Friday 8/31
In a rare occurrence I’m up first, so I start working on the blog. When Nancy gets up, she reads while I write. As we sit there, a stream of Alpenlites (5th wheel trailers) begins to spew from the rest area. There must be 20 or more. We have no idea how they all fit, but somehow they were sandwiched in, and now they are moving back onto the road. All headed south! Woe unto us—we DON’T WANT this much company.
By the time we hit the road, things have calmed down, just the occasional RV and the more occasional semi truck. Besides hauling salmon and timber south, and hauling gasoline and groceries north, these trucks also “haul ass”. It’s perfectly understandable that they want to get from point “A” to point “B” as quickly as possible, but when they come barreling down at you on this narrow road, it’s a little scary. Also scary are the sections of this road that are built on high gravel berms with no shoulder. There’s no margin for error in these sections. If you go off the roadway, you’re doomed. I’m nervous in these areas, and when I’m nervous, Nancy is REALLY nervous.
It’s clear and cold in the early morning—44 degrees. Soon clouds begin to appear, and as the day unfolds, there are more clouds and periods of heavy rain. There are a couple of stretches of road that are seriously under construction. Here, in the rain and slippery mud, there are deep, teeth-rattling, bone-jarring potholes.
While the road is sometimes bad, the scenery is consistently alluring…craggy mountains, bounteous waterfalls, and strings of clear lakes—many with beaver lodges. I stop at one of these to fish. There’s a torrent of cold water flowing through a culvert that connects Vine Lake with a lake on the other side of the road. Looks like a good spot. I cast my small Meps spinner into the swirl where the more shallow culvert water exhausts into the lake—BAM—a fierce strike and vigorous battle with a small but mighty Lake Trout.
We like this road a lot. With the traffic abated and virtually no towns along the way, we feel very much a part of the wilderness.
We come to glorious Dease Lake—25 miles long—essentially unpopulated—spectacularly adorned with rocky, tree-lined shores. Flowing into the lake, we find
Dorothy Creek. I take pictures of the pig and gather some native quartz as souvenirs.
In the early evening we spot a rainbow in the east. We stop to take photos and decide the rainbow is a good omen, and we’ll spend the night here near the Todagin River. I’m assuming it’s pronounced “toad-again” and is named after a kissed, then un-kissed, wart-giving amphibian.
