We had been driving for about 45 minutes when we saw this dirt and gravel covering the highway. We stopped to talk with the man shoveling the dirt and he said a truck hauling the dirt had dumped its load. He told us that's what happens when a truck driver's speeding and accidentally hits the switch that dumps his load. He said the driver never stopped or slowed down - just kept going!
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| From Tok to Kluane Lake |
We stopped at a pull-off to replace our windshield cover with the full front cover on the car.
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| From Tok to Kluane Lake |
When we crossed the border into the Yukon Territory, we were now in the Pacific Time Zone and lost an hour. We arrived at the Beaver Creek Canadian Customs at 12:10. There were 2 other vehicles ahead of us.
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| From Tok to Kluane Lake |
After answering several questions we left Canadian Customs at 12:25 and stopped at the rest area just past customs for lunch.
We had seen a few trumpeter swans in some of the ponds near the highway and this time I was able to get a photo of them.
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| From Tok to Kluane Lake |
We were about 100 miles from Kluane Lake when we ran over a depression in the road. We both had been looking at some RVs that were dry camping near the highway and Mike didn't see the depression in time. It really gave us a jolt! Everything seemed fine and we kept going - wrong!
Whenever Mike would step on the brakes to slow down, we would hear a strange noise in the rear of the RV. After hearing a few times and not being able to identify it, we started to look for a place to pull over and of course, there weren't any turnoffs when we needed one. The RV was handling OK so it didn't seem serious.
We had driven about 50 miles and still hadn't found a pull-off, so we just pulled off the highway on to the shoulder. Well, it was serious - apparently when we hit that depression and the back of the RV bounced up and back down it broke our receiver hitch on the RV.
The "strange noise" we heard was the tow bar dragging on the ground when we slowed the RV down.
The rain started back up just as we pulled off the highway and it was in the mid 40's. Mike removed our tow bar from the receiver hitch and we stowed the tow bar in the back of the car.
A semi truck driver stopped to see if we needed any help and shortly after that a motorhome also stopped to check on us. We were OK, but it’s nice to know we would have had help if we needed it. We still didn't have any cell service and we do have 2 CB radios (1 in the RV & 1 in the car) and then we have OnStar in the car.
Since it's now impossible to tow the car, I took the Garmin GPS with me in the car and a walkie-talkie and headed toward Kluane Lake with Mike following in the RV. We only had 50 more miles to go to reach Kluane Lake.
We arrived at Kluane Lake a little after 4:00. When we arrived there was no one else parked at the lake. The first thing Mike did was get the camera and take several photos of our receiver hitch.
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| From Tok to Kluane Lake |
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| From Tok to Kluane Lake |
We're going to see if we can find a welder in Haines Junction tomorrow and see if it can be repaired. We may have to wait until we get to Haines (our destination tomorrow) to find a welder.
We started out being the only ones here,
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| From Tok to Kluane Lake |
but several RVs pulled in tonight and then we had 3 semi's with wide loads pull in about 11:00 with a couple of escort trucks.
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