August 30 Gasp...it’s 6:15 a.m. and our camper’s batteries are dead. At this time it wasn’t important to know why, but rather OK, now what do we do? We get out our generator and plug the trailer into it. The generator supplies the electricity to run the slides in and power the landing legs so that we can get hooked up to the pickup. Whew!
We were in line for the ferry 6:55 a.m. And to our surprise, the boat maintenance that was scheduled to last from 5-7:00 a.m. was already completed. The ferry was offloading on the opposite shore, but came to get us at 7:05. The ferry crew put a pickup in front of us and then we followed it with our pickup and 5th wheel trailer. In all we are about 45 feet in total length. But we fit on the boat just fine.
The drive through Dawson put us on the Klondike Highway which parallels the Klondike River for quite a ways. The drive itself was rather uneventful. The scenery was of spruce and aspen trees, scrub brush, muskeg, lakes, and rivers. Historically this road was responsible for putting the paddlewheel steamships out of business on the Yukon River. Teamsters could use the road to get goods and people to and from Dawson with less expense than the boats.
We crossed the Stewart and Pelly Rivers which are quite wide. We also crossed the Yukon into which those 2 rivers and many others flow. We made stops at various locations: The Five Finger Rapids on the Yukon where paddlewheelers had to use a cable to winch themselves through the rapids safely and the Montague Roadhouse which catered to those who traveled on the early road leading from Whitehorse to Dawson.
We did suffer a second casualty: in a construction area we met a pickup pulling a utility trailer at a high rate of speed. It throw a stone which put a bullseye nick in our windshield. Fortunately, the chip is in the low center of view so it doesn’t bother either Peggy’s or my vision out the window.
Of course many things happen in groups of three. Sure enough we pull into our campground, The Caribou, just south of Whitehorse, and number three happens- only one of the front landing legs is working.
So I bust out my tool box and proceed to dissemble the inoperable landing gear. To my dismay, the machine pin which holds one of the 90º gears has fallen out so that the shaft driving that gear simply spins without cranking the leg up or down. And, there is no way to get the landing leg out to reassemble it without having to remove things like the battery box, etc.!! We are glad that the warranty on our trailer is still in force so at least when we do get it fixed it will not cost us anything. And like most campers, the folks camped next to us came over to see if I could use their help or needed to borrow any tools.
Since we will not have a large metropolitan area to see about repairs for quite some time down the road, my fix was to get out my bottle jack and use it to hold up the broken landing gear when we are camped. It seems to be an adequate fix for now. Time will tell!
Tomorrow we continue our journey traveling farther south and east on the Alaska Highway. We are planning on taking the Cassiar Highway south through British Columbia barring any more unforeseen complications or breakdowns.
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