Bike Tour to the Last Frontier (Portand to Anchorage)

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A few days after school let out in June of 2004, Justin Arnahlt and I began a bike trip to Alaska from our front porch in Portland, Oregon. We rode up the east side of the Olympic Peninsula and then up the coast through Bellingham to Vancouver. In B.C., we took the Sea to Sky Highway and then rode through central B.C. to Prince George. From there it was east to the beginning of the Cassiar Highway, which we took north into the Yukon. After riding on a severely bent axle for four days, we made it to the junction with the AlCan. From there we hitched a few hundred miles to Whitehorse, where I was able to repair my bike and finish the trip to Anchorage. Here are the emails I sent and a few of the pictures I took along the way...

6/23/04

Little packets of mayo to mix with our cans of tuna, electrically cooled water pouring from betwixt the soda spouts, these are the things we seek as we tour the Chevrons and the Texacos, the gas station convenience marts of the Northwest. Cold water and palletable textures of tuna have kept us pedaling into Canada. For Five days From the Exons of the Willamette valley and the Olympic peninsula to the Arcos lining the base of the Northern Cascades and the Puget Sound, we have met our bicycling needs through the mass auto-infrastructure of America. God only knows what freakish condiments and water dispensing units lie ahead in the mountains to the north of Vancouver. I am afraid.

Steve

6/26/04

hi,

The road to Alaska is steep, shoulders lined with dead dogs and broken bungee chords. Each day is creamy like wet cement in this 2nd world country. 2nd world. 2nd rate to the land of milk and mayo. Yes, mayo. I mean actually, no mayo. not here. Our days are void of the magic love sauce no longer does it moisten the flesh of our fish. We have squirted the last drops from our little mayo packets not found on this side of the border, squirted just like the tears from my eyes as the thought of 1500 hundred more miles of dry tuna
between my bread passes through my head like an afternoon thunder storm that rains on a drunken indian teen passed out in a park. Justin is yelling at me to get off this machine so I must now go and rub the growing blisters on my butt before getting back on my bike seat. Goood night..........................



7/7/04

The day was as wet as a moose turd, the sun was hidden like a hobbit behind the fog, we fought the wind like drunk monkeys over an unpeeled banana in a grocery store. We had a ninety mile day, 40 miles on a spur off the Cassiar through a glaciated canyon, in order to be warm, dry, and drunk for my birthday. We take the day off today to let the rain pass and celebrate having gone 1500 miles, half way on our trip, though ironically, Alaska, the very southern tip of the peninsula, is only two miles away.

see ya sometime, steev






7/12/04
above him, the dragon flies copulating between their mosquito breakfast bites, Bob Quinn awoke beneath a fog and smoky morning sky to the silence of a floating moose-head treading across his waters and emerging on his shore. Nearby a hungry flock of mosquitoes clung, with erect stingers, to a nylon dome in the bush, attracted to the warm breath emanating from its thin walls, awaiting the arising of the respirating creatures that slept within. And groggily they eventually did, into the blood thirsty swarm, fighting sleeves and pant legs to cover their white and tender flesh. The sun lifted the fog as it rose, in its low arctic arc, above the ice crusted peaks that surrounded the now awake and coffee and granola consuming bikers that sat on a dock, feasting in Bob Quinn's armpit.

A days ride on the gravel hi-way, through the Skeena mountains took the bikers just outside of Iskut, BC, where the clouds that had been gathering all day along the mountain ridges of the valley, thickened and darkened like slow burning marshmallows. The clouds cooked black and poured cold rain on the unrooved travelers, but only for minutes before they found cheap shelter and soft beds at the Phantom Ram lodge. The day darkened slightly like the wedding down the road, white spoiled by the news of a hanged indian. For miles you could hear the rafters of his cabin creaking with the slow swing of dead weight as it echoed of Kluachon lake. The sound haunted the sleep of tourists and locals with visions of the red stained fangs of a Grizzly feasting on a raw slab of Western civilization.

And the lord said let there be mayo, saying unto me, go ye unto the temple of the Golden Arches and pay thy corporate slave children one dollar. And I did. And for forty days and forty nights it rained mayo on the land of caana da. And the chosen bicyclists held their cans of tuna to the midnight sun and the flesh of their fishes were moistened. And they feasted on the forty first day, then farted on the forty second.

The anti gravity gator points his snout north, strapped to my front rack with a bungee scavenged from the roadside, squeaking with the bumps of the Cassiar highway. All is well.

steve


7/21/04

RVs are the root of all evil

mosquitoes

my mind is the root of all evil

Butt blisters and black flies. Trees are good.

7/16/04
Its been two day riding on a bent axle. The Yukon Territory is no longer a mysterious oddity on the top of a map.

A thumb can take you alot farther than your legs and feet, at least when your at the juntion of the Cassiar and Alaska Hi-ways, standing in the morning heat of the yukon with a bent axle and a
gut full of granola. 250 mile to be exact, when 4 days becomes four hours. My mind is still erratic with time travel.


7/29/01

Lightning strikes the Salmon on the Mount, cooking Sockeye platters to the perfection of a cat's purr, roasting the stunted Yukon pines in the flames of everlasting sunsets that melt like butter into sunrise, oh that creamy and colorful coitus of dusk with dawn that keeps me insane with insomnia as the Apocalyptic smoke, dust, and thunder blows in and out of the winding valleys of the Alaska highway. The Last Frontier is on fire, burning like the black liquid of geologically compressed dinosaurs in the metal engines of a technologically spoiled nation. The flames will keep us south as we cross the border, pedaling in our frenzy through the wilderness, fighting gravel and can-openers, to the central core of madness like that gooey spot in the middle of a hot apple-pie. Speaking of pie, I am hungry.

Mayonnaise,
steve

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