The end of the road out at Atlin had the cutest little free campsite and a spring that came out of nowhere like most springs seem to do.

Then on to the Canol Road, which is in two parts: a Southern end and a Northern one. The Southern end was an easy drive and moderately pretty. It got better the farther North we went. Bumped into some travelers from Arkansas who gave us good advice. And then we got to the North half. We filled up gas at Ross River, which was strangely complicated with a sheet of directions. On the first try I didn’t get it right. The road up is 150 miles, and then another 150 miles back. That totals 300, which is just about the limit of my camper. So I filled up the 2 spare gas cans on top of the cab for another 100 miles of breathing space, and rolling space. And then, we drove onto the ferry to get across the Pelly River. After that, we only saw another 4 cars over the next 4 days.

The road was horrible, terrible, the worst evar. Really. It’s the worst road that I never turned around on and gave up on. Mostly I never got over 25 MPH. Mostly I never got out of first gear. And it was much more dramatically beautiful than the southern half. The first night was at Dragon Lake, which is the most beautiful camping spot I’ve ever been to. It’s a 3 or 4-way tie for most beautiful camping spot, but Dragon Lake definitely makes the cut. The next day, there were distant glaciers and vehicles parked since WWII. And once our gas was halfway gone it was clear we were not near the end of the road. Apparently, 1st gear doesn’t get the mileage that 4th gear gets. I asked Mary if we should turn around, and amazingly she said, “Let’s keep going. If we have to walk for gas at the end, that’ll be part of the adventure.” She did make me stop reading out our remaining mileage every 5 minutes though. So we get to the top, and there’s the border with the Northwest Territories, and a couple with what I would think is a Scottish accent, but which may just be your ordinary backwoods Canada accent, said the road wasn’t worth continuing on. So we drove back to a pullout and slept for the night.

The next day we headed back down. Just before Sheldon Lake, I had to pull over to let a truck pass by. The driver called out, “There’s a big load about 30 minutes behind me.” And exactly thirty minutes later, I had to pull down Sheldon Lake road so the truck could pass by. We spent that night at Dragon Lake again, hurray! I poured the gas cans into the tank. We were going to need their help. Coming back into Ross River, the road was really full of clay, and there’d been rain, and there were cracks in the roadway like the road was going to peel off and crash into the river below. So that worry and the fear of running out of gas made for a tense ending. Then we got to the ferry, and the cable pulled us across, and there we were back at the gas station.

That evening had to abandon a campground I’d planned on because the smoke was too thick. There were fires all around. We drove a couple of hours further, and just at dusk found a gravel pit pull-off. I tried to back into it so we wouldn’t be obvious from the road and nearly drove off the dirt ramp and into the pit. Didn’t realize that till the next morning. Just before we settled in for bed, maybe I was giving Lucy that last walk, I saw some clouds moving kinda funny in the sky. We ended up with a couple of hours of pretty good auroras. It covered the whole sky at one point. Mostly it was just ping-ponging back and forth from one horizon to the other. That wasn’t disappointing, thank goodness.