Signs, Signs, Everywhere A Sign

Today is our first day of school and I am determined to finish blogging about our trip this week. I think I can do it :) It should be easier now that everyone is gone during the day!

We left The Yukon on the last day of July to make our way back to Alberta and Saskatchewan. Our drive back was not nearly as exciting as our drive there as we really didn't want to leave :( However, we did have a beautiful start to our day.

I told you about a thousand posts again (okay, it was this one here which I wrote on August 1), that I really needed to do a whole post on the Watson Lake Sign Post Forest.

I have copied the history of the Sign Post Forest from this website: The tradition began during the Alaska Highway Project in 1942, when U.S. soldier Carl K. Lindley spent time in Watson Lake recovering from an injury. A commanding officer asked him to repair and erect the directional signposts, and while completing the job, he added a sign that indicated the direction and mileage to his hometown of Danville, Illinois. Others followed suit, and the trend caught on. 

Continued from the website: In 1990, a couple from Ohio added the 10,000th sign in the Signpost Forest. Today, there are over 77,000 signs in the Forest, and the number grows each year as visitors contribute signs and continue the tradition. The Town of Watson Lake maintains the site, adding more sign posts as they fill up. (End of website quoting).

I don't remember if I've mentioned this on the blog or not, but our family road tripped to the Yukon in 1986 to visit my grandparents who were working there. I very clearly remember stopping at the Sign Post Forest but it was much smaller then. I was amazed at how big it has gotten.

Another thing that I think has changed is that it just used to be city signs. I enjoyed seeing a lot of different places.

 

Currently, there are A TON of homemade signs that just have people's names on them.

Rachel's nickname in utero was Knut so we had to get a picture of her with this sign.

Some of the "signs" are a little...unconventional... shall we say? Like these flip flops and the baseball glove. It really does appear that these days, anything goes!

We were excited to see this sign -- "Yukon Ho!"

And we were very excited to see our neighbourhood sign which our friends had posted on their trip out last fall. (These pictures are from both our stop on the way to Whitehorse, as well as from the stop we made on our return trip).

We wore our neighbourhood shirts on purpose :)

On the way home, with our friends' permission, we added our name and date to the sign, as well as putting down the dates when our friends had visited.

This was a really fun place to visit and I'm so glad that we got a chance to stop here and leave our mark.