The featured ride this year was a seven day, 3,200 mile outbound trip through British Columbia, Alberta, Yukon, and Alaska, encompassing the Alaska Highway from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, through Tok, Alaska, and ending in Whittier, Alaska. The return trip was a five‐day sail to Washington State courtesy of the Alaska Marine Highway, arriving in Bellingham via the Inside Passage.
We had a nice send‐off from our wives, who joined us at our customary meeting stop at Starbucks in Duvall.
Our familiar route through northeastern Washington (see April in Cascadia) kept us in the only sunshine we were going to see for a few days. The wet spring and late snowmelt had the rivers running high; the Methow was an impressive sight. Into Canada west of Waneta on State Route 25 — if you are ever in Rossland, B.C., for dinner, I recommend the fish and chips at Flying Steamshovel Inn. We got the tents up at Beaver Creek with just enough time left to recap the day before hitting the sleeping bags.
A latté and muffin on the main street of Creston
the next morning got us started on the road to the parks in Alberta.
We had not got very far from breakfast when John’s bike stopped running — the gas line had become disconnected from the tank.
Ten minutes to let the gas evaporate from the engine where it had spilled from the tank, and we were back on our way.
We were taking a break on the shoulder in Kootenay National Park
when we were passed by a two‐up cruiser. They were
listening to their stereo using the crank it up to 11 so we can hear it through our helmets
method, and we could hear it for quite a while after they had
disappeared over the next rise in the road. We ended up bumping into them a few times in the days ahead as we made our
way north.
The weather was gray and mostly wet throughout the day, but not uncomfortably cold. We encountered a black bear, a grizzly bear, bighorn sheep, and an elk along the way. We also saw a coyote with a rabbit in its jaws. The series of wildlife overpasses in Banff National Park were as impressive as expected, and several more were under construction.
Jasper, Alberta, is a very inviting community and clearly the launching point for a variety of recreational activites — and it was busy. After dinner at Cassios, we had time for hot showers in Whistlers Campground before calling it a day.
The following morning, a latté and croissant at the Soft Rock Cafe in Jasper was about as tasty as one might imagine a latté and croissant would be
in a restaurant advertising breakfast & pizzeria
, but the skies augured rain ahead and called for a hot beverage no matter
its provenance.
The first RCMP vehicle I spotted was at a gas station in Grand Cache, Alberta; we were passing through territory that was rife with resource extraction activity, but it nevertheless had a distinctly remote character, and it surprised me that the RCMP had been scarce in the seemingly more well‐traveled regions. A stop at Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to take photos at the landmark sign marking mile zero of the Alaska Highway was the highlight of the day, which ended at Charlie Lake.
The weather finally cleared up on the fourth day. We had a classic eggs and bacon breakfast in Pink Mountain at one of the many small inns that line the Alaska Highway, and for every one of which is open for business several have been boarded up and abandoned to the elements. The folks running the restaurant were very nice — the cook came out of the kitchen to chat for a few minutes — and the food was a good complement to their disposition. It is difficult for someone accustomed to high‐rise working conditions and ready access to most every material comfort to conceive the effect a frame of reference consisting of a circle with a small radius in the middle of an empty landscape would have on one’s prospects, and I prefer instead to think the folks we encountered in Pink Mountain are not in fact stuck on an island.
After grocery store sandwiches in a park in Fort Nelson,
we began gaining a bit of altitude. We passed a moose on the far side of mostly‐thawed Summit Lake, and saw more sheep and elk during the afternoon.
The approach to the campground up the highway from the south is a beautiful stretch of shoreline road. I had naturally dismantled the video camera earlier because the weather was threatening, and so missed getting what would likely have been some of the best footage of the entire trip. I was tempted after dinner to drive back down the highway and take a second pass with the camera on, but dissuaded myself. A snapshot of the lake taken from our camp site appears in the slide show.
The weather from this point on would be almost uniformly pleasant, with the exception of a few miles during the ride on the penultimate day. As you can see from the adjacent photo, the Yamaha was by now carrying quite a bit of evidence of one of the prominent features of the surrounding landscape, which was mud. I was happy to have driven out from under the rain and to spend the next several hundred miles under blue skies.
The hours of daylight had been increasing noticeably each day as we gained on the Arctic Circle; it was disconcerting to wake up momentarily in what, under my customary circumstances, would have been the middle of the night to discover twilight filtering through the tent. Sunset on the fifth day would be 11∶14 PM.
The ride that day took us through beautiful, isolated Wood Bison territory, and we saw many of them.
It was also our most prolific bear‐sighting day. We stopped for a man‐sized breakfast in Coal River,
where we also gassed up.
As we were working the pumps, a fellow approached the pump attendant and asked,How much is gas here?After being told, he said,I’m not paying that much for gas.There was not another gas station for miles and miles. What was the guy doing, comparison shopping? Negotiating?
There was a Harley and a BMW pulled up outside the restaurant. The two riders were finishing up, and we chatted with them for a while. Both were headed north (separately), and we saw each of them again later along the road.
Into Yukon we went, with grocery store sandwiches for lunch in Teslin.
We gassed up
again in Whitehorse, where a local character driving a nicely maintained 1965 Ford Thunderbird gave me a ball point pen
with Annie Lake Trucking embossed on it because I’ll never use them all.
Dinner at Kluane Park Inn in Haines Junction,
where the cell phone pulled in a signal from somewhere allowing a call home, and then a good night’s sleep in the tent at Pine Lake rounded out the day.
My notes for day six begin, What a day.
We hit the road at 7∶04 AM with clear skies and Alaska on the horizon. The ride to Destruction Bay took us along the outskirts of Kluane National Park, which contains the tallest peak in Canada. In a word, it was gorgeous.
Breakfast in Destruction Bay at the well‐kept Talbot Arm Motel restaurant, where the menu features a photo of Kluane Lake across the street tossing breakers ashore — apparently when the wind kicks up, it is quite a sight; Destruction Bay was given its name during construction of the highway because the wind would blow down structures.
Up to this point, the entire length of the Alaska Highway had been in really quite good repair. Once we got north of Destruction Bay, its condition changed immediately and dramatically for the worse. We rode mile after mile (after mile after mile) over surface broken by frost heave and just generally in bad condition. Where the road was being repaired it was covered in loose gravel, which is not a motorcyclist’s friend. Our rate of advance slowed considerably in order for us to be able to safely negotiate a path through the damage and gravel on the roadway. It was not fun, and it reached its nadir of not‐funness when John’s rear tire went flat, pierced by a sharp piece of gravel.
Standing roadside in the middle of Yukon with a flat motorcycle tire is an invitation to discover an entire vocabulary of epithets, then run off into the weeds to kick something not quick‐witted enough to get out of the way; however, John instead got out his repair kit, talked nicely to the tire for a while, dosed it with the portable air compressor (we had two of them between us), and an hour later we were back underway. That repaired tire lasted another several hundred miles without further ado.
And then we were in Alaska. Three hundred yards before the U.S. Customs station, the road surface changed to fresh, unblemished, butter‐smooth asphalt, and it remained that way for a fair distance into the state.
We had grocery store sandwiches for lunch in Tetlin under a warm, sunny sky. Somewhere outside Slana we rode into a downpour — just drenching rain. On top of which it was a thunderstorm, and I was not carrying a Farraday cage with me: motorcycles and lightning are not a good combination, and it was a nerve‐wracking episode. Within 20 minutes, we were back into the sunshine and mid‐70s and had dried out in no time.
We had spent some time after reaching Alaska on the Sena talking about pushing into Anchorage in order to be able to add Homer to the trip the following day. Anchorage was about 180 miles beyond our programmed camp spot for the night, which was Dry Creek, and detouring into Homer meant we had to find budget in the schedule to get there. We spent about 20 minutes pulled up in the campground at Dry Creek, where I dithered about saddling back up for another 180 miles and decided to push on. It may have been the mosquitoes that were stabbing me as I stood there that encouraged me; in fact, I took one of them inside my helmet with me to Anchorage. It ate well before it died.
We were not very far down the road when we ran into another thunderstorm, and we were in it or on its periphery for quite a few miles. The weather cleared for good around Tehneta Pass on Glenn Highway, and the scenery commenced: breathtaking around each corner all the way to Anchorage.
Despite the best efforts of the Garmin to find a restaurant in Anchorage that was not part of a chain, we finally surrendered at 10∶00 PM and settled into a booth at Denny’s. We had agreed to compensate ourselves for the impromptu extra time in the saddle by finding a hotel, and so 642 miles after we had rolled on the throttle at Pine Lake in Haines Junction, wrestled the bikes over the frost‐broken highway, fixed a flat tire, and clenched up through thunderstorms, Holiday Inn Express in Anchorage got our business for the night. What a day, indeed.
The ride onto the Kenai Peninsula the next day disclosed where all the Alaska postcard photos must be taken. Holy cow. Mountains erupt straight up out of the bays and inlets and surround the traveler.
We took our time getting to the turnoff to Homer, where we decided that we had asked enough of the repaired tire on the Triumph and not to tempt fate any further by disappearing into that stretch of the Peninsula; instead, we covered the last few miles into Seward and — with the exception of the brief backtrack the next day to Whittier to await the ferry — called it a trip.
One thing I failed to anticipate was how violently the camera’s mount would shake given the state of repair of the road, and so I had to discard a considerable amount of footage simply because of the effect of that shaking. I have been experimenting with changes to the mounting hardware to reduce the displacement of the camera as the suspension fights with the road surface.