Sign Post Forest is a collection of signs at Watson Lake, Yukon, and is one of the most famous of the landmarks along the Alaska Highway. It was started by a homesick GI in 1942.
Private Carl Lindley, of Company D, 341st Army of Engineers, was injured while working on the Alaska Highway near Lower Post, B.C. He was taken to recover at an aid station in what is now Watson Lake, a few miles over the border into the Yukon. While there, Lindley was given light work duty repairing and repainting directional posts. Of his own accord, he added one for Danville, Illinois, 2835 miles where he was from. Several other people added directions to their hometowns, and the idea has been snowballing ever since. Visitors may add their own signs to the more than 100,000 already present.
A miniature maze maintained by the town, the forest has almost 100,000 signs tacked on to towering signposts, listing locations around the world alongside their distances from the Yukon. The forest started “growing” in 1942 when a homesick American soldier erected an homage to his own hometown in Illinois.
The original sign, located at Mile 635 on the Alaska Highway, is no longer there. It was replaced during a 1992 party celebrating the 50-year anniversary of the forest, which had grown exponentially by then.
Today, it has expanded even further. License plates, laminated pages, road signs and handmade plaques decorate the forest, giving shoutouts to hometowns all over the world—from Wyoming in the U.S.A to Winterburg, Germany.
Visitors can bring signs from home or make one at the Visitor’s Interpretive Centre, open daily from mid-May to mid-September, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. The centre also has nails and a hammer to borrow if you forgot yours. While you’re there, check out additional attractions, including equipment used during the construction of the Alaska Highway, and a 60-seat theatre that shows a video about the highway’s construction.
While I was there in 2012 working on the Nearby hospital as a supervisor, I made a sign with all the initials of my crew on some of the scrap from the building materials we were using. After work one day I loaded a ladder into my company truck, drove over to the forest and put up our sign!! (You can see it in the picture gallery) When I was staying there, there was only 2 caches in town, I had to travel to get other caches, which you can read in my monthly blog at: "Magicman65 Adventures Around the World"
To Log this Virtual cache:
Post a photo of yourself or caching group at the Posted Co-ords which is a replica of the original sign post that started all this, but you must have a trackable, a keychain, or something to prove you were here geocaching, even a piece of paper with your cache name on it. You do not need to be in the photo if you do not want to be, but this is to stop armchair cachers using an old photo. If you do not comply your log will be deleted. Enjoy wandering around to see all the signs. Please feel free to post as many picture as you want also.
BONUS POINTS if you post a pic of you or your team putting up a sign of your own!!!
Virtual Rewards 4.0 - 2024-2025
This Virtual Cache is part of a limited release of Virtuals created between January 17, 2024 and January 17, 2025. Only 4,000 cache owners were given the opportunity to hide a Virtual Cache. Learn more about Virtual Rewards 4.0 on the Geocaching Blog.