June 20 - Bumpy Road

The bad news is that we had a very long driving ahead of us, over 450 miles of less than great road surfaces.  We went from Alaska through British Columbia and Yukon and back to Alaska. The good news is the scenery was just amazing.  It was extremely difficult to winnow through the photos and choose which to include in the blog. 

One sad part of the drive was looking at places that had been heavily infested with spruce bark beetles.  They attack two species of spruce and apparently are only problematic after 2 or more warm summers, but that has been a problem for over 20 years.

An interesting place is Lake Kluane, nestled in the mountains near the highest point of the Haines Highway.  The strange thing was that it reversed course about 300 years ago, due to a glacier completely blocking its previous outflow.  The glacier has receded quite a bit in later years, but the outflow of the lake was so strong, it cut a nice deep stream bed. The destination of its waters was the Gulf of Alaska, but is now the Yukon River and on to the Bering Sea.

We took a lunch break and at the Talbot Arm Motel and Restaurant in Destruction Bay, Yukon. It was a spotlessly clean restaurant and we each had a cup of chicken corn chowder – great!  Jim had an Alaskan crab salad sandwich and Ardith had a veal cordon bleu burger.  

After lunch we got back on the road and experienced more potholes and gravel roads that were worse than any roller coaster ride that we have experienced. The Yukon portion of the Alaska highway is especially subjected to heavy heaving of the permafrost lying below the surface.  A portion of road that is smooth in the fall might be very torn up in the spring.  We bumped so much that Ardith’s spine was very sore in the evening.  A lot of other drivers had the same stories to tell.

They make a lot of effort to keep up with the problem.  At one stretch, they had torn up all the old material and removed the top foot or so of the roadway.  Jim thinks there must have a manpower shortage because they had a dog working on the crew :-). 

The good thing about the roads we used today is that almost nobody else was on them.  Several times, we went 15 or twenty minutes without seeing another vehicle.  This meant that it was no big deal to move to the opposing lane or straddle the center lane to avoid the worst of the problems.  A gift shop in a rest stop had a bumper sticker depicting Ardith's experience today on the Alaska Highway.

Earlier in the day we saw 3 buses belonging to the Holland-American line taking large loads of people toward Haines.  Several hours later we saw an independent tour bus.  We wondered how the passengers felt as they were bounced along the Alaska Highway in Yukon.

Roughly at the mid-point of our day’s drive, we passed 5000 miles.  We are now at 5218.  Jim estimates we will do 12 to 13,000 miles this trip.  We paid $4.47.9 for a gallon of gas in Haines and just under $6 in the Yukon.

We stopped at Young’s Motel in Tok.  It is right next to Fast Eddy’s Restaurant which offers some home style cooking.  We had a wonderful pizza for dinner – the Alaska special: pepperoni, Canadian bacon, olives and green peppers.

We started the day at 46 degrees; later it turned 70. Most motels aren’t air conditioned and we needed to have the fan on at night.