Alaska 2012

We set off from Hyder at 8am. After entering Canada – Hyder’s on the border – we drove through a small town and then rode for 150 miles without seeing any habitation and only a few vehicles! Indeed for the next 250 miles we passed no towns or hamlets and just a very few motels and petrol stations. All we saw was massive lakes, massive mountains and massive forests. My motorbike friends may joke about the enormous petrol tank on my bike but they wouldn’t if they were out here!

Not sure what I think about Canada. The people are friendly and the prices of things OK, but its vastness and desolateness makes it only suitable for a certain kind of person I guess – suspect that’s why most of its population just live in a few cities mainly on the East coast. Also the wild life seems to be in hiding as far as I’m concerned. Just one moose today! I also wonder if it’s a bit over hyped for you see people casually cycling around miles from anywhere without a care in the World?

Tomorrow we chug towards Alaska – again. 400 miles to Haines Junction: Oh, by the way, I’m currently in the Yukon at Watson Lake and riding through the Yukon all tomorrow. By tomorrow night we’ll have done nearly 3000 miles and be quite near the half way point which, frankly, I’m looking forward to. The jury’s still out as to whether I’ll do the Dalton Highway to Prudhoe Bay. I’ll more or less definitely do the first 250 miles of it to Wiseman but after that its 250 miles of packed dirt road!

Indeed the roads are surprisingly good over here – please touch wood for me. A couple of guys were here 3 years ago and both are surprised how much new road has been laid. Let’s hope it continues.

I’m staying in weird place tonight, ‘The Airforce Lodge’, which is the last remaining one of its type. It’s a prefabricated building designed to house American transit pilots who flew new American war planes to Fairbanks where they gave them to Russian pilots who flew them on to Russia and used them to fight the Germans in WW2. Apparently there were thousands of these lodges the caretaker said – this one has been completely refurbished. Quite an irony that the caretaker is a good German from Hannover!

Today, Friday the 22^nd, was a sort of rest day with a short trip to a Glacier thrown in. I started the trip to the Glacier – 23 miles on a packed dirt road which I’ve got a video of – but after about 10 miles decided this was no rest. The road was easy enough to ride. But even with my suspension set to ‘off road’ and only going a steady 30 mph it was like riding a bucking bronco. So, while the rest rode on I turned back and crossed the Canadian border to the nearest town with a petrol station to fill up in. I then returned across the border to Hyder where I’m sitting having a beer which maybe followed by another one or four.

Out of interest, and for any other intrepid adventurers reading this, my policy of having disposal pants and socks (the pants I took the socks I’ve bought here for about $9.99 for six) might amuse my fellow travellers but works really well. Similarly, having two proper motorcycle sweat shirts – one to wear one to wash – that I wear as my base body covering works very well. Indeed, all in all I’m well organised except for Canadian money which I forgot to get any of and finding a bank over here is quite difficult as we just seem to go through small towns with ATM machines only – my cash card is only for US dollars! But I can use my credit card for petrol and motels – it’s just spending money I have difficulty organising, but I’ll survive. Also, for info, at each stop (100 to 150 miles) I drink water and eat an energy bar to help keep me alert.

Tomorrow is long miles so I’ll just chill for the rest of the day and make sure everything is packed and ready for an early (7 am) start again.

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.

Just a short post to say I’m in Hyder, Alaska which has limited internet and no mobile phone facilities. Indeed if I didn’t have Wera’s old laptop which has an ethernet connection I couldn’t speak to you?

We’re here for a couple of days – to look at bears and how the early Alaskan’s lived. We then head back to (nearly) civilisation. I’ll try and update the blog tomorrow when I have more time. At the moment I’m just tired having spent 8 hours on the road having driven through ‘epic’ landscapes.

PS The bears look so cuddly and tame!!

Today we started at 8am and finished riding at 4pm. We did 310 miles approx down a main road for as I said previously there aren’t really any other options here apart from trekking through forest paths! We have traveled to Vanderhoof – our last stop in BC before going to Hyder in Alaska tomorrow.

When we first set of today the scenery was pretty desolate and I wondered if this is how it is going to be the more North we go, but after about 50 miles we started riding in a rich, verdant plain with a sprinkling of farms along the way. And that’s how it’s been all the way to Vanderhoof.

For the last 100 odd miles I chose to ride alone and enjoyed doing so. However as hard as I looked I didn’t see any bears or caribou (there were quite a few beware signs for these large creatures).

The motel we’re booked into is pretty good and but there were no good restaurants local so my room-mate and I went for a burger at a local take away (not a McDonalds!).

Everybody’s putting a brave face on it but the prospect of the distances we have to complete over the next few days is daunting to most and it will be interesting to see how things pan out. I’ll definitely go to Fairbanks – but I’ve got an open mind about doing the next 500 miles to Prudhoe Bay. Not because the road is difficult but more because Prudhoe is a real dump where you aren’t allowed to get to the sea and the place is swarming with mosquitoes. However it is the most Northerly point of the continent and many in the group will feel duty bound to do the last leg as they’ve come this far. I don’t share that compunction. However, if I’m feeling fit and the weather is good I may go the whole way. A day at a time …………..

I’m currently in Caribou Lodge, Clinton, British Columbia. I’m thinking I should have done a blog yesterday because today has blown yesterday away. We did quite a bit of mileage on an Interstate yesterday (boring) with our one big detour being to Mount St Helen, when after about a 10 mile ride up twisty roads in the pouring rain to the observation point of a neighbouring mountain (Mount St Helen is still an active volcano) we discovered we were in the clouds and couldn’t see anything!

We then stayed at the most dire Motel ever. Without being racist it is our experience that motels run by Americans are usually good whereas motels run by Asian Indians in America (a growing phenomena) are run down with poor service. You can guess who ran this motel. However I slept well and was on the road again at seven. After an hour we were through a very friendly Canadian custom point and quickly driving through the outskirts of Vancouver, To the north of Vancouver we drove the coast road a bit and the scenery was breathtaking. We then started going inland through the valley of a mountain range and for mile after mile you just experienced both exquisite roads and scenery. British Columbia is huge!!

After about a two hundred and twenty odd mile ride the tour leader said there was a dirt rode to the hotel (which was ten miles away) – which we had to do, or lose face. So I then did about 10 miles standing on the pegs riding through mud and shale. But we all stayed on and I won’t be doing anymore of that. The upside is the motel is top class and the owner is a biker who threw 100 dollars in the till for our drinks. Great guy!

One observation about driving in BC. You look at your sat nav and don’t see any other roads than the one your on most of the time. That’s because there aren’t any. There’s just one road going through vast sways of wilderness with small hamlets dotted along it every 50 or 100 miles. Not a place to break down in.

Beware of the bear (or actually ‘don’t feed the bear’) signs have been appearing for the last 100 miles, but we haven’t seen any yet.

Well I guess that’s it for the moment. I was thinking as I rode I should have a tape recorder to record my thoughts as by the time I blog I have forgotten half I thought and saw – like the experience of riding through Seattle in the pouring rain yesterday on a road network that makes spaghetti junction look like a toy. But I guess a recorder would be overkill. I’ll try and post some pictures now if I don’t fall asleep first. Bye for now.