I was up early to get some breakfast, pack and get over to the workshop by 8:00 am to get the plugged tire patched. There I met the second Glaswegian – Scott the Scot! I left the Subie with him and went to get a cup of tea and look at email.
About an hour or so later I went back to see if the tire had been done but as I approached the workshop, I saw a guy with a car on a trailer about to depart. He said good morning, so I did too and mentioned that my tire was being repaired. He pointed to a wheel on the car on his trailer and said, “they just done these”.
They have? Well, that’s nice because I was here with the birds this morning and no one else was in front of me. I think that the guy with the trailer was the guy that was based there and went out on tow calls, which would explain why they did his tire first. It was slightly annoying but frankly beggars can’t be choosers and I was definitely begging!
You can see the interaction with Scott at the start of video #1, He had actually patched the main tire but they were having trouble trying to repair the spare. He had actually patched it but it was proving impossible to inflate it because the damage to the wheel rim was preventing a proper seal between the tire and the rim. The spare has to be inflated to 60 psi so that seal is even more important than on a normal tire. You can see Scott attempting to inflate the spare at 1:49 in video #1 but not only was the rim damaged but the sidewall of the tire was too, so even if it could have been inflated it wouldn’t be a good idea to put that wheel back on because if the whole wheel collapsed that would wreck the axle hub, disc brakes etc.
I was going to have to proceed without a spare. Earlier in the journey I had bought a can of tire inflator so if pushed I could use that, but again it’s only good for a limited distance and just for good measure it can ruin the tire pressure sensor/transmitter. I was going to have to drive back down the Dempster with no spare and a normal road surface was 229 miles away. 229 miles of the Dempster not only not with two spares, but with no spare….. I must have been nuts!
But the garage didn’t have more that half a dozen tires in stock, none of which fitted the Subie, and a 250-mile tow to a tire shop was costly beyond belief. I had no choice but to set off, drive carefully and pray a lot. I did a final pressure check on the patched tire and drove the short distance to the gas pump to gas up at CA$2;15 a litre. That may seem to be an extortionate price to pay but you have to remember that every drop of that gas has to be trucked in on a 500 mile round trip and it’s got to be stored and delivered in a system that can operate in very cold and very hot conditions. Well worth the price.
Freeze video #1 at 2:58 and you can see a notice listing the services at this complex – I wonder why the Laundromat is no longer operating?
It was a beautiful, almost cloudless day though a little cold. At 3:49 in video #1 you get a fantastic view looking South across Eagle Plain and in the background are the Ogilvie mountains which I would go through later today. Note I am trying to stay in the middle of the road. By 5:15 in video #1 I am back in a boreal forest area.
At 5:33 in video #1 you can enjoy another fantastic view of the Ogilvie Range, this time to accompanying Beatles music. You also get a sense of just how wide the valley is between the Dempster and the mountains. The rest of the journey down to the end of the Dempster was slower, just as rough as going up but otherwise uneventful with not a single puncture in sight! At 2:02 in video #3 you can see the approach to the bridge over the Klondike River just before Klondike Junction where the Dempster ends at the Klondike Highway.
Although it had started to get cloudy, the air temperature had warmed up considerably during the day as evidenced by the snowmelt channels and puddles by the side of the heading into Dawson City. This was causing an unusually rapid general snowmelt – which, although I didn’t know it at the time, was to cause problems that would alter my planned route back home.
I stayed at the Bonanza Creek hotel as I had two nights before and even went back to Anabel’s Noodles for dinner as I had two nights before as well. I would go there every night if I could but it’s just a little too far from home.
I got to bed reasonably early and watched some TV, snuggly wrapped up in my artic sleeping bag.
A very, very different sort of day from yesterday!
You can see the stills and videos shot today here.
