Tuesday 2 September 2014

Whooops!!

Luke just pointed out that I forgot to blog about our time in the Kluane National Park in the Yukon. I could have sworn I included it, but it seems I left it out.

We were there for a couple of days--it's a huge, beautiful area, but it rained a bunch so we didn't get out to do much. What I can tell you about it is they have a really impressive visitor centre at Haines Junction (the best I've ever seen actually). They have a lot of interesting interactive displays where you could see aerial photos of the huge snowy mountains (including Mount Logan, Canada's highest peak) that you can't see from the road, since they are behind the mountains you can see from the road. They also had a great informative bear section and a scale which tells you how many picas it would take to make up your weight.

We did manage to do a bike ride through one of the valleys, called the Alsek Valley Trail. Their site has a better description of the history of that area than I can do:
High beach ridges left behind by a succession of glacial lakes are also apparent from here. Further down the Alsek valley, the Lowell glacier has surged across the valley four different times during the past 12,000 years, damming the Alsek River and creating glacial lakes, the last one having drained only just over a century ago.

The park has the highest density of grizzly bears in North America but we didn't see any on our ride.

We did, however, see one by the road. We've seen a bunch of grizzlies but this was the first one we managed to photograph. Here he is:


He was actually just a kilometre or so down the road from where we camped, so I kept a vigilant eye out for bears while we made dinner.

Here's a photo of a small part of the park:


This all happened after Alaska and before Smithers BC.  It's a good thing Luke is keeping me honest!

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