Driving the ALASKA HIGHWAY from Dawson Creek, BC to the Yukon!

Today we are officially starting our drive on the Alaska Highway. This highway runs 2,232 kilometers from Dawson Creek in British Columbia through the Yukon and ending in Delta Junction in Alaska. We're currently standing at mile zero in Dawson Creek which is where the highway begins and over the next seven days we're going to be driving it all the way to the Alaska Canada border. We'll tell you a bit of history about the Alaska Highway in a bit but first we're going to grab coffee and breakfast at a local spot called Beans and Barley. Beans and Barley is a coffee shop, cafe, and they have three golf bays in the back. This might be my favorite coffee shop ever. It's so cool. I'm gonna have to steal that concept one day but I got this breakfast burrito and it is super delicious. It has tons of egg in there, loads of cheese which you know makes everything better. There's peppers, the bacon is nice and crispy, and then also to top it off the tortilla out here is like perfectly grilled on what looks like panini press or something. Oh yeah. And I got a butterscotch latte which is perfection and a cob bowl which is basically a cob salad which is kind of a weird thing to have for breakfast but it sounded so good. It has ham, bacon, veggies, and the most delicious homemade dressing. So we're gonna sit here for a bit and devour this and take advantage of probably our last wi-fi in at least five days, maybe longer. So a little bit of history for you about the Alaska Highway. After the attack on Pearl Harbor there was increasing concern about how the U.S. could defend Alaska which finalized the decision to create a land route between the lower 48 and Alaska. An agreement was made between the U.S. and Canada where the U.S. would fund and maintain the road through World War II plus an additional six months and then Canada would take over its portion of the road. The construction began in March 1942 with the scouting of the route and mobilizing thousands of pieces of equipment and by June over 10,000 American soldiers had poured into Canada. The life of a soldier working to build the road was a grueling gig. They would work seven days a week with sometimes 16 hour days and battle below zero temperatures in the winter and mosquitoes and black flies in the summer all while being fueled by subpar food and harsh living conditions. Along with the help of 16,000 Canadian and American civilians they completed the Alaska Highway also known as the Alcan Highway in just eight months after construction started. While the road technically opened in November 1942 it wasn't open to the public until 1948 and over time it has gone through many improvements to make it what it is today. We're about to start our trek on the Alaska Highway but before we get started we have a couple quick chores to take care of. First chore we've got to do we got to fill up our water tank so we can shower, have water to drink, have water to cook with. Hopefully it'll last us the next few days till we can get to the next water source. We're filling up the van and we're also filling up our jerry cans here. Like we said we don't think we'll need them but we'd rather have them full ready to go and not need them than have them empty and need them. Also our windshield looks like a crime scene. I don't know if we've ever had so many dead bugs on our window before. You can't even get any footage out of it right now without just having dead bugs all over it. So we're gonna clean it up real quick but I have a feeling it'll look this bad again in about an hour. We're ready to hit the road. Let's get on the Alaska Highway. Doing it! We're on the Alaska Highway! Finally! Our plan today is to drive almost six hours to northwest of Fort Nelson to a rest area to sleep for the night. We had heard and we had read in the mile posts and on a bunch of blogs that this stretch of the drive is the least exciting so we decided to kind of book it through this part that way we have more time to enjoy the rest of it. Which is all stuff that we are just so excited about. Just saw a black bear back there. First one of the Alaska Highway. I tried to film him but as predicted our windshield is covered in dead bugs again and I couldn't get it to focus on him. Today's drive hasn't been super eventful but we're still just so jazzed to be on the Alaska Highway and be going to Alaska right now. A couple years ago we would have never thought we would be driving up all of British Columbia and minus yesterday when we kind of started to meet up with the Alaska Highway crowd we hadn't seen any license plates from the United States for days and it just really puts into perspective just how far we are from home. Yeah I just I just can't believe we're doing this. I'm so excited. Cool. See ya buddy enjoy your meal. What a day of driving. We are staying at kilometer 536 rest stop just on the side of the road nothing glamorous as you can see behind me. Actually I lied there is a view of all these mountains over here we're gonna check it out and then we're gonna make some dinner and get some rest keep going tomorrow. We were just leaving the parking area and we were just completely blanketed in and now we drove about 100 meters and it opened up a little bit we came out of the cloud a little bit. We can see things. Yeah we were a little worried when we woke up and we couldn't see anything outside of the van because today is one of the days we've been most excited about. We're driving up to Muncho Lake and we hear this is one of the most gorgeous stretches of the Alaska Highway at least in British Columbia so it's not looking that great it's still looking pretty foggy but we might hopefully we'll get to see some views today but first we're on a mission to get some cinnamon buns. We read that cinnamon buns are a very popular food item along the Alaska Highway we aren't 100% sure why we tried to do a little bit of research to figure out why couldn't really find a clear answer but we're not mad about it. We heard that Tetsa River Lodge had some of the best along the road so we had to stop and try one for ourselves. So gooey. Oh my goodness. This cinnamon bun looks absolutely insane. This box doesn't look that big and then you open it and then the cinnamon bun is massive. It's all melted and there is so much cinnamon in there and it is thick but also moist and gooey. I haven't had many cinnamon buns in my life but this is hands down one of the best if not the best one. Like Catherine said that is just super gooey. The bun just tastes fresh baked. It's got a little chew to it but man it's not nice and warm and gooey. Oh my goodness look at all that in between all the layers there. Oh yeah buddy. And the middle roll there just soaks up all the goo but then if you look here oh yeah it's pillowy. What an amazing thing to just be able to stop and eat on this really long remote stretch of road. We've been driving over six hours since yesterday and being able to just stop and have a delicious like high quality cinnamon roll is such an amazing surprise. They also have a very sweet doggy here which just makes the experience even better and a cat inside. That was super fluffy. How many cinnamon buns do you have every day? 10? What? We're back on the road. We have about 20 minutes to our next stop Stone Mountain Provincial Park. We're hoping to go on a hike but there's some really dense patchy patches of fog and so it's not the greatest you know hiking weather but we're gonna go out there and see what we can see. Just saw two caribou. Our first ever. Yeah first ones we've ever seen. This park is located in the northern Rocky Mountains and it is insanely beautiful out here. As you may be able to tell the sun's coming out a bit, the fog's starting to lift, I can see a super snowy mountain right in front of me. We're hiking the Flower Springs Lake Trail which is 10 kilometers round trip. We haven't seen any recent trail reports on it so we're not 100% sure the conditions but we think it should be accessible. We should be able to make it all the way to the lake. First part of this trail was on a service road and now we're on the actual trail and at the beginning of the trail there's a log book to sign in on and if it's accurate it looks like we're only the second group out here this year and the first one was just yesterday and they wrote that they couldn't make it all the way to the lake because it was too snowy so we'll see how far we can get. Post hole went all the way down to my knee. Let's see if I can get out of this. I shouldn't laugh because I still have to go through this stretch too. I thought I had it. We're just across the trail from us right now. I feel like I'm in a National Geographic documentary. He just kind of was up on the hill over there, came across this little valley. He like ran a little bit. Just in the mist. He's running again. What I love about this drive so far and this hike is just how remote and wild it feels. It's definitely a touristy thing to drive the Alaska Highway. Thousands of people do it. Maybe millions. I don't even know. Every single year but compared to places like Banff National Park and all the national parks in the U.S. there's like really nothing out here. There are no amenities. It's just pure nature and the road and it's just amazing to just be immersed in nature like this but also have that solitude that is just so hard to find in so many places these days. We see two what we think are bighorn sheep off on this mountainside over here. Just when we think this hike can't get any better, look behind me. This was all engulfed in a cloud about a minute and a half ago. You can see the entire mountain now. Oh my gosh this is incredible. I'm so happy to be here. I just can't stop smiling. More mountains are popping out. This is amazing. Yes, yes, yes. Thank goodness. We have made it to the lake and as we kind of assumed on the hike out here it's completely frozen over but in the summertime this lake is a gorgeous turquoise color. We're definitely not mad about it though because as we've kind of said a million times we're a bit of a broken record. These mountain views are insane. We fully expected to get out here and it's just to be completely clouded in and these are the views that we came out here for. We wanted to see these rocky mountains and we just feel so lucky and just so glad that we ended up doing the hike even though it didn't look very promising at first because you just truly never know there could be something this epic behind all the clouds. As hard as it is to leave this lake area we're gonna book it back to the van because we have some rain coming later on in the day and we want to beat that rain to our next spot. My shoes which are waterproof are completely soaked. I have pools of water but it was worth it because that hike was so much fun. So I don't think we beat the rain but even with the rain and the clouds the views are just getting better and better. We have about an hour and a half drive to our final stop today and where we hope to camp Muncho Lake. For those of you interested in driving the Alaska highway just a quick note on self-service so far. Yesterday we basically had self-service the entire drive and the rest area we stayed at had amazing self-service but we had read that once we left the rest area we would basically have no service and that has proven to be the case. We have not had a bar at all today but we downloaded offline google maps. We have the milepost. We downloaded offline all trails map so we're able to navigate just fine without it and we have our Garmin so we can text my mom and let her know that we're doing okay. I don't know what I was expecting on the Alaska highway. We had heard it was less scenic than the Cassier highway which is how we might drive down afterwards but I have been completely blown away. I mean just look this is just behind me there are these huge waterfalls that are like multi-level. It's just mind-blowing. I cannot get over how blue this water is. It is strikingly blue. It is it's one of those Gatorade ones. I can see why this is one of the top things to see on this road and yeah it is. We pulled into the McDonald campground on Muncho Lake. It's one of two. There's this one in Strawberry Flats I believe and I think there's 15 sites at this one and we just drove by five of them. They were all open. We're just kind of doing the loop to see which one looks the best because it seems like we have the pick of the litter. We ended up snagging campsite number nine and I think it's one of the best campsites here. We have this beachfront access to the lake. It costs $20 per night to stay here and I think it's going to be the best $20 we've ever spent. Look at this chunk of ice. Jonah is just going straight in there after her stick. She is not fazed by this water at all. When we woke up this morning and looked out the window and saw the weather forecast we did not have very high hopes for today but thankfully everything worked out perfectly and it ended up being an incredible day and we are excited for one more awesome day here in BC tomorrow. Today is our last day here in British Columbia. We're headed to the Yukon. We have 157 miles to go until the Yukon border. We have a couple stops we're going to make along the way. On our way out we stopped at this incredible overlook of Muncho Lake and they have some signage here and we learned that Muncho means big lake in the Kaska language and it's seven and a half miles long making it one of the largest natural lakes in all the Canadian Rockies. We had read that on this stretch of the road that we would see some wood bison. We just got our first taste of some. Four or five of them out here beastly. Our first stop of the day is Leard River Hot Springs Provincial Park which we hear is a must-do along the Alaska Highway. It costs five dollars per person during peak season and it's home to Canada's second largest hot spring. We're about to get into the alpha pool which is the public hot springs pool and it ranges in temperature so on one end we read that it gets as hot as 52 degrees celsius and then it gets progressively cooler the further you get away from it. We're going to start out with the cooler pool that way the hotter one feels even better later. Oh that feels nice Nice and warm not hot. The bottom is cold it's like a a la mode. I can't wait to get in the hot one though because this one's it gets warmer but it's not super hot and I want to be burnt. Let's get toasty. No one's on this end and they're eyeballing me saying it's pretty hot. Yeah it's pretty warm. Oh yeah it's toasty oh yeah I don't like it I don't like it it's too hot. Oh yeah that's nice. Oh it feels so good it's really nice. You still get little like bursts of cold. Yeah it's not too bad the other end was way too hot I thought I was going to get cooked. This hot spring is super amazing. We're just gonna sit here float here and relax for a bit. Sign of a good hot spring time. We hung out in the hot springs for almost two hours and it just felt so nice this thing is located on perfect spot on the Alaska highway almost halfway there after a few days of driving feel rested and recharged ready to go. We're making a quick pit stop at Smith River Falls which should be just a pretty short walk from the parking lot. Followed the path brought us to the Smith River I guess but I don't want to be skirt along the way I don't know I don't want to get too close to this this water water's moving quick one one slip you're into it. We read on the sign at the trailhead that back in 2012 there was a fire that came through the area and there used to be a boardwalk that I believe would take you to like the base of the falls but it has not been rebuilt since then so I'm guessing that's what should have been right here to take us the rest of the way. I thought we had read more recent reports of people getting to this waterfall so I don't know maybe they just skirt along but there is a viewpoint up in the parking area that seems much safer so I think we're just gonna go view it from up there. Couldn't get down to the base of the falls but it's still super impressive from up here they are 35 meters high and 10 meters wide. We met some folks at the hot springs that live about five hours from here and they told us we should check out Whirlpool Canyon. We plugged it into google maps and nothing showed up so we weren't sure if we could find it we saw a sign on the side of the road with an arrow so we turned down that road and we made it down here and it definitely looks like a whirlpool. There are giant logs and tree trunks that are just swirling through the water here and the guy at the hot spring told us there's multiple different channels that the water runs through at this area and that the central channel is the only channel that's safe enough for a river boat to go through. He said that one time in the past I'm not totally sure all the details other boats tried to go through the side channels and they either crashed or people flew overboard. This is not only mesmerizing you can just watch all the big logs swirling around but it's also another example of just how crazy destructive and how powerful nature can be. I think that's going to be our final stop here in British Columbia now we have a little over an hour and a half drive to the Yukon. We just passed a sign that said welcome to the Yukon and then 30 seconds later we were back in British Columbia and then about five minutes after that we're back in the Yukon we're basically going in and out of British Columbia in the Yukon for the next stretch of this drive so we're not going to officially say we're in the Yukon until we cross the border right by Watson Lake. We have made it to the Yukon! The Alaska Highway continues for another 575 miles in the Yukon and that's all that separates us from Alaska. We're making noise along the trail and one of the things we do is we sing a song. Can you name this theme song? There's a mosquito on the lens look at this there's a mosquito on the lens! The way the reflection is it makes it look like Adam's wearing a speedo. Maybe I am!