July 7, 9:00 pm - Another flat tire tire on the trailer. Well, not too bad. The only other tire problems we had were on the haul road nearly a month earlier. But this set of trailer tires was completely bald after only 4000 miles of Alaska roads (mostly gravel). We were planning on a new set at Whitehorse, but then decided to cruise the Campbell Highway on the way back and bypassed Whitehorse completely. We did finally get the fourth set of tires for the trailer the next morning in Watson Lake (back near the Signpost Forest).

We had topped off the gas at Carmacks just before leaving the Klondike loop, then again at Ross River just 146 miles later. Good thing too, because we didn't realize at the time that it was another 227 miles to Watson Lake without another filling station.

You notice we had the top down enjoying the atmosphere on this day. A couple of hours later, around, around 11:00 pm when it was getting nicely dark for a change, we saw a black bear amble across the road in the headlights about 100 yards ahead. We were discussing the fact that there were black bears nearly everywhere, but that we hadn't seen even one grizzly bear outside of Denali Park.

About a minute later a HUGE Grizzly bear bounded out of the darkness and ran across the road right in front of the car. We hit the brakes and slid forever in the gravel, just missing the bear by a few feet. Then of course, we promptly departed the scene. We think the grizzly would probably have been really pissed off if we had actually hit it, and since the bear was considerably bigger than the MGA, we weren't staying around to apologize.