The trouble is the more spellbinding scenery you drive through the more you start to get blasé about it. Yesterday, after driving for about fifty miles through relatively gentle forests and farmed plains, we crested a gentle gradient to see a snow capped mountain range that just went on for ever running along the Alaska Sea coastline. You can see it very clearly on Google maps if you switch to terrain view.
We then rode through this – the roads are in the valleys thank God and don’t try to cross the mountains – past/by the side of flowing rivers, melting snow falls and glaciers. Yes glaciers! At one stage we rode on a stretch 130 km long that didn’t have a house, fuel stop, lay by or anything for its length. The scale of things is just enormous.
We stopped for tonight and tomorrow at a place called Hyder in Alaska (just). Basically it’s an old gold town that’s been left unchanged as a tourist trap. The roads are sort of packed mud and 30k up the road is a place we’re going today where tourists view bears grazing and or catching and eating salmon.
On Saturday we resume our journey North, back into Canada through the Yukon and then into Alaska properly. We’ve done about 2000 miles now so it’s about another 1300 miles to Fairbanks before contemplating the last 500 miles to Prudhoe Bay on the Dalton Highway.
The group has gelled pretty well together. An odd bunch that probably have an average age in their mid fifties – if you exclude the youngsters who are forty and forty five respectively. Two or three are recovering from nervous breakdowns, on or two are retired after voluntary redundancies, one is a very senior civil servant and none of us seem hard up.
Last night I slept from 9pm to 7pm – which gives an indication of how tired we get in the day: My room mate is still snoring away as I type and it’s nearly 8am. Ah well, coffee and breakfast time now and then I’ll upload some photos.