The ravens were squawking this morning when we woke at 8.  They are as prolific up here as crows are at home.  We checked out of the hotel at 9 and continued our drive back down the Dempster Highway toward Dawson City.  We had 410 km (250 miles) to drive today.  Yesterday’s smoke had drifted off and the sky was a mix of sun and clouds.

The first couple of hours of the drive we were just traveling through the larch forests, then we drove for another half hour through all the fire burn before anything became scenic.  More photos of mountains to follow:                         All the tors were very pretty against the blue sky.We pulled into the campground at Engineer’s Creek for a pit stop and some lunch and when John stepped out of the truck he discovered that the new tire he had put on yesterday was flat.  Thankfully we came prepared with three tires on rims as the Dempster Highway is famous for creating flat tires.  The repair shop at Eagle Plains sometimes gets as many as 25 flats to repair in a day.                     Beef up the air pressure a bit and off we go once again.

I didn’t keep out my little Travelogue booklet to follow our journey in reverse so I can’t tell you exactly where all these mountains, etc. were. They were just pretty so I took photos of them. We had not stopped at Chapman Lake on the way north so decided to pull in for a photo stop on the way back.There were some placards about the RCMP ‘Lost Patrol.’
The windshield had so many bugs on it I stuck my camera out the window to take a photo of the view in front of us.We didn’t stop at the Tombstone Range Viewpoint today but that doesn’t mean I could pass without taking another photo. The view is glorious! I had been in communication with a fellow geocacher from the Revelstoke area who was also coming to the north to drive the new road to Tuktoyaktuk.  We were hoping to connect somewhere along the road and sure enough as we were driving back to Dawson City after finishing our drive down the Dempster John recognized his truck and camper from the photo he had sent us.  We flagged him down and we introduced ourselves by our real names, not our geocache ‘handles.’  He was just leaving Dawson City to drive up to Eagle Plains.  The weather is forecasted to be sunny for the next three days up in Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuck so after hearing about our experience driving on the road when it was wet from rain, he decided to push straight through and get up there while the going was good.  Any wandering around and fishing he wanted to do he would do later.  It was fun to meet up with someone who likes our hobby as much as we do.

It was 4:45 when we were taking our luggage out of the truck so we did the whole drive in just under eight hours, which included the time it took to change the tire.  These are our last long, long driving days for awhile.  We stay in Dawson City tomorrow then on Tuesday we will take the Top of the World (gravel) road across the border into Alaska.