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Well, Things have finally started to calm down after September Start-up.

Well, it's that time of year again. Labour Day weekend is upon us, which means that summer holidays are officially over. After working for a school district for the past number of years, I've come to regard this weekend, rather than the Autumn Equinox, as the end of summer and the beginning of fall. After all, there are several things to note the passing of this weekend. For starters, yesterday was the last day I'll get to wear casual clothes to work; starting on Tuesday, I'll have to go back to wearing shirts with collars, and tucking them in.

I stumbled out of the trailer at about one in the morning, in search of the outhouse. For the first time in nearly a week, I was greeted not by the perpetual twilight of the Yukon, but by utterly black, starlight-squined velvet. Mars glared his baleful eye at me as I flicked on my lantern.

Today we stopped backtracking. We had an early breakfast at Watson Lake and then started down Highway 37 toward Kinaskan Lake Provincial Park, which would be our next stop.

Today was our last day at Little Atlin Lake. We had breakfast, loaded up, and started back toward Watson Lake.

From Little Atlin Lake, we dead-headed down to Skagway, Alaska. Not bringing the trailer along was a good thing, since the road was all hills and sharp corners. The scenery, however, was absolutely stunning. Most of what you see is sharp mountains and exposed bedrock. Many small lakes are visible from the highway, all bright green, and very cold. The road winds down from a thousand meters' altitude to sea level within the hour-long drive.

Today we returned to Whitehorse to stock up for the next two nights. We were going to be spending a couple nights on Little Atlin Lake; not exactly just down the road from a 7-11.

Got up early. Today we were driving all the way to Whitehorse.

The drive itself was routine at this point. The road to Whitehorse passes through the Southern Lakes region of the Yukon, and some of these lakes are just freakin' huge. Marsh Lake in particular, along which the road winds for some ten or fifteen kilometers, unrolls as a vast stretch of vivid green water. The odometer clicked over relentlessly until finally we pulled into the capital of the Yukon.

I was awake and out of bed by 0530. I don't know if it was the early bedtime, the lack of darkness, or my subconscious desire to get the hell out of the dump of a campground we'd had the misfortune to choose, but I wasn't getting any more sleep in Fort Nelson. The bathroom facilities at our campground were utterly disgusting, so after breakfast, I treated myself to a sponge bath in the trailer. We drove through a mudhole, past the charred remains of what had once, years ago, been some kind of building, past the long-sealed secondary bathrooms, and out of the campground.

The trip from Hudson's Hope to Fort Nelson was my first taste of the Alaska Highway. I was rather disappointed. The scenery was bland and uneventful. There is no reason to travel this stretch of highway other than to get to the other end. Of course, the original purpose of the Alaska Highway was to move military materiel from the continental United States to Alaska during the Second World War.