THE ALASKAN ADVENTURE Day 111 September 4, 2009 Watson Lake, YK

Well as you can guess it was not an early morning. We stayed up into the wee hours last night and unfortunately we were not rewarded for our vigilance. There was a full moon last night and this tends to override the Northern Lights. We are not going to stay up if the conditions are the same tonight.

After finally getting going we walked over to the Sign Post Forest.

This all started in 1942 when the soldiers were building the Alaskan Highway. They erected a sign post that showed the mileage to a number of cities around the world. The original post is the only sign post to survive from the Alaska Highway construction.

Carl Lindley, a homesick soldier, added his hometown to the post and a long standing tradition began. From that single posting there have been 65,164 signs added that say and show all sorts of things. Names, hometowns, destinations and dates on anything from pieces of wood to toilet seats to old frying pans. There are also a large number of signs that were brought with the full intention of leaving them here. These signs are official city signs, population signs, mileage signs, anything with their home town on it. There is everything from professionally produced signs to tacky hand made signs and of course we got caught up in the tradition. The next thing we know we are off to the local Home Hardware to get a pre-cut board. Along with the paints and markers that the visitor’s center gives you we set out to be creative. The theme is to list the town you reside in but as that does not apply to us we opted to create a sign that we felt was applicable.

So we hung the sign and then headed back to the RV Park for supper. Oh, and now there are 65,165 signs in the Forest.

It is just starting to rain so I think we will skip the light gazing tonight and get some sleep. We are heading for Laird Hot Springs in the morning and hopefully the conditions will allow us to see the Northern Lights.