July 14th:
121 km: Long way of ancient lakebed!
(Rob)
. Not having finished our website work we spent the morning finishing
that. We actually slept in though this morning. It may not have been the
best idea in the world though, given where we were sleeping. We had a
campsite just on the other side of the railroad tracks, of which where
right next to the baseball fields. As I was sitting in the tent working
on the site Joseph heard and then saw the baseball maintenance truck driving
next to the tracks. “Oh CRAP” we thought. “We
better get the heck outta here before they come back!”
WE can pack up quickly nowadays. We then had to dodge the pickup by cycling
the opposite direction around the baseball fields. In the end we made
it. Wheeew.
The
day was supposed to be a ridding day, but after uploading data, Joseph
fixing his derailleur, me buying new pedals for my broken pair, me buying
phone cards to call home and both of us gorging on an all you can eat
buffet at Pizza Hut, it was four pm! But, here in the Yukon, the land
of the midnight sun, that didn’t stop us. We cycled all afternoon
until about 11pm. We only stopped once because Joseph ran out of water.
So we filled up the bottles. In the process we saw these really
cool Cliff Swallows under the culvert of the stream we were filtering.
It was cold walking in to photograph them, but very neat to see their
nests up close.
(Joseph) More minor odds and ends need to be done in Whitehorse before we could hit the road again. I had to have my derailleur straighten out, which cost me 20 bucks. We bought 50 dollars worth of power bars and were on the road by 4 pm. We spent the next 7 hours riding on the floor of a pre historic lake bed, dating back about 10 thousand years. The now desert-like landscape showed evidence of the old sandy beaches of this lake. We pick a campsite on a hill over looking hundreds of miles of this ancient lake bed and fell asleep to the sound of howling dogs.
