Yukon Trip 2009 - Day 8 Part 1 - Alaska Highway

May 30th, besides being my older daughter's birthday, was the day we finally made it to the Yukon. We woke to clouds again, and wind. The thermometer said it was 6 degrees but it felt a lot colder with the wind. While Ernie took Shantz for her morning walk, I was doing my usual thing of packing everything away getting us ready to hit the road......while I was trying to wrap up Shantz's tie out chain (with numb fingers), this bird flew onto the tree right behind the camper's steps. Now I'm pretty sure it has to be a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, but it has me totally confused because there is no red on it anywhere. I think, when you zoom in really close, there might be just the hint of some red on the forehead just above the bill. None of the 3 or 4 pictures I took are clear, but I included it here, just because of the odd coloring.
If anyone can enlighten as to why this bird is coloured this way....please do so....maybe my ID is incorrect.

A Chipping Sparrow was also in the area.......

and this Yellow-rump Warbler was singing his heart out, despite the chill.

Back out on the highway and headed northwards, we stopped at this pull out on 'Blue Lakes' but the wind was so cold we didn't do much more than take this picture, mainly to show the highway winding it's way to the Alaska Highway. At this point we were only 26 km away from the Alaska Highway.

Just a little further along....this was Mud Creek....looking nice and clear and not muddy at all!

Now I should have had these last two photos in reverse order......we entered the Yukon first, Mud Creek was just a kilometer or two down the road from this point.

The Stewart/Cassiar highway joins the Alaska Highway at Junction 37. There is a gas station, store and RV park here with a dump station which we made use of. One note....none of the campgrounds on the Stewart/Cassiar have dump stations. There is one at Dease Lake, but we forgot about it until we were way down the road. It was a good test to find out the capacity of the holding tanks on the camper and we found 5 to 7 days...no problem!

From the junction we were now heading in a sort of north westerly direction and traveling across the top of a plateau. The wind hadn't let up any.....we stopped at this rest area overlooking the Rancheria River.....I searched and searched for a Moose, it looked like prime Moose habitat, but didn't see any.

Over my shoulder, from the same spot, this was the view....

Stopped at this Recreation Site for a bit of a break. You will notice, as we go along, that all the campgrounds and recreation sites in the Yukon have these same signs. You have probably also noticed the snow....in fact, while we walked, the odd snowflake fell on us.

This photo shows part of the extensive boardwalk system at this Recreation site that lead to a view of the falls.

and here is a view of the falls themselves, it actually turned a corner and tumbled some more around a corner.

Here is another section of the river at the end of the boardwalk. We saw Boreal Chickadee's here but never managed to get a picture.

Continuing on, another view of the Cassiar Mountains....this is looking southward.

another break, another recreation site, another nice sign.........

and this is the Morley River....rather swollen but not as muddy as other river's we'd seen. Note that the shrubs haven't even begun to leaf out as of the end of May.

and on to Teslin in part 2.