Day 29 – Canada Wilderness to Haines, AK.

We camped at a great spot next to a river and got up around 7 AM. I had stayed up late last night to finish cooking the potatoes that were undercooked and I did some relaxing by a fire. This is the first fire we have had the entire journey and I had forgotten how peaceful it is to watch a fire burn. The goal was to get down to coals so I could get the veggies cooked and then to clean out the dutch oven. I finally got to bed around 2 AM, and it was still pretty light out,

Creekside campsite just north of the US border.

We were only about 90 minutes from Haines, but in our usual style, we didn’t make it there until about 3PM. I took a side road up Porcupine creek and after reaching a dead end, I took another road to Flower mountain. This road started out a little rough but got rougher, and steeper, and muddier, and kept going up and up. After about 45 minutes I thought about turning around but Carl said lets see where it goes. A guy we passed said it went up to the snow line. We were still in the trees and the road had thinned from a 4×4 trail to a ATV trail. We continued and about 10 minutes later it opened up at the tree line and we were driving in a high alpine meadow, about 3500 feet up from where we started. I cannot do justice in words the views and the road we found.

Top of the Flower road, Haines Alaska.

If we had known about this road and the campsites at the end, we would have taken one more day to get the ferry to Skagway. This would have been an epic place to camp and hike to the summits. We were above the snow line on the adjacent slopes and above at least 2 glaciers. It was so beautiful.

Small ice-melt lake at 3800 feet

We spent about an hour up at the top hiking and enjoying the scenery. As we headed down, we stopped for a photo-op at a glacial lake with Carl fishing. It took us another 50 minutes to get back down to Porcupine creek road and then another 30 minutes to get to Haines, Alaska. We stopped along the way to give soem snickers to some bikers and then found the local brewery. The tasty cold ones were all right so we headed to the visitors center and then to dinner. We finished the night camping along the road about a half mile from the ferry ride that we had to be at at 5:30 AM., This day was epic and I cannot say enough good things about the FJ and its capabilities.

A smooth section of the 4×4 road
Haines Harbor