“We also have a lot of familial signs where, say, a grandpa will put up a sign and then years later family will come back and try to find it.” “A lot of these are personal signs that people make to literally say that they’re here,” she says. ![]() The forest features pathways meandering throughout the property.īruce says that it’s not uncommon for people to travel out of their way to post a sign, and many travelers build their itineraries to have time to wander around the roughly two-acre site, which has pathways meandering throughout the property and is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. It’s the idea of leaving something in passing and a way for people to say, ‘Hey, I was here.'” “It’s one of those things that really took off,” says Lelah Bruce, supervisor of the Watson Lake Visitors Center. (The original sign has since been lost to time, however, 50 years later, in 1992, Lindley and his wife Elinor made the pilgrimage back to Watson Lake to place a replica sign, which is still there.) Little did Lindley know that years later travelers from near and far would follow in his footsteps and place signposts from their own hometowns. Built of planks that he nailed together and painted red and white, the handmade sign proudly proclaimed “Danville, Illinois, 2,835 miles,” denoting the distance that the homesick soldier was from his hometown. Lindley was the first person to place a sign there in 1942 while he was helping to construct the Alaska Highway, a strategic roadway project undertaken by the U.S. So how did all these signs get there in the first place?Īccording to the Watson Lake Visitors Center, which helps maintain the collection, a U.S. ![]() While many of the locations are easily recognizable, there are others that are lesser known, such as Uettligen, Switzerland Guemes Island, Washington and Cool, California. They’re all part of the Signpost Forest, the largest collection of signs from places around the world.Īt last count, the Signpost Forest in Watson Lake, located about 10 miles north of the U.S.-Canadian border, contains 91,000 signs from spots near and far, including Berlin, Moscow, Dublin and Hawaii. Instead of a canopy of treetops cutting across the horizon, tens of thousands of signposts perch haphazardly one on top of the other from locales near and far. Later we enjoyed an evening around the campfire to plan the next leg of our trip and so we will be heading to Whitehorse, YT to spend a couple of days doing laundry, bicycling, and hiking around the area.Located deep within the Yukon, one of the most densely wooded areas of Canada, sits a patch of land that’s unlike any other forest on the planet. We took a short walk and found a monument to an engineer that died during the building of the Alaska Hwy. It is still raining off and on and the mosquitos are present but not overwhelming. Not the most level spot but J&J the professional RV’rs that they are, made it level. It was a bit of a tight squeeze for Jimmy’s 5th Wheel but he was able to maneuver it out of danger and parked along side of the narrow road. ![]() We drove down a narrow road that led down to the lake where there were a number of camping spots right along the lake. This was a free campground as it straddles the border between the two territories. We spent the night at Morley Lake campground on the border of BC and the Yukon. We placed ours along with so many others to commemorate our stop here. ![]() Jackie had a little metal sign that she modified and added our initials and the year of our visit. 07/09 – 07/10/19 We passed through the town of Watson Lake and walked through the Signpost Forest which was begun by a homesick GI in 1942 and has been steadily added to over the years and now boasts more than 80,000 signs of every shape and size.
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