A Viking’s Walkabout – Day 24 – Viking Navigation LLC

Whitehorse, Yukon to Cassiar and then Dease Lake, B.C. by way of the Alaska and Cassiar Highways

Distance: 421 miles / 677 km

Time: ~8 hours

Back on the Alaska Highway south and east of Whitehorse, Yukon.

Turning south on the Cassiar Highway before Watson Lake, Yukon and entering B.C. once again.

This stretch of B.C. is what the U.S. and Great Britain would have fought over if 54-40 had remained our irrational rallying cry. This place is so remote there are entire mountain ranges with two-paragraph wiki entries. There is almost no one here. For hundreds of miles. Nothing to fight over… except…

…Asbestos. This is the abandoned asbestos mine in Cassiar. Later, down south, I would meet a guy who grew up here.

I could not get close to the processing facilities because the whole town is being scrapped.

A timber deck bridge on the road to Cassiar from Jade City.

A bit of a bend in that chord…

I stayed in Dease Lake, which was different. Great roadside food stand: “The Shack.” No website, but good food. The weather was cold and wet, but I sat outside to eat anyway.

I stayed in “The Arctic Divide.” It’s a cool place and it is all self serve. No staff. They just send you a code, you grab your key, you go to your room, you misunderstand how to make coffee, you make a coffee, and then get one of the coffees they made for you, and then you hit the road. In between you say hi to one other human. But it was clean and comfortable.

Wildflowers growing in the yard of The Arctic Divide in Dease Lake, B.C.