Cinnamon Bun Anticipation

Canol Project Park, Johnson Crossing, YT, CA – Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Woke up to an overcast blustery morning in Whitehorse. The wind was pretty strong all night and even though the outside temperature is in the 50’s, the wind still makes it seem cold. We’re moving a little slow this morning and EJ feels like she may be coming down with my cold. She’s tougher than I am so it’s hard to tell.

We eventually head over to McDonalds to check the internet and do another blog posting. We’ve been real disappointed in not being able to find the elusive fresh baked cinnamon bun so as an alternate we went to Tim Horton’s(similar to Dunkin Donuts) for donuts instead. We actually had to go to two different Horton’s as the first was packed with school kids and it took too long to get waited on.

Then we stopped by the visitors center to check road conditions and weather along BC highway 37, which is the western most north south highway through Canada. It is still being repaired and they are only letting southbound traffic through every other hour. The weather in this area is also predicted to be rainy for the next week. We have until late tomorrow to make up our minds. That’s when we reach the highway 37 – ALCAN intersection just west of Watson Lake.

Nice views along the way. Several places the trees have lost all of their leaves already.

Todays big news is that we finally got hit by a rock that cracked BG’s windshield. There’s another repair job that will have to wait until we get back to Orange Park. I taped it up, but expect that the crack will expand as we travel down the road.

We made it to Johnson’s Crossing where 9 weeks ago we had what we thought were the best cinnamon buns of the whole trip. But they were closed. It was late in the day so we camped about a mile away and will go back in the morning and hope they are open and making baked goods.

We are camped beside the Canol Road. The road was necessary for construction of the Canol Project born in WWII when America was afraid that Japan would disrupt fuel supplies shipped by boat from mainland US to Alaska. A project was started that would bring Canadian Oil (Canol) through a 4 inch pipeline from the Northwest Territories to Whitehorse, Yukon for refining and then transported to Alaska for use by the Armed Forces.

The project, estimated at $32,000,000, took two years to complete and ending up costing $134,000,000. It operated for one year and the cost of fuel per barrel produced was four times what it would cost on the open market. After one year the project was abandoned and all the construction equipment was left in place rather than recovered and shipped back to the US. Fuel shipments resumed by boat from the US to Seward, Alaska.

BG Miles Today	87	BG Total Miles	8027
Eat Out total $	1228.27	BG Total Fuel $	4555.55
Entertainment total $	1387.63	Total Camping $	1162.03
E Miles Today	0	E Total Miles	2744.26
E Total Fuel $	575.82	Day # of Trip	112