_      We woke up early and packed up camp before the mosquitoes had a chance to catch us again.  Not too far down the road, we found a perfect place to make breakfast (that we wish we had found the night before!) at Whirlpool Canyon.  The Liard River makes a screaming right turn, and during spring break-up, the ice floes take out a lot of trees along the river and deposit them on the shore here as they cannot make the turn with the very fast-moving water.  The shape of the rocks below the scattered trees also reflects the power of the water and ice during break-up over the years, as the layers of shale, too, are broken up at harsh angles.

_      On our drive to Liard Hotsprings down the river, we were lucky to glimpse a lot of wildlife from the road—two herds of buffalo, a black bear, and many birds.  Once reaching Liard, we were disappointed to be turned away, as the boardwalk-lined hot springs were blocked with crime scene caution tape from an event the day before.  We spotted a helicopter and a four-wheeler along the road nearby, but we have still yet to spot anything in the Vancouver Sun or on the CBC about what happened there.  Leaving Liard Hotsprings, we drove past the jade-colored Muncho Lake and on to the Toad River Lodge. 

_      Chase added his well-worn John Deere hat (the front of which had completely fallen apart while we were tubing in Vang Vieng, Laos, earlier this summer) to the lodge’s famous collection, making 8,189 hats.  He hung the hat in a small cluster above the beef jerky section of the shop and took his registration card for memories.

_      As we traveled through the Rockies, we were excited to see the Military Vehicles Preservation Association convoy lining up at the top of a mountain to begin the day’s drive, a leg of their trip the length of the Alaska Highway to celebrate the 70th anniversary of its construction.  There were over seventy vintage vehicles, mostly World War II era, and fifteen support vehicles.  The owners of the vehicles were private collectors who had restored their vehicles and, in the cases of the larger trucks-turned-RVs, fixed them up to make such a cross-country drive.  Our favorites, though, were the smaller Jeep CJ-2As, and there were at least fifteen or twenty of them in the line-up.

     As the convoy headed out to Toad River, we continued in the opposite direction on the highway towards Fort Nelson, where we stopped for gas and groceries.  From there, we traveled a little further down the road and cooked dinner at the First Nations Prophet River area.  After dinner, we drove our last section of the Alaska Highway and got onto the Hudson’s Hope Loop, which took us alongside the beautiful Peace River until we stopped at an overlook rest area to set up camp for the night.

       We started day three by packing up wet gear thanks to a Dawson morning rain shower.  Once we got all of our wet gear stowed away for the trip, we got to once again jump on the ferry for our final water crossing of the Yukon River.  The ladies at the Visitor Center directed us to the cheapest gas in town, at an industrial Alberta Fuels cardlock system in a mining part of town.  After figuring out how to use the most obscure cardlock system in the world, we were finally zooming out of town on the Klondike Highway.  We stopped for lunch at Moose Creek, a nice campground though it was lacking the running water that it had advertised.  Without rinsing our dishes we were back on the road again.  We continued on to Carmacks for a gas stop, and much more excitingly, a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Mint Chocolate bar that was hiding in the gas station!  We stopped to enjoy some morsels of chocolate at Little Fox Lake, the scene of a catastrophic forest fire in 1998.  The landscape is still charred and recovering to this day.
     A few miles down the road we arrived at Lake Laberge.  We were on an overlook, not quite a marge, but it was still appropriate to have a reading of Robert Service's “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”  After the dramatic reading, we took a look around to discover we weren’t merely at an overlook, but we had somehow ventured into a Public Use Quarry, complete with three Caterpillar 776Bs with keys in the ignitions!  However tempted we were to rally, we settled with a photo shoot.  (Who knows how good the steering would be on a vehicle whose tires are taller than the trusty Pilot?!)_

_      Our quarry was quite close to Whitehorse, which features the Yukon Brewery (“Beer Worth Freezin' For”).  Unbeknownst to us we had stopped in on International IPA Day, a day we should all be celebrating.  After a bit of sampling we decided on a growler of Discovery Honey Ale and bottles of Ice Fog IPA and Midnight Sun Espresso Stout.