The Rise Up Ride: Day 118, Trail Magic in the Cold, Wet Yukon
Date: 18 August 2021
Start Location: Beaver Creek, Yukon
End Location: Lake Creek Campground, Alcan Highway, Yukon
Distance: 80.7 km
Time: 4:37
Total elapsed: 5:54
Elevation: 451 m
After 36 hours in Beaver Creek, I was already a regular at Buckshot Betty's, where I consumed a pile of pancakes while watching the rain out the window. With no services and only one campground with bear boxes between there and Destruction Bay down the Alcan Highway, I pictured setting up my tent in the wet cold that night. Touring cyclists will all tell you how much they dislike the prospect of setting up a tent in the rain and the awful possibility of having to pack it up the next morning, wet, cold and heavy.
However, when I turned off the Alaska Highway at Lake Creek, I quickly realized why the Yukon Government Campgrounds are widely regarded as the finest in the world. There, amidst a dozen or so lovely campsites with tables, fire pits and bear boxes, was a dry cooking shelter with a big iron wood stove next to a huge cache of free firewood. With no other campers at Lake Creek, I pulled my bike into the dry space out of the rain and dove onto my panniers for my firestarter kit, scrambled for some dry kindling, kicked the woodpile to wake up the spiders and other biting critters, boy-scouted several smaller logs and created fire before hypothermia set in. The race to get the fire going before my wet clothes sucked all of my hard-pedaling body heat away was on. The match struck, fire cube sputtered, tinder caught and then the big iron stove creaked and groaned, drafting up the stovepipe as designed and the fire roared, catching the bigger logs. Rather than out in the downpour struggling to get the tent up and diving into my down bag bag to get my core temperature up, I pulled my bike over close to the stove and hung my damp cycling gear on it, dressed in all my drysacked warm clothes, set up my little camp chair next to the fire and rejoiced in my good fortune to be staying in a remote campground designed for people in need of a safe space to seek refuge rather than to park a cozy RV.
With no one else in the entire campground on the 18th of August, I was reminded that folks in this part of the world already know that summer is over. One very interesting Kansan and his wife pulled in with their camper but had no interest in using the cook shelter so I skipped setting up the tent out in the downpour and inflated my Nemo pad, and unstuffed my Nemo down quilt to sleep tonight on the picnic table in the dry.
