Leaving the Alaska Marine Highway and the Inside Passage behind, we began our adventure into the Interior. We passed back through Canada, first through the short panhandle of British Columbia, then onto the Al-Can Highway in the Yukon Territory. We drove by little rivers and streams with names like Flying Squirrel Creek and Gibbles Gulch. To the west was a white picket-fence of mountain tops holding back one of the largest non-polar ice fields in the world. Our first stop was the Kluane National Park visitor center. Kluane, combined with the Wrangell - St. Elias National Park in the US, is the largest protected wilderness area on earth. The mountains are still growing and we learned that there are over a thousand "seismic events" a year here including a 4.0 earthquake that was recorded just three weeks ago and an enormous landslide in the park last year that registered 4.3 on the Richter Scale! We continued on the lonely highway, only occasionally passing other vehicles - over half of which are RV's. Even with all the RV's, there's problem with traffic - if you get stuck behind one going 50mph on the two-lane road, the highway is so empty you can pass them at almost any time. We spotted a moose and young calf along the road and later some wild trumpeter swams - they look so much larger in the wild then in a city park (and maybe they are!) We stopped for the "night" (it never really gets dark this far north) in a state park just outside the town of Tok. Apparently, the town was originally Tokyo Village but was shortened to Tok during WWII when fighting broke out in the Aleutians. Rain was threatening so we moved all our bags, tote boxes and cooler into the front, pumped up the air mattress in back and slept in the back of the Escape for the night. Even though it was still light, we quickly fell asleep after our long drive through the vastness of the Yukon and Alaskan Interior.