I haven’t posted a lot lately, but this is due to us either being camping or getting ready for camping. We’ve made two trips since I last put something up on the blog.
We went back to Fox Lake for five days, although conditions were quite different. There was no more flooding, the weather was quite sunny, and there was no snow this time. We brought out the boat with the camper and I managed to get a few days of fishing in. I’ll admit, Fox Lake is not the world’s greatest place to fish for lake trout. However, I’m happy bobbing up in a down in a boat on a nice, peaceful lake, even when the fish are not cooperating.
I did get one fish, but it was quite small. It was of legal, but not moral, size. The fish was about 12″ long, and I prefer my “lakers” to be at least 16″ long before I keep them. After all, it is still a baby.
I was pleased to see that the flooded out campsites and roads had been repaired. It was a little rough, since some of the gravel in the sites wasn’t packed down as much as the old sites, but this opened another eight sites at the campground.
We were able to get a site just above the creek and you could see the little waterfall that’s about 20 yards upstream from the site. In the picture above, you can see our campfire and the little waterfall in the background.
As you can see, Clara is enjoying the bright sunlight in here zero gravity chair. She spent the time enjoying the campsite while I spent much of my time trolling for trout.
As mentioned, the weather was really nice. It was nice enough to go out in the boat in shorts. This had a bit of a down side, since I managed to sunburn my knees. I didn’t burn the upper parts of my legs, or the lowers. All that turned out crispy were my knees. For what it’s worth, it did look a lot worse than it actually was. They seemed warm for the first day but didn’t really end up hurting. I could have done far worse, I suppose.
We headed out to our favourite campground last Wednesday. This is Kusawa Lake, a little more than an hour west of Whitehorse (60° 35’N, 136° 9’W).
We left about 4 PM and it was almost the last trip we took. There is a turnoff from the Alaska Highway to the campground road. I signaled my left turn, started to slow down, and checked my side mirror. I learned the last part in the two Defense Driving courses I’ve taken (one in high school and one in the army). The car behind me was slowing down but the idiot behind him decided to pass both of us. He should have been able to see the turn signals so he probably knew exactly what they were doing, and did it anyway. I caught a bit of his facial expression and he seemed unhappy with what I screamed at him while waving a one-finger salute. If I didn’t have the motorhome and boat behind us, I may have followed him down and yelled at him at his first stop. I’ll admit, visions of a tire iron may also have crossed my mind. It was a dark blue Toyota or Subaru, by the way.
We spent five days at Kusawa, and in a trend, the fish weren’t biting much there either. I did catch two trout, one about 1½ lbs. and one about 2½ lbs. I froze these and will smoke them some time this week. The weather was hot, with temperatures in the high twenties, except for Thursday. There was a nice overcast and it only got up to 23°. It’s hard to argue with weather like this for a whole weekend, and we enjoyed it to the fullest.
There were three more things to the trip that were an annoyance. First, the neighbours on one side of us had the most whiny dog. He was constantly whining and the neighbours really didn’t seem interested in doing anything about it. On the other side, the other neighbour was a bit of a winner, too. There was someone who moved into the site Thursday afternoon and, before that, there was nothing at that site at all. A little later Thursday, this guy shows up and says he had that site and, basically, kicked the other people out of it. If you like trends, the people at the two sites on either side of us were together.
The third problem was the road itself. I have never seen the road in such rough shape. There are 11 km of washboard, and some of the dips in the washboard are three or four inches. It is one lane in a few places and there is no evidence the government has graded it this year. Before they fixed it almost 20 years ago, it was better than it was this week. And frankly, that annoys me since, for the last three years, you see the following sign at the beginning of the road…
Doug Rutherford 