Heading Towards Deadhorse

July 31

Got out of Seattle yesterday, after finishing my refurbishing of the bike over the last few days, which included a new chain, a custom seat, and a Best Rest rack on the back right behind the passenger part of the seat. I am now carrying my old tires as emergency spares because the Alaska road guide, The Milepost, talks a lot about how bad the roads can be in Alaska, and parts are going to be incredibly expensive up there. It was time well spent, but I was glad to finally leave Seattle after a week. I also just bought a hardbound journal, and shipped my Visor home. I haven´t used my cd player since New Brunswick. I seem to be shifting to less and less electronics.

So I was waiting for the ferry to Alaska to board yesterday afternoon. I'd planned to start my trip to Tierra del Fuego from the northern edge of Alaska, and as I went across Canada I decided it would probably be smart to get up there as early as I could because winter starts in late August in Alaska. To do this, I decided I'd take the ferry up, and then ride down. I figured along the way I'd get to see the Inland Passage as a bonus, which people often go on cruises and pay thousands to see.

Back at Prince Edward Island I ran into another motorcyclist and his wife riding to the BMW convention in Ontario, and he also being an adventure tourer had recommended that I get the kind of tire inflator that can be plugged into a car lighter outlet. Since I have the BMW accessory outlet, I could inflate my tires using the bike´s own electricity. [An editorial note - as of Nov 22, I`ve used this pump constantly and it works great]. The original pump was big, with a large plastic casing, but he assured me I could remove three quarters of it and still have a workable pump. I had the case off already, and was tinkering with things that I didn´t need, like the compressor´s fan or the work light. Every now and then I reached into my black tank bag for another tool - a pair of pliers, a screwdriver or some electrical tape. I started wrapping the whole remaining package in duct tape. There was a big guage taped to the outside. The only problem with this was that I was in the cafeteria of the ferry terminal playing with mysterious wires and electrical parts that looked vaguely bomblike in a Hollywood kind of way.

I only realized what this looked like when I got up to check on my bike outside. I asked two elderly ladies at the next table, "Could you watch this for me?"
"I suppose so," she said in a rather patrician English accent. "As long as it isn`t a bomb."
I was nonplussed. I assumed they were joking. "Left all of my Semtex at home, actually."
"Fine then."
People were actually watching me as I went outside, past the signs that "All Unattended Luggage Will Be Removed". I figured my bag was now attended. Then I actually took a very long time coming back because I started talking to the other motorcyclists lined up for the ferry, forgetting that I was still in the category of potential terrorist until I came back inside. This was not quite a year after September 11, and Seattle was speculating about the possibility of terrorists using a ferry with a bomb on it to ram a pier. San Francisco had just been getting paranoid about bridge attacks, and I guess what Seattle has is to attack is either the ferries or the Space Needle. Speculating about mass disaster helps everyone feel connected in some sick sort of way, and to be on the map as a metropolis a city has to imagine itself a potential target. I found it kind of funny, until I really gave a thought to a semi truck with a fuel air bomb going off on the enclosed car deck in the middle of the freezing waters off Alaska. But what the hell, I live in New York, and where I was going, grizzly bears were more of a danger.

On the subject of September 11th, since I´ve left New York City, it seems to be as much a subject of conversation with other people - especially those from other countries - as the motorcycle trip is. Usually, depending on the level of morbid curiosity of the person asking, I get out of talking about it by making it sound as dull as possible - i.e., that I had no idea what was happening until it was pretty much over, which is largely true. I was working from home, and was unreachable because I was online until about 9:30am. Sometimes I also mention that I watched the smoke plume move over Brooklyn from the roof of my apartment building because we had lost television transmission when the towers collapsed, and the chaos of trying to cross Queens as all of the office workers walked out of Manhattan in suits and high heels, looking like war refugees. But since I was several miles away, in the age of television I was probably in many ways more removed than the people in Europe who could catch it all on CNN.

Outside I met Dave Wissen, who was riding a KLR 650 and planned on getting up at least as far as Fairbanks, and possibly all of the way to the Arctic Ocean at Deadhorse. We talked bikes for a bit - the KLR and my BMW 650 GSPD are very similar in many ways, and we talked about modifications we had made, and the pros and cons of each, sizing each other up as potential riding partners. Dave´s bike had a mysterious tube in front of and under the engine, behind the front wheel, which turned out to be a tool carrier he had improvised from some PVC tubing and end caps, which moved the weight of the tools low and to the front of the bike. [I ultimately made one of these for my bike in Los Angeles... works great.] Dave knew far more about motorcycles than I did, but he seemed more tentative about trying to get all of the way to Deadhorse, the last town to the north in Alaska, on the shore of the Arctic Ocean. Dave was getting off in Skagway, and I was going to Haines Junction, but ultimately our roads would meet up in Alaska, since there are only a few highways in the whole state. I remembered the bags inside, and went to collect my things, to the relief of the old ladies.

Motorcycles generally get loaded on the ferry before other vehicles, and myself and the four other bikes getting on rode into the car deck and up to the front of the boat across a greasy, dark metal deck. We got off and started trying to ready our bikes for the passage. I spent a lot of time trying to tie down my motorcycle - unlike the Canadian ferries, the only thing the Alaska Marine Highway provides is twine. After most of the other vehicles were loaded, I snuck over and got a huge, oily rachet mechanism attached to a chain and evil looking hooks, probably intended for 18 wheelers, and racheted my bike tight against the deck. I also helped out an older biker with a Harley whose only tool apparently is his cell phone. This took so much time that I was one of the last people above decks, which it turned out was a mistake on the good ship Manuska.

The back of the top deck had two sections, a solarium enclosed on all sides except the back, with space heaters on the ceiling, and deck chairs, all of which were now occupied by sleeping bags. There was open deck towards the back, which was by now completely filled with tents. I took what was left, all the way back and well exposed to the wind. After about five minutes of setting up my tent, which is free standing, I was trying to figure out how to attach it when it was nearly blown over the side, rolling over other tents all the way to the railing - once the fly is on it, it´s pretty much a sail. After I stopped being dumbfounded, I ran over and pulled the tent back and returned to my spot. I immediately threw all of my bags inside the tent - with the result that the tent left the deck except for the spot inside where my bags were. So for the next hour, I shuttled down to the car deck, taking out my tools to use as weights, filling up water bags to use as ballast and anchor points. After using most of my roll of duct tape like the other refugees, I finally felt like it was probably going to be there when I came back.

Sleeping on the ship is pleasant, the rumbling of the diesel engine coming through the metal deck an inch away from my face, lulling me into a deep, industrial sleep. I have a thermorest so the deck isn`t very cold for me (others have complained), but it´s still very hard when I roll out of bed as I did this morning. I noticed today that 2 tents have disappeared, so the ship is starting to look a little less like the HMS Bosnia. The privacy of the tent is nice, and we have showers at the end of the solarium. Two more full days to go on board. We´re about to head into the open ocean, and they just announced that people who need it should take their dramamine now.

August 2

Been on the good ship Manuska for three days now. It´s been a pretty good ride. Since yesterday we´ve stopped off in various towns in the Alaskan pan handle. In Ketchikan yesterday I left the boat during a 1 hr 45 min stopover, had breakfast, and tried to shop for some clothes to replace the synthetics that I shipped home in Seattle. At 9:50 am, I realized that I had 25 minutes before the boat left, and I had walked two miles away. I started walking back, and became nervous that I would miss the boat, so I ran the next mile in my new combat boots back to the ship. I made it up the plank as they blew the warning whistle, which meant I`d had five minutes to spare. That was nearly the most expensive t-shirt in history. After that I did my shopping much closer to the ship.

I spent the last few days doing some juggling and studying Spanish. I also pulled out the Milepost ("The Bible of Alaska Travel" - it tells you to the tenth of a mile every service on every Alaska highway outside of the major cities) and plotted out a probable itinerary. I realized after talking to Dave, Richard and some other bikers on board that my trip is much less planned than most. Dave has been planning this for months. I just want to make it to Deadhorse, and then see what I can see before I head back down. This attitude of improvisation was probably the reason that Dave is getting off at 6am in Skagway, and I´m disembarking at 2am in Haines.

In the enclosed environment of the ferry, you see the same people over and over again, either in the lounge, the cafeteria or the bar or up on deck, but the people on the motorcycles tend to congregate for most meals. I´ve met Richard, the Harley guy with no tools, who is a death penalty defense lawyer originally from Brooklyn, now living in Modesto, California. Richard has a ponytail of salt and pepper hair and a beard, and strange blue-brown eyes, but he is not the liberal that he appears - in fact he is an extreme conservative, and often shows up at conventions for death penalty defense lawyers wearing a t-shirt that says "My guy is innocent, yours should fry". We´re had some interesting conversations about things ranging from George Orwell to the Spanish Civil War and the Kronstat Rebellion, but he´s a little too angry and intense for it to be fun.

Dave is an aircraft mechanic from the Bay Area, who took a voluntary furlough for a year following September 11th, and has two or three months before he is expecting to be back at work - it took him a few months to decide to do this trip and get it together. He´s in his late 30´s, has brown hair and a beard and usually wears sunglasses. He knows just about everything there is to know about motorcycle mechanics. He´s got libertarian views with an environmental bent similar to mine. There is also a Canadian couple riding two up - the husband is a bush pilot and had interesting stories to tell about landing planes in places and then trying to get them off the ground again.

The bartender in the ferry´s bar grew up in a salmon fishing family going back a few generations, but says that life has been decimated in Alaska by farm fish. Many of the fishermen tried to switch to other types of fish, but by the time he decided to change over all of the quotas were already held by other boats, so he ended up working for other people for a while. Even those jobs became hard to find as the catches declined, and he finally had to get out of fishing. Then he started a nightclub in his town with a friend, and for a while they were making great money. Their specialty was bringing up bands that had one or two hits 20 years ago - he mentioned Ratt, Quiet Riot, Nightranger and a few others I barely remembered. Sic transit gloria... After a while he decided to get out of the business and go back to school, and move to the Lower 48, so he was just working the boats for the summer.

The channel was only a hundred yards wide this morning, and the ship manuevered carefully around markers between rocky islets and mountains. Snow capped mountains are visible in the distance all around us, and the scenery is outstanding, especially around sunset. I hope to get my motorcycle off the boat tonight at 8pm for an hour to see the glacier near Juneau, the Alaskan capital.

The ferry has been great for seeing wildlife - in many ways, aside from the food here, I think that the people who have paid for one of the cruises have wasted their money. The whether has been uncommonly good for the summer (it has rained mainly at night) and the fog typical to the interior passage has stayed away. We have seen dolphins, bald eagles, and pods of humpback whales bubble-net fishing. There is a naturalist from the parks department on board who gives afternoon lectures about the wildlife that we are seeing, with subjects like types of orca whales and how they live. She lost a little bit of credibility yesterday when she had the farmer´s association from South Dakota, the most avid nature watchers on the boat, looking for the pink flamingos that migrate from Mexico to the Arctic... they are actually plastic pink flamingos that an Alaska tied to one of the trees on an island in the channel as a prank.

I packed up my tent today, in preparation for landing in Haines tomorrow. I´m going to sleep in my sleeping bag in the solarium tonight, because I have to get off at 2am - another thing I could have planned better. Dave is getting off in Skagway at 6am.

August 4 - Beaver Creek

I landed yesterday morning at 2am in Haines. The Canadian border is 40 miles away, but it doesn´t open until 7am, so I slept in the ferry office, along with the Canadian biker couple, until 7am. I was groggy and irritable for most of the day, especially when the Canadian surplus gortex combat boots I bought in Winnipeg turned out to be not entirely waterproof. The ride from Haines to Haines Junction was a lot of rain, but had the best mountains I´ve seen other than those around Lake Louise in Alberta. The vast windblasted openness of the plains between the mountains reminded me of Newfoundland. There was a mountain with mist rolling down it like a river. I also spotted the first black spruce pines. In the far north, because of the permafrost there are only 3-4 inches of defrosted, active soil during the summer, which means that plants grow slowly and have very little nutrients to work with. Black spruce bogs are forests of trees that are mostly 2-3 inches in diameter, and 10 or 20 feet tall, after centuries of growth. They almost resemble cacti.

Going through one of these bogs I spotted my first bear, standing in the road - tawny and brown colored, about 4 feet tall at the shoulder. I slammed on my brakes about 200 yards away, but he heard me and galloped off at surprising speed into the woods. Dave filled me in on some bear lore on the boat, and I got more from the Alaskan bartender and the naturalist on board (I tend to trust my bartender more). Apparently there are really only two main species of bears in North America, brown and black bears. The way they behave depends on what environments they have adapted to and how much pressure they are under. The biggest bears are the fish hunting brown bears, which can stand 12 feet tall, but generally have less interaction with humans because of their habitat and typical food supply. Brown bears that are inland usually eat berries and game - and tend to run out of food more easily, which is when they start coming around people for food and garbage. Brown bears and grizzly bears are different names for the same thing. In the continental U.S., black bears are usually considered more docile, and brown bears have a reputation for being dangerous, but the opposite is the common wisdom in Alaska, for some reason. (A black bear actually killed an infant in upstate new York this summer, so neither is really docile.) As naturalists and many outdoor people will tell you, all bears usually avoid people if given the chance - until they run out of food. It is also worth noting that bears can rip off car doors to get at food inside. When they choose not to avoid people, they can outrun (35 mph at a burst), outswim and outclimb people - but this is considered rare. Despite this, roadside places catering to tourists in Alaska and the Yukon have books like "Bear Attacks Book 2" to cater to those with Bearanoia. On the ferry Dave was joking that the perfect gun for a grizzly bear is the old six shooter because after you fire five bullets at him, and have really pissed him off, you still have one left for yourself.

I stayed at a hotel in the Yukon last night right near the U.S. border, because it is still relatively cheap on the Canadian side, and I needed to do some laundry. This morning I met a woman named Maxine, who is in her 60´s. She sold her house and intends to travel and camp in her van with her 150 lb dog Rex until she dies. Quite a character - she´s originally from Montreal and Toronto, and says that she speaks French in her sleep but won´t when she is awake because she hates to make mistakes.

I´ve spent some time redistributing the weight on my bike to lower its center of gravity, to deal with the gravel on the roads. The roads going into Alaska - principally the Alaska Highway, which oldtimers call the Alcan - are usually paved but can break into stretches of loose gravel at any time. This is because the permafrost can melt and subside under the road, creating potholes 5 feet wide and several feet deep. Fortunately most of this damage happens in the thaw during the spring, and since it is now August a lot has been repaired - I´ll often see orange signs warning of road damage but when I get to it the damaged area has been filled with new blacktop. The Alaskan roads are a constant state of decay, and an incredible amount of work is required every year to keep them passable because of frost damage. Where the roads have not been repaired there can be packed gravel or loose gravel, and while the packed gravel is pretty manageable on a motorcycle if you stay in the ruts made by trucks, the loose gravel can be a little hairy. You usually know you are headed for trouble when the double yellow line disappears ahead of you, but sometimes that also means that they´ve switched to chip seal, which is a hard road surface of fist sized rocks sealed with something like tar, which is as good as regular black top for a dual sport bike with heavy shocks and enduro tires. (You have to pity some of the people in small cars, though.) Yesterday I had a stretch of about 40 miles of gravel to deal with, but once in Alaska the roads are supposed to be better.

I´m headed to Fairbanks, Alaska tonight where I hope to meet up with Dave for the ride up to Deadhorse.

August 5 - North of Coldfoot, halfway between Fairbanks and Deadhorse

I arrived at 5pm yesterday in Fairbanks. The weather was decent, but there were large wildfires in central Alaska, making a haze that covered the road in some places. I had the hottest chili I´ve ever had at Tok Junction, then headed into Fairbanks. On the advice of another tourist I stopped in North Pole, Alaska, about 15 miles away from Fairbanks - Santa´s little village and tourist trap 365 days a year. All of the lampposts are painted to resemble candy canes, and there is a Santa 60 feet tall, but other than that there is nothing there that you can´t see from the highway, a fact that I was not aware of when I pulled off. I didn´t need to buy any Christmas ornaments in August, so I beat a rapid retreat.

At a Tesoro gas station on the way into town I saw a group of 3 women riding Harleys, with no helmets. Ahh, Alaska. At the same time, I ended up talking to a guy who apparently had met "the Striking Viking", the guy who got himself kidnapped in Colombia. He gave me one of my many contradictory reports on weather and road conditions on the way to Deadhorse, up what is locally called "the Haul Road", since it is used to supply parts to the Alaska Pipeline. He also warned me about the calcium chloride on the roads, and told me that he thought the Haul Road was closed, since the September 11th attacks, to protect the pipeline. The Milepost mentioned this but said that the road was due to possibly be opened again in the summer of 2002. Someone else had mentioned that it was closed because some maniac with a rifle had shot some holes in the pipeline. The Haul Road and the Pipeline run next to each other for most of the 500 miles to the Arctic Ocean - in fact without the Pipeline, the Haul Road would not exist. The Haul Road was actually only opened to general tourists in the mid-90´s. I finally realized that I would never really be sure what the truth was until we were stopped on the road. Worst case scenario, we´d only make it to he Arctic Circle.

I looked for Dave in Fairbanks, at the hostel we had agreed to meet at. Dave had never stayed at a hostel before, but in Alaska a cheap, crappy room would be $70 a night, so it seemed like the best option if we wanted to stay near Fairbanks. The city looked pretty bad in the area I was driving through - my sense based on my experiences in New York City in the 80´s and 90´s was that this was a bad part of town. I checked the address, and realized that the place was across a major road, in an area that was marginally better. The vibe didn´t remind me of bad areas of New York City so much as a dying city in upstate New York like Hudson, where the good life is so far away that even the hope of stealing it is gone. Maybe the place looks better under a few feet of snow. The hostel was here, and so was Dave. I ran into the owner first. Mr Boyle, the proprietor of Boyle´s Hostel, has an accent that I first thought was English, but is actually from Ontario from 60 years ago. He seems like a kindly old man, and has to be in his 70´s or 80´s. While I was trying to get a room he seemed to forget that I was there, then forgot to take my money. He eventually showed me to a 5x10 side room in the garage with a concrete floor but its own side door, big enough for a bed, a dresser and a table. I made out slightly better than Dave, who is camped in an aluminum garden shed that has a bed inside it. He makes quite a racket when he tries to get into bed and close the door behind him.

We asked him about leaving some of our gear there for a few days while we went up to Deadhorse, also known as Prudhoe Bay.
"Well, my wife is returning from England tonight. She´s been away for a few years. She might need some things from the garage." We assured him that we could make the pile very small and stick it in some corner out of the way, and he agreed that we could put some things under a table.
"So you boys are going to Prudhoe Bay?", he said. "Well. That is quite an expedition. That´s a very long way."
"Yes, about 500 miles", Dave said.
"That´s quite an adventure." We nodded, basking in his admiration as he looked at us and the bikes.
"A man could die on a trip like that," he stated grimly. Our jaws dropped. Me and Dave looked at each other, then at him. He seemed to be thinking about what he might have to do with all of our stuff if we did not return. We assured him that we´d be back in four nights, and we´d want rooms again, and he agreed and went back inside.
"Are all hostels like this?" Dave asked, as we walked down the block to a bar for dinner.
"No no no. Nope. This is one of a kind," I said.
"Good."
We had a few beers and some burgers. I had an Alaska Pale, which was $5.50. Dave noted that this beer was brewed in Anchorage, cost $3.50 in the terminal in Bellingham, cost $4.50 on the ferry, and somehow got more and more expensive as it got closer to home. It had negative shipping costs. The same seemed to be true of gasoline (extracted from here), and for that matter, everything in Alaska, almost as if there was a different currency up there. Must be great to be Alaskan if you´re good at saving and you travel south in the winter. We finished dinner, and decided to head back and go to sleep for an early start.

So I was just about asleep after when the door to my room opened. The door was the kind that only opens with a key, but the Mr Boyle had this ingenious habit of putting all of the keys under the doormats where no one would ever think to look. Being in my sleeping bag in my underwear, I didn´t do much more than sit up and stare as two guys started walking in.
"What are you doing?" I yelled.
"Oh... I didn´t realize he´d rented this room. I´ll just be a minute. I need the dresser." I realized that this was Boyle´s middle aged son.
His friend said "Hey, maybe we should come back for it tomorrow..."
"No, no, we need to get it now. Mother is very particular."
He started pulling the dresser towards the door, then realized my stuff was on it.
"This is yours?" he asked.
"Yeah... just put it over there on the table," I said, wanting them out as fast as possible, given the whole Norman Bates vibe that the hostel now had. He moved my toiletry bag and some other stuff to the table, and pulled the dresser out of the door, and they were gone.

The next morning while we packed up, I ate a Powerbar and we sorted out our gear, I related what had happened the night before, most of which he had seen. He told me that he´d walked into the kitchen to use the stove and he`d seen the wife, who appeared to be sleeping when he first walked in. She woke up, and asked him where her husband kept the milk. I went down some stairs in the back yard to the shower, and afterwards I overheard this exhange between mother and son up the stairs...
"There was a strange man in here earlier."
"Yes mother. He´s one of the hostelers. Do you like the hostel?"
No response.
"This food is for us, but father can have some of it too..."
By the time I was upstairs, Dave already had his bike in the street.

We´d removed all non-essentials, though I was still carrying the spare tires. Dave had about 150,000 miles of motorcycle riding experience since he rides to and from work every day, and is an expert mechanic. My contribution, such as it was, was spare parts, since my tires would fit both of our bikes.

I have a new front and an old rear tire as spares, because the Milepost and the experiences of various people driving in Alaska convinced me that I´ll probably need them. My dad had two flats driving a pickup truck on the Alcan, which is pavement with patches of gravel. Shredded truck tire tread sticking up in mud can slice right through a regular tire. The Milepost recommends at least 2 spares to attempt the Deadhorse run. I think this is excessive for us since we are running on enduro tires and still have lots of tread left, but we did hear the story of a guy in a car who ran through two spares at one time, then had a third flat and was stuck by the side of the road for hours until a truck picked him up and got him out of there. Rental car companies prohibit tourists from taking cars up the Haul Road, partially because of flats and other gravel damage (and partially because its so easy for green tourists not used to gravel to drive a rental off into a ravine). So we should basically expect at least one flat between us, which should be fun to change on the Haul Road.

I brought 2 changes of clothes and all of my cold weather gear and left all of my other personal effects. On the way out of town I filled two containers I have with gasoline. These are 10 liter dromedary bags which I´ve heard on the adventure motorcycling web site Horizons Unlimited can be used as collapsible gas cans. Since there is a 250 mile gap between the last gas station on the road and Deadhorse, I need to have extra gasoline, though this is probably more than I need now (I bought two because I´ll need them in Chile in the desert.)

We headed out of Fairbanks around 9am, hit some gravel, and then never really had anything loose again all the way up to Coldfoot - it was paved a lot of the way, and chip sealed for most of the rest. We also had temperatures of 75 or 80 degrees for most of the day, dropping only slightly as we went north. The road so far has been much better than from Haines Junction to Beaver Creek. The traffic is largley heavy trucks, carrying what are essentially gigantic plumbing supplies for the Alaska Pipeline - enormous pipes, valves, connectors, all chained down to flatbeds pulled by powerful 18 wheelers. Today we saw an empty 18 wheeler push another one with a single valve up a steep hill in first gear. We try to follow the advice of the Milepost on this, which is that the Haul Road is the truckers road, and we should stay out of their way as best we can, since in many cases even if they want to stop for us by the time they see us they won´t be able to. This is difficult since most of the road has soft shoulders of gravel or no shoulder at all, with a steep dropoff into the tundra. Most of the early part of the road today was winding through hills, and we were often caught behind trucks for a while, but they tend to be pretty good about letting us pass. The oncoming trucks are probably the greatest danger, since there are so many loose fist-sized rocks on the road and their tires can throw them at 70 mph at your headlight or your face plate.

We stopped at the Arctic Circle, which is a parking area above the regular road, up a ramp of gravel, with some trees and a sign that says "Arctic Circle", and then a little interpretive area behind it that explains what the Circle actually is, and the role of the seasons in the Arctic. The Arctic Circle is an imaginary line, like the equator, at 66 degrees north. Beyond this line, during the summer solstice for the northern hemisphere, the sun is visible for 24 hours a day. It is a milepost that many people aim for as an endpoint to a northern trip, if they don´t want to drive all of the dirt road to Deadhorse. We took some photos, and watched as a couple arrived in a rental car, and got out - the guy was wearing a t-shirt and Hawaiian shorts. Then a bus arrived with at least 20 tourists, and the guide came up to the sign and unrolled a rubber mat with a dotted line in the middle of it and made everyone step across it, after an elaborate ritual of his own devising. We decided it was time to go.

We had sandwiches in Hotspot - a collection of semi-permanent trailers in a gravel lot by the side of the road, where they turned on a generator to pump the gas. The yorkie terriers there were barking at something in the woods, which the woman who owned the place confessed (after we´d ordered our food) was a lone wolf, possibly rabid, that had been seen around for the last few days. She also mentioned two ladies on motorcycles who had headed north the day before. We bought the "cheapest gas north of Fairbanks" for $2.50, and headed out.

Gas was $2.35 in Coldfoot, another gravel lot with a hotel, which was actually the last gas station before the big gap. The pumps even had card readers which operated by satellite phone. Coldfoot got its name because supposedly some prospectors about a century ago were headed north to the ocean, and got cold feet here and turned around to go back to balmy Anchorage.

We decided to camp north of Beaver Creek, the last town, in the Minnie River campground. Both Dave and I walked around the roads and small gravel pads in the middle of the black spruce bogs that constitutes the campground, and concluded independently that since the trees are 3 inches wide and 15 feet tall, the only place to run from bears is on top of one of the RV´s across the road that has a ladder to its roof... we´ve decided to move our food and stoves to another site and leave them there, and hope for the best. All of the garbage in the campground is in steel, concrete mounted bear proof containers, so hopefully they don´t think of this place as a source of food. Even more than car campers, we really have nowhere to go.

We´ve reached a little bit more than the midpoint of the 500 miles between Fairbanks and Deadhorse. The gravel started 5 miles south of here. So far the weather has been good, but we´ve been told that on top of Aticun Pass it will probably be bad. The Brooks Range is the Continental Divide between the Arctic and the Pacific, another imaginary line that means all water that falls on this side flows to a river that ends in the Pacific, and all water on the other side ends up in the Arctic. The weather is supposed to be different on the other side. Apparently the forecast is for rain, north of the mountains. The pass is a 12% grade of gravel. Time to sleep under the midday sun - at 9:30 pm. I´m glad I brought eye shades. We´ll go slow and hope for the best.

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