as planned and get up at 5 am and cross the bridge before it closed. We did that and everything worked out fine.

The nice bonus for staying in the National Forest Campground was having a campfire (the first in weeks due to fire bans) as well as a nice sunset over Lake Michigan….

Our last night we stayed about an hour from the US/Canada border at a boondocker’s tree farm. Although we had significant road delays due to the heavy Labour Day traffic, it was a nice place to stay and we were welcomed by our hosts. We appreciated their flexibility in our arrival time.

Some stats from our trip:

Total km driven:   23330

Total km driven with the trailer attached:   17090

Total km driven without the trailer (day trips):   6240

Total spent on camping fees (in Canadian $$):   $ 2720.05 (about 60% was in USD)

Total spent on fuel (in Canadian $$):      $ 4139.30 (about 60% was in USD)

 

The alarm went off at 5:30 – we haven’t been up that early on this trip! After breakfast and packing our lunch, we headed off up the road. It was really nice out – calm, blue sky and fairly clear. Right now, there wasn’t much smoke in the air from the fire that is burning on the other side of Glacier National Park. We’re being rewarded for getting up so early I guess!

There were lots of cars on the road ahead of us but we made a couple of stops to take a few pictures, and the parking lot was 75% full when we got to the Logan Pass Visitor Centre. Most were arriving early to get hiking. There is a 12 mile hike that leaves from the visitor centre that people are heading out to. We chose the 3 mile one to Hidden Lake instead.

The trail has close to a 600 foot elevation climb in the 1.5 miles to the view of the lake. We were glad to be on the trail earlier since the weather is to get warm again today – probably 27 or 28 C. There were lots of people hiking the trail. It had some rocky sections but much of it was boardwalk. We met some people who were building more boardwalk. They were carrying the leftover pieces of wood down the trail. They had made at least 3 trips back down with leftovers and weren’t finished.

At one point, we were fortunate to see some bighorn sheep up on the rocks. We were also surprised at the number of wildflowers still in bloom. The areas along the creeks were very colourful! We saw a few creatures as well – some Columbian Ground Squirrels and even a Hoary Marmot.

 

Hidden Lake was quite large. We enjoyed the view and then headed back to the truck to carry on the Going to the Sun road. As we drove down the other side of the pass, the smoke from the wildfire increased and our views got hazy. We were glad we had some nice views on the way up. Many of the pull offs were full – definitely need to be on the road early if you want to get to any of the other hikes.

 

Tomorrow we’ll start the trek home officially. We plan to take highway 2 all the way across the northern US to the upper peninsula of Michigan. We’ll plan to take about a week to get home.