 North Pole, Alaska to Beaver Creek, Yukon Friday • 10 September 1999 |
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September 1999
North Pole to Beaver Creek
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So you really want to read all about our drive down the Alaska Highway and across the Lower 48, huh? Okay, you asked for it.
The days immediately before our departure were pretty hairy and stressful. Problems with the garage door opener had to be resolved, a new water softener installed, and a carpet problem dealt with. And we had the matter of trying to market our house while simultaneously seeing to these other things and preparing for the trip. Thursday had been particularly bad, at least for me, because it seemed like we weren’t going to be ready in time to leave. So many things in which we were dependent on other people to hold to their word, and we were finding out the hard way just what a person’s word is worth these days.
Friday morning I was in a better frame of mind. In meeting our commitments to realtor and others, we had left undone about a million things that needed to be done for us, and as a result we wound up leaving behind a great many things that we had counted on taking, simply because we didn’t have time to fit them into our two vehicles. Furthermore, since we had a relatively short drive planned for that first day, we could be relatively relaxed about the prospect of a late start. As it was, we left the house at a little after 11:00 a.m., me in my Bronco and Chris in her 1988 Honda Civic sedan.
After a quick stop to fill the Bronco’s big gas tank (it needs to be big), we set out down the Richardson Highway toward Delta Junction and the northern terminus of the Alaska Highway. Most of the distance to be covered this first day was familiar territory to me — I’d been to Delta several times in the last five years, and as far down the Alaska Highway as Tok just the previous July 4. The first leg, to Delta, was almost surreal; I couldn’t really grasp that I was leaving it all behind for what might very well be the last time.
Chris and I are both licensed amateur radio operators (“hams”, KLØUD and KLØTY, respectively), and we each kept a small handheld radio in our respective cars for communication as we drove. Tuned to the frequency normally used in Alaska for simplex contact (146.52 MHz), or designated for simplex in Canada (147.42 MHz) we found all during our trip that these radios came in quite handy. On one day later on when, for a short distance, we didn’t use them, we didn’t manage very well at all. Whether that was simply because they were so useful, or because we simply had become so dependent on them, I can’t say. Fortunately we never needed to use them to call for help, though their range in low-power simplex mode proved nicely limited for our purposes, and once we crossed into the States again we used 146.52 again with no apparent conflicts with local uses.
Once we passed Delta Junction and were on the actual Alaska Highway, I was concerned about a long stretch of road construction we’d encountered two months earlier. About twelve miles of the highway had been unpaved and very rough driving back then, and it didn’t seem possible that all the work needed could be completed that soon. Yet the entire stretch had been paved, and striping was in progress as we passed through. And in another improvement over our July visit to Tok, the air was clear of the smoke that had socked in the upper Tanana valley from a July forest fire to the north. Our views of the mountains that day were crystalline.
Then about ninety miles past Tok I did something I had never done before in my life: depart from the United States. I had been aboard aircraft that had passed over Canadian airspace — it’s hard not to do that in flying from Alaska to the Lower 48 or vice versa — but I can’t really call that leaving the country. But just beyond the Port Alcan customs station where travelers bound for Alaska have to stop to be questioned by U.S. Customs agents, there were the signs. “Welcome to Canada’s Yukon.” The speed limits were in “km/h” instead of miles per hour. And the “mileage” signs telling how far it was to the next town — in this case Beaver Creek — were in kilometres. We spent a week looking at these signs and mentally converting them into miles. I especially needed to do this since I don’t really trust the gas gauge in the Bronco and needed to know on several occasions how far it was to the next possible gas stop.
The 1202 Motor Lodge in Beaver Creek puts up its guests in Atco trailers that may once have served as quarters for work crews. They consist of a living room area with small kitchenette, a small but relatively comfy bedroom, and of course a bathroom. Rates are high as might be expected, but the Canadian dollar was at a fairly low level against the U.S. dollar so it wasn’t but so bad.
Accompanying us on this trip were our two cats, Furrari and Taz. Taz was utterly unaccustomed to the rigors of car travel before starting out with us, while the much older Furrari had been across the country even before being carted up to Alaska five years ago. Still, Furry was a bit unsettled that first night. Taz didn’t give us any trouble until it was time to put him back in his carrier the next morning…
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From the Fairbanks and North Pole area, the Richardson Highway generally follows the Tanana River upstream. In some places the road runs quite close to the river, and in other stretches it passes among stands of spruce well back from the bank, or crosses ridges that come close to the river. Closer to Delta there are some great views of the Tanana Valley and the Alaska Range beyond. The weather was sunny and warm, and as late in the season as it was there was very little of last winter’s snow left on the mountains.
A couple of miles short of Beaver Creek was the
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