Leaving Your Mark: The History of Watson Lake’s Signpost Forest

From one sign to a hundred thousand

In 1942, Private Carl K. Lindley of the 341st Army Engineers was injured while working on the Alaska Highway near Lower Post, BC, and sent to recover at an aid station in what's now Watson Lake. Given light duty repairing and repainting directional signposts, he added one of his own accord: a hand-painted plank pointing toward Danville, Illinois, and the 2,835 miles between him and home. Other homesick soldiers followed his lead, and the habit never stopped. A couple from Ohio hammered up the 10,000th sign in 1990. Today the collection numbers well over 100,000, growing by roughly 25 new signs a week, and it's genuinely so vast that the Watson Lake Visitor Centre no longer keeps an inventory of what's actually in it.

Lindley's own original sign was eventually lost to time, weather and decades will do that to a painted plank. But in 1992, fifty years after he first nailed it up, Lindley and his wife Elinor made the trip back to Watson Lake and placed a replica in its place. It's still there today, the quiet origin point of everything that grew up around it.

Wandering the forest

Part of the charm is simply walking the rows, reading names from around the world, Berlin, Moscow, Dublin, alongside tiny towns nobody's heard of, and hunting for a sign from somewhere near your own home. Street signs, welcome signs, licence plates, and even signed dinner plates all hang alongside hand-lettered boards. It's free, open at all hours, and genuinely moving in an odd way, a physical map of everyone who has ever passed this remote northern crossroads. You'll find it right at Km 980 of the Alaska Highway, hard to miss and impossible to see all of in one pass.

Leaving your mark

Many visitors bring a sign to add, a spare licence plate, a painted board with their name or town. If you forget, you can often pick up materials in Watson Lake to make one, and the visitor centre keeps hammers and nails on hand for exactly this purpose. Bring a marker, and the community spirit does the rest. Just add yours respectfully among the throng.

While you're there

Watson Lake also has a small interpretive centre on the Alaska Highway's construction and, on clear nights, is a fine dark-sky spot. It makes a natural overnight or long lunch stop on a highway road trip between the Yukon and points south or east.

Quirky, sprawling, and unexpectedly touching, the Signpost Forest is one of the North's great roadside legends, and one of the few attractions where you get to leave a permanent piece of yourself behind.