The Road to Alaska Part IV: The Alaska Highway

The Alaska Highway officially begins at “Mile 0” in Dawson Creek, British Columbia.  Formerly known as the Alcan Highway by the US military, it was constructed in 1942 as a military supply road for American defense against Japan.   It was opened to the public at the end of World War II.

While sitting in a bar in Anchorage last night, Nick and I attempted to recap our experience of the Alaska Highway and came up with “pine trees.”  The highway cuts through dense wilderness, interrupted only by the occasional gas station or tiny unincorporated town.

Our first part of the drive ended near Summit Lake at kilometer marker 551. The air was thick with mosquitoes, so we donned our mosquito gear, took a walk and ate dinner in the car.  The windows steamed up instantly (it’s quite warm in Canada this time of year) so we doodled on the glass and came up with the idea of a dinner/sauna combination (“lose weight while you eat!”)

The next three days we drove.  All day.  From 9 in the morning to 9 at night.  1,413 miles on the Alaska Highway are slow-moving miles due to poor road conditions and continuous construction in an attempt to repair damage done by permafrost. We saw bison, bighorn sheep and a baby caribou.

On July 18^th, we stopped in the morning to have breakfast snacks and met a group of seven Europeans who were travelling in one RV.  I heard them playing a Madonna song while washing dishes. Nick took a dip in the cold lake which was decorated with moose and caribou antlers.

We drove from kilometer 551 to 1380 in one day.  In those kilometers, we reached the Yukon Territory! Then we dipped back into BC…then back to the Yukon!  We only got out of the car to fill up gas, stretch or eat.  That day we listened to over seven hours of the Dean Koontz book “Cold Fire” and came to despise the voice of the woman who reads the female perspective.

Instead of sleeping on the side of the road in a mosquito cloud, we had the sense to camp at Marsh Lake Campground.   There were very few mosquitoes and free firewood.  We were up past midnight reading and writing in the soft glow of the ever-setting sun (the picture below was taken at midnight!)

We began July 19th with a swim in Marsh Lake.  Actually, I was the only one crazy enough to fully submerge my body in it because it was only a few degrees above freezing.  An employee of the park stood at the shore watching me with a bemused grin on his face.  “It’s cold, eh?” he asked as I was drying my hair in the parking lot. “In winter, three feet of ice.”

The Yukon Territory was stunning.  The weather fluctuated between chilly, foggy and rainy to bright, clear sunshine.  Each dip and turn in the road provided us with fresh mountain views jutted against impossibly blue lakes.  The road became very bumpy, like a roller coaster for children that follows the continual up and down of a sine wave.   We saw a motorcyclist from New Zealand get a couple inches of air when he passed us.   While we were stopped for construction he told us it was “definitely not intentional”.

We both got a little crazy in the last few days.  We spent about 22 hours of each day in the car.  Our food was also pretty limited: Oatmeal, PB&J, fruit, carrots and stew.

That evening, we crossed the international border to Alaska.  We revealed to the border patrol officer that we were carrying three oranges purchased in Canada so she allowed us to peel them in the parking lot.  Right away, we picked up a young Canadian hitchhiker named Martin, who gratefully accepted the third orange.   A nearby seasonal hotel employee, Martin was heading to a music festival in Dawson City. We dropped him off outside of Tok and he was in an SUV heading north before Nick and I even pulled back onto the road.

We camped at Eagle Trail State Recreation Site and the next morning we awoke early.  It was our 11^th and final day on the road.  The 303 miles to Anchorage were rainy, producing a thick white fog that hugged the dark, craggy mountainous terrain of Alaska.  We passed enormous glaciers that wound among the bases of the protruding mountains.

And finally, after over 3,900 miles, we reached the end of the road.