Skagway to Canada

The drive out of Skagway was quite beautiful with lots of rock faces and small waterfalls. In Alaska you can spend the night in any pullout so long as you are 10 feet off the road and there are no signs prohibiting overnight parking. This is not true in Canada, where they instead try to provide frequent government sponsored campgrounds. Our plan was to spend the night in a pullout in Alaska. However, we didn’t find any good pullouts before passing the sign indicating the actual border into Canada. After we crossed the border into Canada, we found a great pullout before we got to the Canadian Customs checkpoint. So we technically violated Canadian law, and spent the night in a Canadian pullout. However, we claim that since we hadn’t passed through Canadian Customs that we were in a sort of US/Canadian DMZ. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

The next morning we continued on into Canada. The short drive to the Canadian Customs checkpoint was through one of the most beautiful landscapes we have ever seen. It was a high pass composed almost entirely of exposed bedrock that had obviously been exposed by now extinct ancient glaciers. We were now quite glacier savvy having seen so many on this and previous trips. This beautiful landscape was full of the features we had read about. There were gouges in the bedrock that were now pristine stone lakes that looked more like swimming pools. There were boulders large and small scattered all across the landscape. There was lovely green vegetation growing wherever it could take root in the cracks and crevices amongst this sea of granite. Island of rock so solid that the ancient glaciers could not budge them defiantly stood, often in the center of the pristine lakes. We just kept repeating “Wow!”, “Wow!”, “Wow!”. It is a shame that the photos do not do it justice.