Mushrooms found along the Tombstone Campground trail
Another gray and rainy day. It seems like there have been far too many this summer, including our canoeing in early July, and now our travels through the north of Canada. When we awoke the sky was clear, but it soon became very overcast as we travelled towards the junction of the Dempster and Klondike highways.
We stopped to refuel before heading north and were pleasantly surprised to find they had free wifi access at the service station. This allowed us to post yesterday’s blog, as well as catch up on our emails. We were not so pleasantly surprised to learn that the Dempster highway is closed by flooding at Engineer Creek and the Ogilvie River. There is no word on when the road will open again, though we hope that it will be in just a couple of days if it stops raining. Unfortunately, that is not the way the weather looks now, as it has been raining for much of the afternoon.
We stopped in Tombstone Campground, as we intended, though with the weather as it is, it’s not very conducive to hiking. We did go for a short hike this afternoon down the campground trail which follows the North Klondike River, as well as scrambling a bit over indistinct trails over some higher ridges. There are a very large number of mushrooms here, though unfortunately we’re not very good at identifying them. The only ones we can identify for sure are the puffballs. It looked to us as if someone might have picked them. There were also many low bush cranberries. They aren’t quite ripe yet, but will be in just a couple of weeks.
For the rest of the afternoon I caught up some by backing up picture and GPS files. Also I’m recharging both my and Enid’s camera batteries. Enid spent the afternoon reading in the Yukon, as it is quite cool outside. The rain has stopped, but it’s very cloudy and cool. It didn’t rain anymore after the late afternoon, and this evening we built a good fire and sat around it and read for a couple of hours. There were many tiny black flies, almost like fruit flies, which didn’t bite, but which did land and crawl all over any exposed skin, and were very annoying.