(In Summer of 2007 I rode my BMW R1150R to Alaska with two friends. I was working at Visa then and had a limited amount of vacation time, so the trip was there and back with just two layover days. I'm posting this in 2021, but have changed the publication date to 2007 so the entry will show in an appropriate place in the blog.)
Dan is a Professor of Classics at Northwestern, whom I met when I was a student there. He's 69 years old (in 2007) and rides a new BMW R1200RT, has a lot of energy, and is very gregarious.
John is a couple of years older than I am and retired early from Visa two years ago. He is very meticulous, is fond of accessories and equipment, and rides a two year old BMW R1200GS.
Both Dan and John have GPS units on their bikes, but I carried a bundle of paper maps as well as The Milepost, a large and heavy book that is the "bible" for visitors to British Columbia, Yukon, and Alaska.
Sunday, July 15
I rode across the Golden Gate Bridge on Highway 101, crossed over to Vallejo on Highway 37 and took I-80 to I-505 to I-5, which I followed to Weed, where I spent the night at a Motel 6. There were wildfires north on I-5 in the Yreka area, and when I went for a run that evening the smoke in the air was just beginning to be annoying. The next morning (Friday, August 3) the smoke was more noticeable and the bike was covered with a small layer of fine, white ash. US Highway 97 begins in Week, and I followed it northeast into Oregon at Klamath Falls, then continued into central Washington where I met John at the town of Cle Elum. Nearby Roslyn was used for locations shots in the TV show Northern Exposure, where it was called Cicely, Alaska. After I unloaded the bike I rode to Roslyn where I took a few pictures of the mural on the side of the Roslyn Café and of the town itself, which is quaint and a bit of a tourist destination.
(Monday, July 16) Highway 97 is the only north-south road in central Oregon and Washington, so it has a fair amount of traffic, including trucks. It isn't a bad road - quite scenic in places - but we've now been on it three times in the last two years, and so are becoming a bit tired of it. We continued north on 97 to Oroville, WA where we met Dan at a new brewpub in town. The pub wasn't officially open yet - the finishing touches ere still being done on the interior - but the owner had invited Dan in and poured him a half pint of amber ale. At my suggestion we rode east for 10 miles and crossed the border near Nighthawk, WA, a tiny town that I read about in a story back in 1970. By crossing at Nighthawk we avoided the congestion of Osoyoos, which is a prime tourist destination to the Okanagan valley. In Canada we followed Highway 3 northwest to Princeton, then north on 5A/97C to Merritt where we spent the night at a motel.
(Tuesday, July 17) In the cold and damp morning we continued on 97C to Logan Lake, where we had our first Canadian breakfast of the trip. Logan Lake looks like it was a mining town at one time, and may be trying to reinvent itself as a resort destination. The town was quiet (well, Sunday morning) but the restaurant was good. We followed 97C to Cache Creek where we headed north on 97, our old friend of the last two years. It is a two lane road in good condition and the only north-south road in central British Columbia, although there isn't much traffic - maybe as much as US 6 across Indiana. There are a few farms, resorts, and small towns although unlike the USA when a Canadian town ends that is it - there are no small businesses strung out along the road outside of the town limits. We rode mostly at or slightly above the 100kph (62 miles per hour) speed limit and at that constant speed my bike was getting 50-55 mpg. Late in the afternoon we arrived in Prince George where there was a bit of traffic for 15 minutes. After driving around town for awhile we eventually checked into the motel that John and I stayed at last year. The place hadn't improved and neither had the restaurant next door. We booked a double room and a single. On the trip when we had two rooms we'd switch off who was in the single. Later in the trip we learned to phone ahead to motels or lodges and ask for family rooms - rooms with three or even four beds - which worked out cheaper than two rooms.
(Wednesday, July 18) We rode back into Prince George in the morning for breakfast, but couldn't find the restaurant that John's GPS directed him to - it may have gone out of business. North of Prince George we crossed the Continental Divide and we felt that the trip was really beginning. There were very few farms now, and finally none - just the occasional resort town and lots of forest. We stopped at Bijou Falls for a break, and continued to Chetwynd where we had lunch.
(Friday, July 20) It was still raining in the morning but we were excited to be heading into Yukon Territory that day. The Alcan changes from 97 to 1 at Contact Creek, the first town in the Yukon. The road dips back into BC and then back to the Yukon at Watson Lake, home of the famous Signpost Forest. During construction of the Alcan during WWII a homesick worker nailed a sign from his hometown to a tree in a park on the edge of town. Now there is a virtual forest of poles and signs from all over the world, but other than that Watson Lake has little to recommend it as far as we could see.
About that time one of the other customers noted that a motorcycle had fallen over outside. It was my bike, and the side stand had sunk into the mud. We righted the bike and I moved it to a more solid location. Another motorcycle came in and we spoke with the rider - Chris from Georgia He asked if he could ride with us heading west, so the four of us set out in the rain to Whitehorse, Yukon. We found a motel there, and I found an auto parts store that had a replacement H-4 headlight bulb - my low beam had burned out and I was riding on my high beam.
(Saturday, July 21) Chris had noticed that oil was seeping from the final drive on John's bike, so this morning before setting out we waited in town until after 9 AM when John called his BMW dealer back in Sparks, Nevada to ask what to do. The dealer said it would probably be OK until he could reach a BMW dealer (over 1000 miles away in Anchorage), so John called the BMW shop in Anchorage to see if they could look at the bike when we got there. Meanwhile, Chris had left early, headed for a campground in Tok, AK. Finally on the road, we continued to Haines Junction where we had lunch. After Haines Junction the Alcan follows the edge of Kluane National park Preserve and the scenery is ever more wild and beautiful. However, the road deteriorates (probably due to the permafrost) with a rough surface, a many patches, frost heaves, sections of chip seal and gravel, and whoop-de-doos. We hit a big road construction site in Destruction Bay where it looked as though they were blasting away a mountain to widen the road. The road was rough and slow all the way to Beaver Creek, the westernmost town in Canada. Another few miles and we were in Alaska and an obligatory stop for pictures of the "Welcome to Alaska" sign.
Another 70 miles and we were in Tok, AK, checked into Young's Motel and were having dinner at Fast Eddy's restaurant. Fast Eddy's is an institution among Alcan travelers with good food and the T-shirt depicts a guy delivering a pizza (Fast Eddy, I presume) being chased by a bear.
(Sunday, July 22) In Alaska the Alcan becomes Highway 2 and remains so until it ends in Delta Junction, where we saw the Alaska pipeline near the road. We continued to Fairbanks where I'd heard of a place called Ivory Jack's, and after riding around for awhile under control of the GPS units, we came to it. It's a roadhouse that is popular with motorcyclists in the Fairbanks area and is a nice enough place but nothing we were interested in. With no reason to spend more time in Fairbanks, we rode south on Highway 3 , the George Parks Highway, named after the governor of Alaska from 1925 to 1933 but usually known simply as the Parks Highway. The road parallels the Alaska Railroad, which connects Anchorage and Fairbanks, and goes through the usual beautiful scenery of mountains, lakes, rivers, and forests. We spent the night in a cabin south of Denali National Park, and had an excellent dinner at a restaurant across the road. By the time we returned to the cabin it was raining again.
Heading south again we stopped at the Grizzly Bear Lodge, where I met Edie Reisland, a family friend of my brother-in-law, who moved to Alaska in the early 1950s with her husband. They homesteaded the land where the lodge is, building campsites at first, then cabins, and finally the lodge.
We arrived in Anchorage in the early evening, and we rode by The Motorcycle Shop (BMW dealer) so we'd know where it is. We found a motel nearby and checked in. The motel was rough and worn, and the bar next door, The Flight Deck, was having a pool competition that night and all the drunks were out in the parking lot smoking cigarettes when they weren't shooting pool, so the place was noisy until the wee hours.
(Tuesday, July 24) John and Dan were at the BMW shop when it opened and spent most of the day there. Dan got a service on his bike, and the shop replaced the entire rear drive on John's bike. When John called from Whitehorse the service writer ordered the part from the Los Angeles warehouse. John asked him if they'd had many problems with the rear drive units, and he took him to a back room where there was whole shelf of broken rear drives waiting to be shipped back to Germany. I went for a run and found a laundromat, so later I did a laundry and mailed some clothing that I wasn't going to use back home. I joined John and Dan at the dealer, and purchased a pair of Goretex boots to replace the ones I was wearing that leaked, then it was back to the post office to mail the boots home. We visited Alaska Leather, a famous motorcycle accessory shop in Anchorage, and John discovered that a woman working there was someone he'd corresponded with on the Internet. She was from Florida and set out on her bike for an extended ride around the country, stopping for a few weeks or months to work when the money got low.
We headed east out of Anchorage on Highway 1 during the evening rush hour, so traffic was heavy until we got to Palmer. The road becomes scenic again as it climbs into some low mountains where a beautiful glacier can be seen from the highway.
Sheep Mountain Lodge was full, but there was room in the bunkhouse, so we stayed there. Most of the other guests at the lodge were part of a tour group from Poland.
I went for a run in Beaver Creek and discovered that the town's electricity was produced by two very large diesel generators on the edge of town. I also saw a very nice 1955 Ford in front of the visitor's center and a Catholic Church that was a converted Quonset hut.
(Thursday, July 26) Back over the rough road we'd been over a few days ago we stopped for breakfast in Burwash Landing, continued through the construction around Destruction Bay, and on to Whitehorse, where we stopped again at the Starbucks there for an afternoon coffee - John has all the Starbucks in North America in his GPS memory. We spent the night at the Dawson Peaks Resort a few miles south of Teslin, which is on a lake and where the mosquitoes would swarm as soon as you stopped moving.
(Friday, July 27) We were off early in the morning and back at the junction with the Cassiar Highway we stopped at Sally's for a snack. Our intent was to ride south on Highway 37 as far as prince Rupert where we would take a ferry to the north end of Vancouver Island. From there we'd ride south to Victoria, take a ferry from Sidney to Anacortes, WA, and then ride on Highway 20 through the Cascades. It was a good plan.
John said that Highway 37 was the first real motorcycle road of the trip - narrow, twisty, and demanding. The Alcan, although very scenic, features gentle hills and curves for the most part - good for enjoying the scenery and easy on trucks, but not necessarily a motorcycle road. We stopped at Jade City, where the Cassiar Mountain Jade Store got a lot of my money: I should be set for presents for the girls (including Carol) at least through Christmas. 75% of the world's jewelry quality jade is mined there. The people who own the place do a certain amount of jewelry design and production, but most of the jade is shipped out of the country - primarily to China - where it is cut and polished and turned into jewelry, some of which then makes its way back to the store where it is sold.
There is little traffic on the Cassiar, and we mostly had the road to ourselves. There was a 20 mile stretch of dirt and gravel road just before we got to Dease Lake, and part of that section had just the bed or river rock (stones the size of a fist) as a surface. We'd decided to spend the night at Dease Lake and I'd made a reservation at the one motel in town - a good thing because when we arrived we discovered that a washout had closed the road about 60 miles south. It had happened just two hours before and the estimate was four days before traffic would be allowed to pass.
Back on the Alcan we went to Watson Lake and had lunch and John and I attempted to wash off at least some of the mud that caked our bikes.
Only partially successful, we continued back along the Alcan through the beautiful scenery and hills, actually the tail end of the Rockies. We spent the night at a cabin at Toad River Crossing, so named because at one time cars had to be towed across the river there - "towed" became "toad". The cabin had confused our reservation with someone else's, so the only cabin that was available had just two beds. As the youngest of the group I volunteered to roll out my sleeping bag on the floor. Dan and John protested, but feebly. (We all carried sleeping bags in case we got stuck someplace without a place to stay, but I only used mine the one time.)
(Sunday, July 29) We stopped in mid-morning at the Rocky Mountain Café in Ft. Nelson, then on to Dawson Creek where we stayed at The Lodge, a motel that seems to cater to construction and drilling workers.
(Monday, July 30) Last year John and I had breakfast at The Lodge and we remembered it as being one of the best breakfasts ever. We must have been hungry last year because the breakfast this time, while good enough, wasn't exceptional. We rode to the beginning of the Alcan Highway and took pictures of the sign there, along with half a dozen other motorcyclists.
Dawson Creek was the emotional end of the trip. We rode back on Highway 97 through Chetwynd and south to Prince George, where we had a coffee at the Starbucks there before Dan left us to head east on Highway 16, The Yellowhead Highway, to Jasper, Banff, Calgary, and home to Chicago. John and I spent the night at a motel in Quesnel.
(Tuesday, July 31) After breakfast at the excellent Granville Café we continued south on 97 to Cache Creek where we cut off on Highway 1, which is first called the Cariboo Highway and then the Fraser Canyon Highway. The road is scenic and mostly in good shape, but heavily traveled, although this is Canada's version of heavily traveled, so it wasn't a problem. Mostly we motored along at the limit, enjoying the scenery along the river. We spent the night in Abbottsford, a fairly large town about 25 miles from Vancouver and three miles from the US border.
(Wednesday, August 1) We crossed into the USA in the morning, the guard at the border waving me through after I told him that I'd purchased about $600 in jewelry. The limit before you have to pay duty must be higher that that. We followed Highway 9 from the border at Sumas to the town of Sedro-Wooley, WA where we went west on Highway 20 to I-5 and then south to Seattle. The face shield on John's Schuberth helmet had broken, so we stopped in Seattle at Ride West BMW for a replacement. We rode south on I-5 through the traffic in Seattle, then through Tacoma and Olympia to cross the Columbia River at the Oregon border and then through the traffic in Portland. We spent the night at a Motel 6 in Albany, OR, where I ate too much at the all-you-can-eat buffet at a Chinese restaurant near the motel.
(Thursday, August 2) In the morning we rode as far as Cottage Grove, where we had breakfast at a café. Back on I-5 we continued south into California. At Shasta Lake John headed east on Highway 89 to Quincy and eventually to his home in Reno, and I stayed on I-5 to Williams, where I had dinner at Granzella's, then I-505 to I-80 at Fairfield. In Vallejo I took Highway 37 across the delta, then 101 to Sausalito where I stopped briefly at my sister's house before continuing down 101 across the Golden Gate Bridge then home, arriving at 10 PM. For the first time in 10 years Jack wasn't there to run crazily around and greet me when I returned from a trip. It had been 105 degrees in Redding that afternoon, 85 in Fairfield in the early evening, then 65 in Vallejo twenty minutes later, and it was 55 in San Francisco. Twenty days, 7400 miles.
The Alcan Highway was constructed between March and November of 1942. its purpose was to provide a secure supply route to the military bases near Fairbanks that was protected from Japanese attack. Although much of the highway is in Canada, it was primarily an American effort - one Canadian official commented that Canada supplied the soil, and the USA supplied the money and toil. The conditions the workers - mostly military, although several private construction companies were part of the effort - faced were very primitive. There was hot weather and swarms of mosquitoes in the Summer, and sub-zero cold later in the year. And everywhere there was mud when it rained and huge clouds of dust when it didn't. Bulldozers were used for everything; trucks became mired in the mud, sank in the permafrost, and went off the roads and had to be rescued by the bulldozer. All the supplies had to be shipped in by truck as the road was built. The US Army was segregated at the time, and there were few black soldiers in combat units. Thirty percent of the military workers on the Alcan were black, and you have to wonder what those poor guys from Louisiana or Georgia thought when the temperatures dropped to 40 below zero.
Last year on our trip to Peace River we noticed that almost every business in Alberta and British Columbia had a "help wanted" sign in the window. This year the signs have been replaced with ones that read "help needed." There's a huge amount of oil and gas exploration going on in Alberta and Eastern BC, and the high-paying jobs must be depleting the labor pool for other businesses. Some of the small towns along our route were bustling and growing places, but others seemed to be dying, fading back into the woods, their reason for existing no longer there or forgotten. Everyone has heard of Watson Lake, but the town has just one gas station and one restaurant. There's a visitors center, and a few businesses, but little else except the sign forest. Whitehorse is a large town of about 20,000 people with a couple of banks, two super markets, two auto parts stores, street people, and of course the Starbucks. I went running in the town the morning of the day we left (while John was talking with various BMW dealers) and this is a great way to get to know a new town. I ran every other day on the trip. We usually stopped in the late afternoon and John would rest, Dan would write in his journal, and I would go for a run before dinner. We didn't give Fairbanks a chance to show itself since we just passed through. It was a mining town originally, and the largest city in Alaska for a long time. There is a university and a museum - Fairbanks seems to be the San Francisco to Anchorage's Los Angeles.
Beaver Creek is an odd little place with three gas stations (none of which had premium) and a couple of motels in addition to the lodge/hotel where we stayed. The place seems in decline, although there is a visitors center. One of the workers there is an older guy with long white hair past his shoulders. He looks like an old hippy, and I saw him drive away in the black and yellow 1955 Ford that I mentioned earlier.
Dease Lake has the one motel and restaurant, a gas station, and a few private businesses. There are quite a few "first people" (as the original natives are called) in town. Quesnel has the Granville Café, and an event called Billy Barker Days, which we just missed again. Fort Nelson is a bustling little town, but Dawson Creek seems to be fading - I noticed many empty storefronts in town when I went for an evening run. Fort St. John, 40 miles to the north, seems to have gotten the business and development that bypassed Dawson Creek, since it's a hub for oil and gas exploration and you could see a lot of construction and expansion taking place.
The small towns in northern BC and the Yukon have to be self-sufficient for electricity - there are no power lines to supply the towns. The towns have large, diesel generators for power and satellite phones for communications. As soon as we crossed the border into Alaska, we saw poles carrying power and telephone lines along the road.
Robin, the woman who owns, runs, cooks, and cleans up the Rocky Mountain Café in Ft. Nelson has a great restaurant and took off time from her work to chat with us both times we stopped there. Her daughter works there and the place is busy and the food and coffee are good.
Since the Alcan is the only way to get to Alaska overland, and the towns are so few, you tend to meet the same people over and over again, because you stop at the same places for fuel, to eat, and to spend the night. I mentioned that Dan is very outgoing; he'd often strike up a conversation with someone at a gas station or restaurant. Somewhere along the Alcan on our way up, perhaps Haines Junction, Dan began a conversation with a Mexican-American couple from Texas in a huge pickup truck. We saw them again that day at a gas stop, and then again that evening at Fast Eddy's in Tok. "Hey, professor!" the guy yelled, and he and Dan were deep in conversation in a moment.
Our dinner waitress at Sheep Mountain Lodge was tent camping nearby with her boyfriend for the summer, although he was leading a tour group on an overnight stay that night. She confessed that she was a bit concerned about being alone in a tent because of wandering bears.
On our second visit to the Starbucks in Whitehorse we met Paul, one of those guys who has been everywhere and done everything. He's a Finn, although he's now a Canadian citizen. He saw our bikes and gear and told us how he'd worked in Vietnam from 1968 to 1973, then went to Singapore where he purchased a Yamaha RD350, a two-stroke sport bike that is not really suited for long distances on poor roads. Nevertheless, he rode the bike across Southeast Asia, then Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. back in Alaska he panned and mined for gold, and still does a little mining.
Sally and her husband own and run Sally's restaurant at the junction of the Alcan and Cassiar highways. They are both very friendly, and they bake fresh bread and other goods every day but Saturday. I suspect that on Saturday they go to Whitehorse and do the shopping. On our second visit there, on our way to Dease Lake, we met a young couple from Montreal, who were traveling on a BMW F650. The bike was completely filthy, the front covered with mud. They were camping most nights and the front of the guy's riding suit looked as bad as the bike.
The stone cutter at the Cassiar Jade Store is a young Australian woman named Kim. She worked at the Whistler ski area, traveled up the Cassiar Highway after ski season to see the area, and somehow ended up working at Jade City.
We met two guys on Harley Road Kings (Harley's big touring bike) at Haines Junction on the way back. They were older, like us, and one bike had a sidecar that carried a small, black dog. it was a Schipperke, also known as a Belgian Barge Dog, named Duke - Duke-the-dog. He had a doggie bed in the car, a bowl of food, toys, and a cover that could be put over the opening so when it rained he wouldn't get wet. They stayed at the same motel we did in Toad Crossing, and we passed them the next morning. We saw their bikes at a Super 8 motel across from The Lodge in Dawson Creek where we spent the night. The next morning we met them again at the signpost for mile zero of the Alcan. Duke sat up in the car with his feet on the rail, barking at the world and ready to meet the adventures of the day.
