Had a great night’s sleep in that artic sleeping bag – didn’t feel cold at all. Up early and on the road by 07:37 am. How nice to be back on a fully paved road… though I know I’ve got some more rough ones to go on yet.
The morning was dreary and overcast with intermittent rain and almost freezing temperatures. I stopped once more at the Klondike Junction to gas up – I wonder if anyone is ever here to serve or is it completely self service/credit card only? I must have been still half asleep as I promptly pulled up at a diesel only pump.
Look at the piles of snow still there off the side of the forecourt and up against the Nissen building at 2:57 in video #1, even after the couple of very warm days. They must get a lot of snow up here in the winter and just push it all to one side in giant heaps.
You can see the Klondike River at 3:19 in video #1 – look carefully and you can see that the ice has broken up quite a bit since we came up this stretch two days ago. The road is right on the river and it’s clear that parts of it gets washed into the river from time to time. My guess is that pile driving the bank for such a long stretch would be uneconomic, so they just repair the damage as and when it occurs. You can see an example of the snowmelt runoff crossing the road into the river at 3:49.
As I was expecting, before the end of the morning the road surface changed again – back to the brown gravel dressing as you can see at 4:59 in video #1. It wasn’t too bad to drive on from the perspective of ruts and potholes, but I was still concerned about chips flying up and damaging the bodywork or, worse still by far, the windshield. This was a Federal project which didn’t surprise me at all because for a while I had been wondering how the tax income from a population of 48,000 over such a huge area could possibly support the infrastructure I was using. I think I would support a toll for folks like me who used the infra structure for leisure as opposed to the locals who had no choice. The dressing surface seemed to go on, and on, and on……
If you look to the right carefully from 7:19 on in video #1 you just get a quick glimpse of the Stewart River and the surface looks quite different from what it did 3 days ago when I last crossed it. There is a considerable break up of the ice.
At 0:39 in video #2 I am just approaching the bridge over the Pelling River at Pelling Crossing – if you look quickly to the right as I enter the bridge you can see a very different picture of the surface of the river than was there three days ago. The ice is definitely well into the process of breaking up.
I stopped at this junction to get some coffee and gas up but I also took the opportunity to stretch my legs and get some fresh air by walking back up on to the bridge. I took a series of still shots with my D333, 2023 05 06 Artic Trip-1 through 8, including a panoramic of upstream/downstream in shots 6 and 7. Shot 8 is the expansion joint on the South end of the bridge – look at that huge gap. I think this must be because very cold winters and sometimes very hot summers result in a wide range of expansion for the bridge to safely cope with.
There a great view of the ice breaking up on the Yukon River just before Carmacks, at 2:05 in video #2. Carmacks is situated in the middle of a series of large bends in the Yukon River – hence all the bridges in the area.
Finally, I was at the same hotel/restaurant/Post Office that I had stopped at on the way North, but this time it was empty, with staff eager to serve someone. It was time for lunch, and I hadn’t eaten yet so I treated myself to a pizza, a “put everything you have on top of it” pizza. It was out of this world….
Just as I approach the building (4:12 in video #2) you can see a pink sign which explains the history of the building. I stupidly park so close that you can’t see half of it and then proceed to read it out loud. It was originally built to house two RCMP officers who had been assigned to the area to support the transfer of ore (presumably gold) from the local mines.
~100 miles to go to Whitehorse!
At 5:26 in video #2 I assume that the scenic view is of a river, but in fact I was driving alongside Fox Lake, the 10 mile long thin lake I had passed by on the way up – no wonder I thought it was a river!
At 3:30 in video #3 you can see the approach to the end of the Klondike Highway at the junction with the Alaska Highway. It may seem strange that parts of the “Alaska” Highway are in Canada but there’s a good reason for it. It was built in 1942, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, to provide a direct road connection between Alaska Territory (it was not a state until 1959) and the 48 states (now known as the Lower 48).
Under Canada agreed to let the USA military build the road through Canada provide the USA met the cost and that control of the road was handed back to Canada after the war ended. The USA duly hand back control in 1946. Today the road is known as the Alaska Highway along it’s entire length but each state also has its own designation for the road and in the case of British Columbia, that is BC 97.
The name of that mountain you can see in the background at 4:19 in video #3 is a bit of a surprise – it’s Surprise Mountain!
So now I was somewhat relieved… if I had a puncture now, a tow to somewhere to fix it would take just minutes and not cost the earth. Plus, I would be heading to the Subaru garage here in Whitehorse to try to get a new spare wheel and tire – you can see me doing this at 5:31 in video #3.
After some surprise that I might need not just a new spare tire, but a wheel to put it on too, Subaru said they would be happy to sell me both, they could order them straight away and they should be here in 1 – 2 weeks. I’m glad I didn’t hang around waiting for them to arrive as I ordered them when I got home and two weeks later there’s no sign of them yet.
The very kind woman who was helping me asked how I had managed to wreck both the tire and the wheel. “Well, I was driving up the Dempster Highway and…..”. I stopped because at the point where I said “Dempster” she was smiling and nodding her head. Somehow, I don’t think I was the first person to come back from the Dempster and ask them for stuff to do with wheels and tires. They said they couldn’t help me and then proceeded to do just that by telling me there was a Canadian Tire just across the street.
For those of you not familiar with Canadian Tire, they sell tires. And they also sell just about everything else you could want in life to drive, cook, eat, live, camp, repair, build and enjoy yourself. In fact, when we first arrived in Canada in my imported Subie, where did I get the official importation inspection done? Canadian Tire, of course.
They didn’t just have a tire plug kit, they had every possible flavor of tire plug kits, so I bought three that between them meant I had every plug, tool and adhesive that I might ever need. I still had 1,504 miles to go without a spare tire, so I was taking no chances! (no…. I never did need to use these kits on the way home).
I stayed at the Best Western in the city, which I chose because it had a “business center”. That turned out to be a lone PC and printer in a hallway on the 3rd floor. You could access the web and create/print documents provided of course you could find the member of staff who had the credentials to log in, and then you couldn’t do anything else, so my plan to use the PC to recover my laptop backup disc from my laptop crash was a nonstarter. I wouldn’t hit another hotel with a business center until Prince George, ~ a 1,000 miles South.
Best Western…. I understand you want security on that PC, but you can achieve that without shutting almost everything down on it.
I grabbed some really good food for dinner in the “restaurant”, a.k.a. the very noisy sports bar – see IMG_1902 and IMG_1903 in the still photos. While I was having dinner I got an email from the owner of the hotel that I was supposed to be staying at in Dease Lake tomorrow night. The severe floods from the rapid snowmelt had trashed BC 37 so there was now no way to get to Dease Lake from where I was. To get home I would have to continue on BC 97 down to BC 99 of the Trans Canada Highway 1, adding ~65 miles to my journey. My concern now was that I already knew that BC 97 too had been cut off further South for the same reason. If BC 97 remained closed then I would be stuck as there is no other way South other than 37 and 97.
Time to grab some rest…..
You can see the stills and videos shot today here.
