Watson Lake is a small town in the southern Yukon, at the junction of the Alaska Highway and the road to the Cassiar country, and it is famous for one very odd thing: a forest of signs. In 1942, during the building of the highway, a homesick American soldier named Carl Lindley put up a sign pointing to his home town in Illinois, and others followed. Today there are more than a hundred thousand signs, licence plates and street signs from all over the world, nailed to posts in a field beside the road. People still bring their own, and a visitor centre helps you find a place to hang it.
The Alaska Highway itself was a wartime project, built in 1942 by American army engineers and civilian contractors in about eight months, to link the lower forty-eight to Alaska after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Watson Lake had an airfield, part of a chain of fields used to ferry aircraft to the Soviet Union, and the town grew around it. The surrounding country is boreal forest, lakes and low mountains, with the Liard River winding nearby, and the light in summer lasts nearly all night.
For a rider, the highway through here is a long, straight, heavy-traffic ribbon, mostly paved but with sections of frost heave, patched surface and loose gravel. Rain is common, and the road can be slick, so allow plenty of time. Wildlife is part of the journey: bison, black bears, moose and caribou wander onto the road, and the large animals are a real danger at dawn and dusk. Mosquitoes in summer can be fierce, and a head net is handy at stops. The summer weather is warm and long, but temperatures can drop sharply at night.
The town, with around fifteen hundred people, has fuel, food and a few motels, and it is the place to fill up, since distances between services on the highway are large, often a couple of hundred kilometres. Liard Hot Springs, a pleasant natural pool in a forest setting, lies some distance to the east, and it is a good place to soak after a long day in the saddle. Westward lies Whitehorse, a long day's ride away. Stop for coffee in town, hang a sign if you have one, and check your tyre pressures before going on.