Starting up the ALCAN Highway
- Marcy Speck
- Aug 2
- 2 min read
Link to our current trip map:
We left Jasper National Park on Friday with the goal covering more miles than we have been over a few days. We saw these herds of big horn sheep and elk on our way out of town.
Why yes, those sheep are licking the road. FUN FACT: sheep lick the road to get salt and minerals that are missing from their plant based diets.
My tongue hurts thinking about this.
We made a stop at Costco in Grande Prairie, Alberta because...well, it's Costco....and it's in Canada....and maybe we needed a few things. It's safe to say that 24 rolls of paper towels and 5 dozen eggs doesn't work very well in a small RV so we tried not to lose our minds. It turns out it is the only Costco in about a 300 miles radius AND it was Friday afternoon of a 3 day weekend in Canada so I'll let you imagine how crowded it was!
We stayed at a small local campground outside Grande Prairie. On Saturday we started driving pretty early and made it to Dawson Creek BC. This is the start of the Alaska - Canada highway that we will be on for the 1400 miles or so.
FUN FACT: the construction of the original 1700 miles of the the ALCAN
highway was completed in about 8 months in 1942. This was a pretty massive achievement, especially for the time. The work was mostly done by about 10,000 members of the US Army Corp of Engineers.
We drove most of the day on Saturday and stayed in Fort Nelson, BC. This morning (Sunday). We drove a few hours to Muncho Lake because we had heard it was a pretty place to camp. It was the first time on the trip we we haven't had reservations somewhere but we decided to drive through the Strawberry Flats campground and see if anything was available.
I'd say we got pretty lucky!
Since leaving California we've driven about 4,000 kilometers or about 2,485 miles.
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