“Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.”

-Author Unknown

I cannot describe the beauty that literally wraps around us. It is breathtaking. I remember driving into Haines Junction with Steve and both of us awestruck by the Saint Elias Mountain Range that comes into view.  It builds slowly on the left, then on the right and then and you crest a hill on the highway…  BAM!  In your face! Wow, stunning snow-capped mountains on three sides. It brought tears to our eyes then; it brought tears to my eyes now.

Haines Junction is a very small community filled with kind, humble people. How can one not be humble in the presence of this beauty? We stopped at the visitor center here and learned of the vastness of this mountain range. We are only seeing the front layer, as many miles of peaks are between us and the Pacific Ocean including Mount Logan at 19,550 feet. We also enjoyed the interactive display that tracked the movements of a collared grizzly bear for a year. We are headed to a campground that was a popular summer hang-out for this bear. Maybe we will see a grizzly! 

These incredible mountain vistas are the gateway to Kluane National Park (pronounced clue-ON-ee).

We camped at Congdon Creek Campground on the shore of Kluane Lake. It’s a wonderful tree-filled government campground with nice large campsites that accommodated both trucks in one. We went for walks in the trees and along the lake. No bears to be seen but we did see some bear poop and of course beautiful vistas.

I began to believe that the world would be saved by beauty. It was this beautiful, natural world that slowly led me back to God.  “How can there be no God,” I asked, “when there are all these beautiful things?” 

-Dorothy Day

We learned that over the last couple of years, college students were working to passively direct bears to the outskirts of the campground by a) training people to be very conscientious and tidy campers and b) by controlling and reducing the favorite plant foods of the bears in the middle of the campground. If you were a tent camper you had to sleep inside an enclosure lined with electric fencing. You couldn’t cook or eat within the enclosure. If you had a hard-sided RV you could camp in regular campsites. This was a place Steve and I wanted to camp but didn’t have time to stop. This time we would have liked to stay another night but have reservations in Tok, Alaska and must be on our way tomorrow.