Saturday June 15, 2019 - Whitehorse, Yukon to Watson Lake, Yukon

Our luggage was again expertly packed up and everything fit and we were on the road by 6 am for  Watson Lake.  Goodbye Whitehorse, maybe someday I will come by again and visit the city and its museums. 

Today the weather is cool with some high rain clouds in the distance.  Hopefully it will be clear and dry.  It does not take long to get into the vistas of mountains, meadows and lakes.  Stunning scenery!  

Today, the highlights of the day were the mammals.  We had at least 6 bears along the highway.  Almost all of the bears looked very healthy and on the chubby side.  Then we stopped for a roadside bathroom break and down in the meadow and ponds were a total of 6 moose!   One male was particularly spectacular as it was feeding in the pond and would submerge itself and then come up like a submarine with water pouring from its rack of antlers.  Everyone watched this for quite a while.  Nature at its best.  We also saw a porcupine by the road and this also caused excitement.  There were numerous ground squirrels also.  My highlight was the moose in the pond feeding!

The waters along the rivers were moving but no whitecaps.  Gosh having this kind of scenery to drive through is distracting.  

We arrived in the small town of Watson Lake around 1 pm.  We went directly to Kathy’s Kitchen for lunch and I had the crab and cheese melt and homemade macaroni for lunch and it was delicious.  Next to the restaurant there is a store called a Department Store and it really is a department-type store, just like a Biway or a Woolworths did years ago.  

I came back to look around and this store had the best rubber boots selection I have seen in years!   I bought Volume 1 of Robert Service Poems about the far north as a souvenir.  

One of the main attractions in Watson Lake was the Signpost Forest.   It is comprised of thousands of location signs from around the world brought into town by tourists passing through.  We could find Orleans and Gatineau but no Ottawa signs but there are thousands of signs and we only strolled around and looked at some of them.  There were just so many.  There was also a tour bus that stopped by and there were people looking through the "forest".

We met up at 3:30pm to do some birding around the town.  We headed over a bridge on the Alaska Highway and there was a nesting Pileated Woodpecker nesting in a hole in the telephone pole.  It did not come out of the hole  but we could see that it was in there.  We did not hear any baby birds chipping for food so maybe they have not hatched yet.  

We checked out the birds at the location of the local bird banding station and it was pretty quiet.  The same for a couple of nearby lakes.  We did have a lovely Red necked Grebe pair come towards us and it was nice to see them.

We returned to town and went to supper.  We heard about some stories of Bruce's and Tom's early birding trips.   So while this day was largely a drive day, we did get some birding in also.

We are staying the night at the Nice Motel and it is a very nice place with a mini fireplace in each room.  There was time for a celebratory splash also.