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July 12, 2009, a Sunday
W of Stone Mountain Provincial Park to N of Muncho Lake Provincial Park, British Columbia, Canada
— Alaska Highway Day 5: Leaky Skylight
I awoke around 5:15, and shortly thereafter I heard water dripping inside the RV. I quickly got out of bed to investigate and I got dripped on when I went under the living room skylight. I discovered that water was dripping from the front driver's side corner of the skylight, and quickly began to towel it up. I though about going out to explore, but decided to stay in because of the dark cloud cover. I sopped up as much water as I could from the head liner around the skylight, then continued my morning ritual. Worked on setting up this blog site, particularly the "export" feature that will let me compose entries on my laptop locally and then upload them to the live site later. Prepped the RV to depart, then hooked up the Jeep. We left around 11:00 and headed west.

Around 11:45, we stopped for a flagman at a construction zone. While waiting, the guy in the pickup truck ahead of us came back to talk with us. He's the manager of the current project to lay fiber-optic cable along the Alaska Highway from Dawson Creek to Teslin. (They were actively laying the cable right through Stone Mountain Provincial Park which might explain why the stone sheep were particularly scarce.) He told us about good places to see wildlife along our route and also where to buy cheap gas.

We stopped at the Toad River Lodge at 11:45 to fill up the RV and had to wait for a fifth-wheel to pull away from the pumps.

We stopped just a little way down the road at a pulloff to have lunch.

There was a nice moose cow in a pond by the road, but some vehicles had stopped ahead of us and there was a large dog barking from the back of a pickup truck while its driver was taking some snapshots. The moose didn't like the dog barking and moved away from the road to the far side of the pond. By the time the barking-dog truck left and we were sure the moose would stick around, it had started raining heavily, so we left too.

We entered Muncho Lake Provincial Park, but I don't recall seeing a sign. A stone sheep ram was walking along the road just beyond a turnoff with some interpretive signs about stone sheep, and we couldn't stop near him because the shoulder was too narrow. By the time we were able to stop, it had started to rain so we decided to keep going and then come back for him another time.

We went by a potentially nice boondocking spot, so we stopped, unhooked the Jeep, and I took the Jeep to go investigate. It looked like it would work, so we took the RV there and set up camp around 2:40 just before some really heavy rain started. I worked on this blog site some more. A ranger came by at 4:50 to tell us that we had picked a bad spot. Hmm, I thought we had gone far enough to get out of the Provincial Park, but obviously we hadn't. He said he had until he returned on his next patrol in about an hour to leave. We prepped the RV and left by 5:20.

We headed west with me driving the RV and J driving the Jeep. After we left the park (we saw a sign on the west boundary), we started looking for another boondocking spot.

We found a nice gravel pit area and set up camp by 6:10. Had dinner then I did the dishes.

I went up on the roof to look at the skylight because it hadn't rained since we had stopped driving so there shouldn't have been any water up there. I found some cracked sealant on the skylight on the aft driver's side. The roof was fairly dry, so I cleaned up the area around the skylight and applied a nice system of Eterna-Bond around the whole skylight mounting flange. Fortunately, it didn't rain while I was doing the work, but I got eaten by some mosquitoes.

After going back inside the RV, I worked on setting up this blog site some more before going to bed.