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Moose and calf
Walked by our tent - later found out they were being tracked by a bear Road miles to date: 1,133
Our wildlife encounters continued as we sat by a campfire on our last night in Denali when a moose and its calf walked right by us. The next morning they were still nearby when a park ranger came around saying that a bear had been sighted about 100 yards from our tent and it was probably tracking the calf. Unfortunately we didn't get to see it, but took it as good a sign as any that it was time for us to pack up and leave the next day.
We rode north to Fairbanks and after a quick stop for fuel and food, we decided to plod on and head up to Chena Hot Springs. The hot springs were discovered (or first developed at least) by the gold miners at the turn of the century and literally lay at the end of the road. During the winter, Chena is supposed to be one of the best places in the world to see the Northern Lights but unfortunately for us we aren't even seeing darkness so whatever is up there remains a mystery! We spent all of the next day in the springs which reached
up to forty degrees. Not a bad way to spend a day of rain.
Byron has been practising his tracking skills and is now quite adept at differentiating a variety of scat. Like a hunter returned to the wild he can tell the animal, what it was eating and how long ago it passed through (
cough cough). He's yet to capture, skin and eat any wild animals, but insists it is just a matter of time.
As Chena lay at the end of the road (highways and route varieties are pretty limited here), we had to backtrack to Fairbanks to begin the long journey south. On the way we passed through North Pole. The locals had registered the town's name back in the fifties in order to attract tourists. All of the town's lamposts are designed as candy canes and the streets have Christmas related names including Snowman Lane, St Nicholas Drive etc. They even have Santa Claus House where hundreds of thousands of letters addressed to Santa Claus, North Pole, Alaska get sent. We stopped by for the obligatory photo but the eerie Christmas songs blasting out across the car park didn't have us hanging about for
long.
Eventually we made it to the small town of Tok. Like many towns in the Alaskan interior, it was set up as a construction camp for the road builders during the second world war. After the road was finished a few stayed behind and this town became a resting point for any intrepid travellers venturing along the new Alaska - Canada highway. A long days' ride through incredible scenery once again made us feel like a tiny drop in this vast, vast ocean of wilderness. After driving through heavy rain and high winds, the thought of setting up camp was less appetising than usual, so we stopped the night at our first roadside motel. There, Byron got talking to a biker going by the name of Dagger. Dagger was planning on taking the same route as us the next morning to Dawson and something about this character, plus a check of the weather told us Whitehorse might be a better destination.
Shortly after crossing the Canadian border into the Yukon Territory, twenty miles before the customs post (we're told this is the longest undefended border in the world) we stopped to take some photos and happened across
a French Canadian couple going in the opposite direction. The guy was playing some pretty awesome riffs on harmonica and before long Byron and this man were having an impromptu harp jam and making some real sweet licks.
Another twenty miles of terrible road got us to the customs post - our first road border crossing. Despite his shock that we were not carrying any bear spray ("but this is grizzly country"), the customs officer stamped us through. We promised to buy some spray (we will!) and he sent us on our way with more bad news that the road conditions would get worse for another hundred miles. Just as we were leaving, Dagger showed up with news that the road to Dawson was so bad he had to turn back at Chicken (population six), and was now heading our way.
The landscape has been stunning and the roads have taken us across taiga ('land of little sticks'😉 vast tundra, over frozen lakes and rivers, via glaciers, through immense mountain ranges, along gravel dirt roads and through thousands of acres of forest fire damage. The feeling of being very small here is an understatement. The knowledge that there
is nothing and no one for thousands of miles either side of the road is hard to comprehend. There are times we have been riding for an hour without seeing another vehicle.
Sometimes we've seen more wildlife than people on parts of the road; yesterday we caught the tail end of a moose crossing the road, we had to break while another moose crossed right in front of us, we slowed down for a black bear foraging right on the edge of the road, we passed a herd of elk, an eagle flew overhead and we caught a glimpse of a porcupine.
Last night we reached Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon and a city of about 27,000 people, (we think we lost Dagger somewhere in the Yukon) and will stay for the next few days as anything we had planned on this trip only took us this far. We'll continue south from here but we're not sure where to yet, we'll just see how it goes.
(Scroll down to the end of this page for more photos)
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Martyn
non-member comment
hahahaa
This is fucking amazing!!!!!!!! :)