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Fort Nelson, BC to Dawson Creek, BC: The long miles

We have ridden the length of the AlCan Highway. Two college young ladies took the obligatory photo at mile marker 0 as they were beginning their Alaskan Highway adventure and we ended ours.

This last stage felt long because it did not produce the visual stimuli the rest of the highway did. Actually the best part was the agricultural stretch from Fort St. John to Dawson Creek. Golden round hay bales in green meadows, horses and especially cows grazing were a welcome sight; it had a soothing effect after so much forest all day.

The towns now look like towns again, the service stations' access ramps and the motels parking lots are paved.

This last day was very cold; we wore just about all we packed including balacklavas. It was also dusty in places and muddy in others. A serious auto accident dampened our mood.

We had a comfortable motel though and we were glad for it because when we finished cleaning up the bikes it was quite late and we were tired. Enduring the cold for 300 miles uses energy.

This concludes our Alaskan interlude. Tomorrow we turn our bikes south and east toward the heartlands of Canada and some of its National Parks.

Watson Lake, YT to Fort Nelson, BC: on the AlCan, through the Rockies; spectacular!

Outstanding scenery along a perfect motorcycling road, plentiful wild game viewing and … cold defined today.

It was 41 degrees Fahrenheit (5 Celcius) when we set out this morning and shortly thereafter we came to a wide area of colder air so we put on our rain gear to try to slow the flow of chilling air against the body. A couple hours later we stopped for potty, food and warmth and I dug into my saddle bags for woolen long johns, long sleeve undershirt and balaclava. Julia was smarter: she began the ride with most of that on. For a couple of hours in the afternoon it warmed up some but by the time we were approaching Summit Lake it got really cold – colder than in the morning – and stayed cold all the way to the hotel in Fort Nelson, BC.

Within the first twenty minutes of the ride we saw a young black bear meandering toward the tree line alongside the road. Later we ran into several herds of buffaloes (bisons). I missed the best picture: a large bull was lying down on the opposite shoulder of the road so when I got close I prepared to take a photo of him. Taking a photo while rolling slow is not easy because both hands are needed for the bike ( gas and clutch). Anyway I managed to get rolling with the camera held between my teeth ready to take it with the left hand and snap a shot as I went by. Things were going well: the buffalo even got up and stood sideways! I juggled the camera –try doing this with the left hand in a winter glove – and generally aimed at him and clicked. You cannot see what you aim fo because the hand hides the screen because the clicker is on the right. But I could not miss; such a huge creature so close. As I rode clear I noticed that the camera was not turned on!

At one point, I noted brake marks on the road and thought that potentially there could be moose in the area, and there was: one cow feeding in a pond. Later in three separate occasions we saw small groups of cariboos. Eventually to crown it all we came onto a young adult black bear on the side of the road (the camera was in the top case!).

I have tried to do justice to the scenery with some pictures but it falls short of the splendor of this stretch of the Rocky Mountains. The road follows fast flowing, milky green rivers and clear lakes, goes up and down valleys, climbs to summits and generally does its best to position scenery attractively for the rider. It was a long delight: 335 miles.

Whitehorse, YT to Watson Lake, YT: more Yukon, more bear … a good day

We left Whitehorse under a blackening sky on the Alaskan Highway (Yukon highway 1) but we never had any rain all day. In the afternoon it became very windy but for us it was a quartering tailwind so it did not affect us badly.

The ride was a succession of mighty rivers, beautiful lakes with mountain backgrounds and incredible beaver dams. We even saw two bears: a yearling that I captured on a photo crossing the road and whom we observed browsing for a while and its mother. The sow was impressively big; her mask was dark brown and her pelt black, shiny and full. When we lost sight of her we moved on because she was not very far from us.

We crossed a Continental Divide this afternoon, but I cannot say which watershed it represents (Arctic Ocean vs. Pacific?).

We ate lunch in Teslin and spoke at length with an Australian couple traveling two-up on an older BMW 1000 GS. He told us that he was 60 kg (132 lbs) over gross and they were headed for Prudoe Bay, AK to begin a journey south all the way to Tierra de Fuego, Argentina. We wish them success; it sounds like a grand adventure. He has done several adventurous rides in various parts of the world. They mentioned the Air Force Lodge as a good, impeccably clean place to spend the night in Watson Lake. They had heard it from a couple traveling the AlCan in a 1940 Ford. The people traveling the AlCan form their own little community with its own “grapevine”. It is rather interesting. Often we find the same people at our hotel that we had lunch with earlier in the day or a day or two before. We hear about someone and then a day or two later we run into that person and can say:"Yes, so-and-so has told us you said this!"

We were blessed to find a vacancy at the Air Force Lodge where I am writing this. Total mileage was just under 300 miles (or as Julia says: 460 km).

Watson Lake is where there is a park filled with some 60,000 signs. It began with a recuperating soldier in 1942 who posted his hometown and distance on the highway sign post.

Dawson City, UT to Whitehorse, YT: Highway 2

The clouds began to drip as we headed out of town, enough to make drop patterns on the beaver ponds along the road but not enough to put on the rain gear. Leaving Dawson City is somewhat of a downer because the road cuts through the “scats” of the dredge. All that is left of the bottom of the valley are the piles of boulders (a la Idaho City, ID); the binding top soil and life sustaining dirt was washed off during the dredging process. Soon we climbed out of the valley and all was well with nature again.

Twenty minutes into the ride, the rain proper began so we donned the Frog Togs and rode on. The nicest by-product of the rain is that there was no dust on the gravel portions of the highway. The mud flaps we installed in Anchorage are working perfectly on both bikes – thanks Kurt.

At Stewart Crossing we stopped for fuel, potty, late lunch and warmth (not necessarily in that order). After that the rain was intermittent and we got out of the rain gear at Pelly Crossing. Our tentative goal for the day was Carmacks, YT; it made sense on the map. However it did not proved to be our choice for an overnight so we fueled up again and headed all the way to Whitehorse, YT.

Soon after Carmack we saw a large black bear near the road (brown in color but a black bear nevertheless). We stopped at Braeburn, YT (a gas station / café / RV park) where the café is very famous for its cinnamon buns. Nine inches across and five high, the monsters are also very good: the dough is made just right. We bought one to try and ate a fair portion of it; even at $7 it was still worth it. We arrived in Whitehorse with 560 km for the day.

Tok, AK to Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada: the Top of the World Highway

It is called the Top of the World Highway because it really feels like it. From the tiny settlement of Chicken the clay road rises continuously to above the timberline and crosses the border into Canada’s Yukon Territory on top of a remote high ridge. The road follows the ridges all the way to Dawson City. The road after the border is mostly “chip sealed” and / or simply gravel. The scenery stretches for ever but the pictures do not capture the vastness or the emptiness of the area.

We left Tok after some housekeeping delays and headed toward Chicken, AK. A short few miles before Chicken, a sign says: “Pavement ends” … and it does. From then on until we shut down in Dawson City (not to be confused with Dawson Creek, BC) we ate dust while we learned to ride on powdery clay then on gravel-on-clay. We left at least a couple hundred yards distance between us so we would not be constantly in the dust wake of the leading rider. However, pickup trucks and especially semi-trucks coming the other way raised huge billowing dust clouds that took away ALL visibility for long seconds while, white eyed, we hoped not to run into a berm of gravel, an animal or another vehicle.

Chicken, year around population 15, 4 outhouses, 1 saloon - got its name because the miners who registered it could not agree on the correct spelling of Ptarmigan. These grouses were plentiful in the area and provided meat for the pot – the miners referred to them as “chickens”. There we met a friendly North Carolinian, Aaron, and had lunch together. He finished his master’s degree in the spring and has been riding his refurbished 1200 Goldwing; up and down the East Coast then west to Alaska. Fully loaded he says he is “at a thousand pounds”. He does his own repairs, and saves money by camping. He had just gone over the Top of the World Highway that morning and from the dust on him and his motorcycle we got an inkling of what was in store for us.

Arriving in Dawson City is really cool: there is no bridge over the Yukon so a free ferry runs back and forth. The river carries a lot of water and is amazingly swift so the ferry ride follows a parabolic course from one side to the other. We remained seated on our bikes holding the brakes because there is no ramp on the landing and the ferry simply rams the shoreline, and drops its ramp. Dawson City is at the confluence of the Yukon and the Klondike rivers. These names fired the adventure dreams in the children’s novels I read growing up; being here is exciting for me. Dawson City retains its gold mine character (saloons/gambling and dance halls) and many of its original buildings. Our hotel “Yukon Hotel” was built in 1898. We have the run of it and our very large room overlooks the river.

Dawson City is also where the exhausted, starving would-be miners arrived floating down the ice clogged Yukon from Whitehorse, YT and were met by the fresh, well fed would-be miners who had not rushed headlong into the wilderness but had waited for the steamer service to begin and cruised up in style to the Klondike gold fields! The former had clawed their way up the mountain and glaciers out of Skagway, AK to the border where the Mounties would require them to show enough supplies to last them one year before entering Canada and head for the Klondike gold fields. So these adventurers went back and forth from the border to Skagway in miserable weather moving all their supplies up ridiculously steep, snow covered terrain on their backs. Once through the border, they wintered in very rough (very cold) country waiting for the ice to begin melting. When this started they built log rafts and floated the river toward Dawson City. How any survived is a mystery to me.

Glennallen, AK to Tok, AK: a pleasant ride into Alaska’s interior

This shorter ride (143 miles) gets us back to Tok where we will ride straight north again to do the Top of the World Highway. The day followed the pattern we have noticed: cloudy and cold in the morning and brightening into sunshine in the late afternoon. We left Glennallen later than usual because we mailed equipment back to Ohio; equipment made redundant by route choices. Today was a very nice day to be riding, the natural surroundings continue to promote musing and praises. In Glennallen we stayed in the same motel as on the way in: the Snowshoe Motel (in the same room:6), Larry – one of the V-Strom riders – left our route book there for us to pick up on our way.