September 13, 2025
This is part three of my drive from Whitehorse, YT to Tok, AK.
After driving around the base of Sheep Mountain I would continue about 30 miles alongside Kluane Lake. Large mountains would dominate the area left of the roadway, some of which had snow cover and/or glaciers so there were clouds hugging the tops of them. I also suspected there might be more mountains on the other side.
This is also the stretch where the condition of the Alaska Highway would go downhill in places. I had been warned when I was in Watson Lake that this portion of the highway would be slow going. In addition to the aforementioned dips, humps and places where the surface of the road was patched, there would also be stretches which were gravel, in some cases where the highway department had ripped up the pavement completely and was laying down a foundation for new pavement. There were also many spots where the road would alternate between paved and gravel in rapid succession (why I don’t know). For the most part, this stretch of road had little or no warning about bad spots. I had to drive extremely slow in many places, and if a vehicle came up behind me I generally pulled over and let it go on ahead.
Here are some of the things I saw on this stretch of road:
This was one of the places where I had to stop and wait for a “Pilot Car” to follow through a long construction zone. Up ahead you can see that the road changes from paved to gravel, and in some places would be mainly dirt. I had commented earlier in the blog that Canadian roads by and large didn’t have potholes, but after driving this road back east about a month later I take that back. These unpaved stretches did, in fact, have potholes and some places it was very slow going, even without an escort.
That is me following the Pilot Car (truck). While in these gravel zones large tandem construction trucks would occasionally whiz by at full speed, kicking up rocks. Sometimes they were overtaking us and sometimes they were going in the opposite direction.
I had had been warned not to follow other vehicles too closely but there was nothing I could do about vehicles going the other way other than hope they would slow down. I also tried to pull as far right as I safely could, but if I was stopped waiting for an escort vehicle I was a sitting duck. I did end up getting a crack on my windshield on the way back to Canada.
The sky looking west was getting more ominous, and I suspected that there might be bad weather on the other side.
To my right it was still sunny and mostly clear.
But there were places where I was getting close enough to the mountains on the left to be in the shadow of the clouds.
I would soon reach the border and will finish my report on the trek to Tok, AK in my next post.
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