Wandering in the Wilderness

August 9 - Fairbanks

We made it back to Fairbanks, after the "Deadhorse 500". Iīm happy to be on real roads again.

We set out August 6 at 6:30 am from the campground, and headed north in the cold. The temperature had dropped 35 degrees or so, to the mid 30īs, but we hoped that this was because we were up early. After packing and donning all of our cold weather clothes, we were still both barely warm even before getting on the bikes. Once on a motorcycle, you have the wind chill, and the main thing it affects is your fingers, which can make it very hard to control the bike. I took the time to let some air out of my tires, to increase their surface area, and give better traction, but it turns out that my new stick guage was a piece of garbage - we figured out in Deadhorse that it was completely wrong - and Iīd probably not let out as much air as I thought.

We were riding for about half an hour before we reached the first foothills of Aticun Pass. As we approached the Brooks Range, we got a look at the ascent, which was a ramp. Typically mountain passes have an ascent on the mountain itself, often with switchbacks, as you gain the altitude you need to cross over to the other side. The engineers who built the Haul Road were more direct than that. The ramp was made out of piled, rammed earth, with guard rails on both sides and only curved a little as it ascended steeply, and after a half mile turned onto the mountain and went straight over the pass. The ramp did not leave a lot of room to get out of the way of trucks - we assumed that there was no chance that they could stop - but it was still very early, so weīd probably be fine. Besides, I figured, every now and then the trucks had to pass each other on the pass, which meant there must be space for two of them, despite all evidence to the contrary - I forgot that they have CBīs.

We were thrilled when we made it to the top, and stopped to take some pictures. The toothlike peaks of the Brooks Range were not the tallest mountains that Iīd seen, but because the stone was jet black and rough, when the peaks were dusted with snow they looked like shots from an Apollo mission of the lunar surface, a high contrast of white and black, bleak and forboding. There was snow below us in the mountain pass, but none on the road. We assumed the worst was over, and headed north into the first valley of the true Arctic. As we descended, it was foggy, but the ground was a lush, grassy, green. Unlike the other side of the mountains, here there were no trees at all, not even black spruce. Nothing taller than a bush grew on the plain all of the way down the North Slope to the ocean. The wind met no resistance, and blew in over the plains all the way from the ocean to the mountains, and we started feeling it as soon as we were out of the shadows of the pass.

As we wound through the valley to the open plain, we got a few flakes of snow. For about half an hour, it didnīt stick, and I hoped that as we descended, and the day went on, it would get warmer, and we wouldnīt get snow on the road. First the gravel and dirt turned to mud, then bits of snow appeared in the gravel. Finally the snow started sticking, but we still had tracks, so we kept going. The snow actually started covering the ruts in some places, and I was starting to get worried. I had fairly new Enduro 3 tires, with an aggressive tread, but once the snow got more than half an inch deep that wouldnīt mean much. The mountains in the distance were starting to disappear into the snow as the storm got more intense. We crossed a bridge - I noticed before that some of the bridges were wood, but being a New Yorker and not having much experience with them, I didnīt know enough to be worried - I was always looking out for metal. Turns out wood with snow is at least as bad, and I only slowed down at this bridge because Dave had, and because of that I only fishtailed slightly. After that, I thought it was time to stop and rethink things, so I decided to catch up to Dave.

Heīd seemed to be unconcerned, and was making good time up the hill on the other side. I tried to catch up with him, and sped up the hill, and as I rounded the curve at the top the wind from the ocean hit me and started screwing up my steering. Riding on snow is fine, as long as you donīt need to change your momentum - which means turn or slow down. I needed to do both. I was on a road with a berm on one side and a 15 foot drop into the tundra on the other, and the snow making it hard to tell where I was on the road. I did what I know I shouldnīt have done, which is overcontrolled my steering, which made me swerve from one side to the other in gradually wider overcorrections. It could have been worse, since I never hit the front brake, which is death on anything other than pavement. It took at least 5 gyrations before I finally lost the bike completely and spun it around, so by then I was going a little slower, maybe 25 or 30 mph. As I landed I watched Daveīs taillight disappear into the storm.

Thoughts of Jack London stories about death in the Arctic ran through my mind, particularly the one where the wind blows the musherīs last match out before he can light the fire that will save his life. Iīd landed with the bike, my leg protected by the aluminum pannier. Iīve crashed snowboards as fast as this in snow, and I was wearing protective clothing along with about 5 other layers, but as I got off the bike I checked myself quickly for injuries which you can get without realizing it in shock situations. The good news was, I was fine - my rain gear wasnīt even ripped. I tried to lift the bike, which was still running. The bad news was, that at a minimum the left pannier had been partly ripped off, as the metal frame detached from the passenger foot peg and dug itself into the mud. The back part of the rack was twisted also. I couldnīt lift the weight since it was not quite attached anymore. I realized that it was critical to get out of the middle of the road as fast as possible, because a truck could come around the bend at any minute. I started detaching gear.

As I was doing this, Dave arrived. He started to try to lift up the bike, not realizing Iīd already tried that. I got more of the stuff off the top. A semi roared out of the blizzard and barely missed us northbound. He must have been halfway over the edge to manage that. We pulled the bike up and got it to a small built up area on the tundra side, as another passed southbound. Dave spotted a pullout back 100 yards, and we headed for that, parking the bikes there and collecting my gear. While Dave was getting his bike to the turnout, a rental car with some foreign tourists pulled up, northbound, and asked if the road north was open. When he said yes, they took off, never asking if he was ok. "Hope those bastards wind up in a ditch," he said.

The bike itself seemed to be fine, except for a slight twist in the handlebars. "In a few months, youīll get used to it, and other bikes with straight ones will seem weird to you," Dave said. I looked over the rack. It looked a little ugly, but we were carrying a light load as it was, and if we made it a little lighter I could get all of the weight out of the left aluminum box. One of the panniers was only carrying the bags of gasoline. At first, Iīd thought about strapping them on top of the boxes or in front of them, but after some cautionary tales on Horizons Unlimited about explosions and burning flesh I decided to put them in the panniers, which was a lucky thing, as it turned out. We decided it was a good place to get fuel into our bikes. Weīd fill mine and Daveīs, then if I needed more I could take from his container later.

We then ran into the next hitch, which was that the gasoline had welded together the plastic threads of the bags and the new Nalgene bottle tops that Iīd put on them. If I couldnīt get them open, I might have no way of refueling on the way home. I hate working on machines in the cold, and both of us had wet gloves on, and it was still snowing. Once your hands get cold and numb, they become nearly useless. Taking off the gloves actually made my hands warmer. I opened up my tool kit and found a very small screwdriver, and decided to pry off the lids, one way or another. We opened my tank and got the funnel ready, and then the cap just came right off with a few prods. We tried to use our bodies to block the wind as the gas went into the tank. We put part of the second bag in my bike, and the rest in Daveīs and he topped off from his container. The snow started to melt on the road from the trucks.

I put the gas bags in the good side along with all of my tools to keep most of the weight low, and then bungied everything else into the passenger seat as close to me as possible. I abandoned the rear tire in the pullout, intending to pick it up on the return trip, and we headed out. According to the Milepost, we were lucky because there was an Alaska Department of Transportation station to the north in 7 miles, and we decided to head for there and find out what the weather was supposed to be like. Our mood was pretty grim, with both of us having wet gloves that were wet and freezing cold. As our hands got numb our handling in emergencies would get worse. I had heated grips and Dave didnīt so I made sure not to bitch about this.

The DOT station was half a mile down a dirt road off of the highway, and was a group of hangar like buildings surrounded by chain link fence, with living quarters in some trailers. There was a couch on the deck outside the trailer building, covered in snow. We noticed as we arrived that there were two other bikes in the yard. As we went up to the door, we were met by two women. These were the pair of women bikers that weīd heard mention of in Hotspot the day before. Betty and Nancy had made it this far the previous day, and had gotten hit by a blizzard, which we were getting the tail end of. They had been rescued from the road by the guys at the DOT station, who had offered them a place to stay, and urged them to head south the next day.

They offered us some tea, and as I went inside, the living room was warm, with three couches and satellite TV. We stripped off our clothes, and the idea of staying here forever occurred to me. But after the tea, we checked the weather on the radio, and found out the forecast was for above freezing in Deadhorse, with temperatures rising through the afternoon. Betty and Nancy were undecided on what to do - Betty wanted to make Deadhorse, but Nancy was more hesitant. She was riding a bike from her husbandīs motorcycle rental business and was afraid to bring it back damaged. I think my story had made her more cautious. I was a little shaken by my crash, and had spent a few minutes contemplating heading south while I was repacking the bike, but I realized that if I turned back now, it would make it harder for me to get through other dangerous parts of the trip like Peru and Bolivia. Iīd turned around in Newfoundland because it was a lark, a small side trip, but this was part of my main goal, and I wasnīt going to give up on it unless it was impossible. Dave didnīt seem to have many worries, or if he did he didnīt express them.

We finished up, and Dave and I decided to head north. We started getting clothes on. Betty seemed to be leaning towards coming with us. Dave and I offered to let them ride with us, and take the lead (which I was all in favor of, because Dave rode a little faster than my comfort zone.) Nancy decided to go for it, and we waited for them to pack up. As they were doing this I realized that my license plate was missing. I went off to look for it for an hour in the snow, with no luck. While I was there, a pickup stopped and asked if I was ok, which made the thoughts of death in the remote Arctic seem a little absurd (unless of course one drove off into the tundra and got eaten by a bear.) I decided to try again the next day, when hopefully the snow would be gone. I headed back to the station and we all headed north.

By now it was 2:30, but we still had more daylight than weīd need, and the snow had changed to rain. We could see the mountains again. We had 120 miles to go. The road was no longer covered with snow, but it was coated with calcium chloride. This is a chemical that is applied to a packed dirt road, which keeps dust clouds down - an 18 wheeler can raise a dust cloud on a dirt road that you can see for miles, and stays in the air for a long time. When itīs dry, it makes the dirt pack harder, which is great for bikes. But when itīs wet, it feels as if the road has been greased. In many ways, it is worse than snow. The road was covered with the stuff. We couldnīt go faster than 35 mph, and in many places we went slower as the surface turned to mud. The dirt road was constantly being repaired, and in some places where the water had washed the dirt away all that was left was very large rocks.

Staying on the road required constant and total concentration, and was nerve racking as ruts became difficult to find, trying to see through a mud and rain coated visor where the slickest muddy parts were, and where the calcium chloride was. At one other point in the day, I started losing control of the bike again - Dave was just behind me, and a huge tanker truck was heading towards us, as I swerved right, then left. Dave told me later he was sure I was going to plant it right in front of the truck, but then I just regained control somehow, and kept riding. 80 miles out we randomly hit 25 miles of good asphault paving, complete with the yellow line down the middle, and I was filled with joy until I remembered that the Milepost said that it ended around mile 55 from Deadhorse. We did make it, though, with random outbuildings of Deadhorse appearing anticlimactically in the tundra, in a flat coastal plain.

The name Deadhorse apparently comes from a a trucking company that once operated up there before the pipeline was created, called Deadhorse Hauling... and the story that I read in Deadhorse was that the son of a very rich man back east had decided that his son should not inherit any money until he was 35, but did lend him money to invest in a business venture - a trucking company. The company kept losing money, and the old man remarked that "he was feeding a dead horse." This company apparently got the contract for the first gravel airstrip up there (this is loosely paraphrased from the Arctic Caribou Inn's newsletter.) It's a pretty good name for the town.

Deadhorse looks like a refinery dropped into the middle of an airport. Only recently were the complex of roads in the plain there given names, because workers had a tendancy to get lost in the fog. Deadhorse is a company town with 2000 workers, most of them men, playing around with a huge variety of heavy machinery mostly with wheels bigger than my motorcycle. There are bizarre mobile outbuildings many stories tall, on temporary gravel pads, with pilot flames burning from the chemicals taken out of the ground. Rows of enormous pipes appear out of nowhere in the ground, run for a few hundred meters, then disappear again. One of the semi-temporary buildings vents some sulphuric compounds on a regular schedule because when it goes off the road nearby needs to be closed and the explosion can be heard throughout the town.

Most of the people there are working a few weeks on, a few weeks off - meaning flown back to Fairbanks or Anchorage - so the town is pretty hardworking, and alcohol is banned. I was a little disappointed to not have a beer at the end of the ride - particularly this ride - and I mentioned to Betty that no alcohol seemed un-Alaskan, and she said "That's why it's necessary." It turns out that dry towns are becoming common in "The Bush" as the areas far from the cities are called, mainly because of the devastating effect of alcohol on the Innuit communities, but given that it is pitch black for months at a time, anyone could become an alcoholic up here.

We also were having a hard time finding a room. Deadhorse isnīt much of a tourist attraction, but more and more people are finding there way up there, so there are now two hotels. One of them is really temporary workers housing as much as a hotel, but there are also a mix of military people and tourists to put up, so a second establishment, the Arctic Caribou Inn has opened. They had a triple left. Grizzly bears are endemic in the area - in many places the Milepost warns of a grizzly presence, but in Deadhorse it simply says that you must not sleep outside. As we entered town, the local sheriff was driving by with a truck carrying huge bear traps, to take out a particular family of mama and cubs that were known to be aggressive. The summer situation is slightly better than winter though - after the ice closes in polar bears can reach the town, and they are not the cuddly Coca-cola sipping kind of polar bears, but more of the play-with-the-seal-by-tossing-it-in-the-air-before-ripping-it-to-pieces kind of polar bear.

So anyway, we were going to take what they had, and we were assured that if no rooms were available something indoors would be found for us. We took the triple, and I offered to take the floor. We dropped our gear and went out to work on the bikes. The whole town had many muddy streets and was really one big truck parking lot, so I was sure Iīd find some wire and other useful stuff in the mud, and I did. With the baling wire and rope I found, I only needed a long pipe, which I borrowed from the post office/hardware store/gift shop. I disassembled the rack and turned the piece that was twisted and managed to reassemble the whole thing in a reasonable facsimile of repaired. I needed the baling wire and rope because Iīd lost an expansion bolt that fit the rack to the back of the passenger footpeg - it wasnīt missing after the crash, but Iīd stupidly left it there and it was now somewhere out on the road north of Alaska DOT station 7. Iīd also bridged a weak section of metal with a piece of metal rod and some hose clamps. While I was working I met a guy from Ireland, who was a contract worker. We talked Irish music, and then he said that he often made the ride up from Fairbanks on a KTM, sometimes in snow. I stopped believing him when he said he usually did 60 miles an hour or faster, even in mud or snow, though I guess its possible. He worked in the hotel and said heīd try to get us breakfast in the morning, but we didnīt see him again.

We stopped for dinner at the buffet in the main hotel, and then I finished up, and headed off to sleep. I was the first in bed. It was 10:30, and still broad daylight. With the overcast, it was impossible to tell where the sun was, only that it was not going to be dark anytime soon. It was August 6, and the sun had been setting for only two weeks at this point, and it barely dipped below the horizon when it did set. In July, it just circled around overhead endlessly. I put on my eye shades, and the others closed the heavy curtains in the room. I think I must have relived the crash at least once in my sleep, but the next day I rose ready to try it again. But first, we had the tour.

The oil companies really own Deadhorse (which they prefer to call Prudhoe Bay), and only grudgingly allow access to anything. The town itself fronts on land that tumbles down a gravel ditch into some kind of water, but it seems to be closed in by a berm a few miles out, and it is not the kind of water youīd want to go into, since the oil companies have been working their petroleumagic around here. The Federal Government takes the view that since most of the north slope is Federal land owned by our government, it makes sense for U.S. troops to be deployed to prevent U.S. citizens from approaching this land. Since the various drilling areas cover most of the shore for 40 miles, and they have plenty to want to hide, all access to the ocean is through an official tour, which costs $37. No dipping of the tires of your bike in the Arctic Ocean allowed.

Before theyīll even take you on the tour, you have to watch an informative video on all of the great things that Chevron and Co. are doing for the environment of the Arctic. This includes points like how they use ice roads to move heavy equipment, a supposed environmental move that the local workers will tell you was really done because dirt roads are extremely costly to build and hard to maintain, and all you need for an ice road is a hose. It also tells you about how they can now drill sideways to get at more oil from a smaller surface footprint - a good thing, I suppose - and looks to a brighter future involving drilling in the Arctic National Wilderness. To quote the Onion, George W. Bush vows to remove toxic oil from underneath our national parks.

It was the tour guideīs last day, so some of the points of interest in the industrial wonderland were probably missed, but the driver was having fun. He was warming up for the group after us, who were apparently going to be environmentalists. He was hoping for Greenpeace. He said that the oil companies had cleared the forest of the north slopes to make room for the oil derricks... I told him he should go one better, and say that the Army had as a special favor used some nuclear weapons back in the 50īs to clear the trees and defrost the soil. He seemed to like that one. It was probably considered, too. Alaskans donīt get taxed by their state - they actually are paid to live there, and get a payment for all of their kids, which comes from the Alaska Permanent Fund, which comes from oil revenue. On the other hand, they tend to be outdoors oriented, and love the environment when they arenīt shooting at it. They are conflicted. So I wasnīt saying everything I thought about the place around the Alaskans. Since I was from New York City, I didnīt have to - all Alaskans thought people from the East Coast wanted to intrude and protect things that they would never come to see (a line that more than one person said before they thought about who they were talking to). I can see that point of view... but I it`s hard to think straight about the future of the environment when you get that check every year.

The bus stopped at a gravel spit with a wide area, and we were at the Arctic Ocean. I took off my boots and socks, and waded in to about my knees, long enough for a bunch of photos to be taken. It was very cold, but bearable. The driver told us that two other guys had gone skinny dipping, which Iīd considered but ruled out because we were leaving right afterwards and Iīd have to ride in salt for at least two days. The others got about toe deep.

Back in town, we bought some t-shirts (I passed on "Crouching Tourist, Hidden Grizzly" in favor of "The Deadhorse 500: The Ride of Your Life"), and then mounted up, pausing only for the guys in the post office to take a polaroid of us as a group. I was holding up the group because Iīd still been working on repairs and wanted to be sure he bike was as ready as it was going to get. It was raining again, and we reversed our order from the previous day, with Dave taking the lead. This time it wasnīt nearly as harrowing, and the rain stopped after about an hour. The snow had all melted and the Arctic landscape was all rolling green hills, strange table-shaped land formations caused by the permafrost pushing up, and wildlife that you could spot miles away in the green. We saw musk ox, that look like survivors from before the ice age with massive gnarled antlers, as well as arctic swans and dahl sheep. We got back to the DOT station, where I went ahead and quickly found my license plate, while Betty and Nancy got some beers at the DOT station from their friends. I retrieved my rear tire from where Iīd left it the day before. The ride from there was uneventful. In the place where I had crashed I looked out at the Brooks Range as the sun lit up the peaks, and was finally happy that Iīd made the trip.

20 miles before Aticun Pass, Dave froze ahead of me. We were in a valley between some mountains in the Brooks Range, and Betty and Nancy were a few minutes behind us. I was wondering why heīd stopped. Ahead of us about 200 yards, there were two vehicles, a blue truck on the northbound side and a white van in front of us on the southbound side, blocking the road. I looked at them, still unenlightened. Finally, I noticed the large grizzly digging in the dirt about 30 feet from the road. The silly tourists had forgotten the part about grizzly bears ripping off car doors to get at the food inside, which in this case was them.
"Hey... thatīs a bear, Dave?" I observed keenly.
"YES ITīS A FUCKING BEAR!" Dave admitted to having some bearanoia.
The bear was paying no attention to the people in the cars who were very close to him, but we appeared to have caught his eye. He was very close to the road, and we were still far away, so there was no way we could get by if he decided to get in our way.
"Do you want to turn the bikes around in case we need to get out of here?" I asked. Dave didnīt say anything. I figured we probably would be fine with the bear, but if something went wrong - like a semi plowing through this little photo shoot at 60 - Iīd like to be ahead of the pack, and given the narrowness of the road it might take a maneuver or two to turn around. As I said this, the bear lost interest in us, and wandered up the hill. The truck and the van finally got out of the way, and Dave gunned it past the bear with me right behind. I restrained my impulse to stop for a photo, remembering the part about the bear having a top speed of 35 mph, which was pretty close to my top speed on gravel and dirt.

We took a break at a gravel pullout to regroup with Betty and Nancy, had some power bars, and played with Nancyīs chain adjustment. As weīd arrived, Dave had noticed the white van pulling out with a flat tire. We later saw the same van on the other side of the pass about 20 miles to the south, the tire having finally shredded down to the rim, and the driver now changing it. Iīd guess the bear had made an impression on him. We crossed the pass as a group, and once again we were in luck and did not encounter any trucks. I breathed a sigh of relief once we were down on the other side. I was near empty with my yellow gas warning light on for about 25 miles, and had already long since used my reserve gas, but we made it back to the campground, and were only 7 miles from Coldfoot. I felt lucky. Nancy and Betty had decided on one of the pricey hotel rooms there, but returned to share the beers with us that theyīd picked up from the DOT guys. Slightly warm, but delicious nevertheless.

We cooked some food at the next campsite over and left our food and cooking gear there, and then retired to our tents, assuming the worst was over. Of course, the next day it rained, and what had been easy three days before became a slippery mess. We ran down from Coldfoot to Hotspot, where there was a guy with a rifle hunting for the rabid wolf, and kept going until we hit pavement, where we assumed our problems were over. But this road, evil beast that it was, was not done yet. The first 70 miles had been twisty and hilly as we came up, but then we had dry weather and good visibility, and we hadnīt really worried about it. The forest fires and rain mixed together into a kind of fog/smoke that at times closed visibility down to 20 feet, and for a short time less than that. I was thinking of stopping when I could no longer see the taillights of a car right in front of me, but then we dipped into a valley and it improved. We went through an area where ravines dropped from both sides of the highway and I noticed an SUV flipped over at the bottom, which neither of us remembered from a few days earlier.

Finally we arrived back in Fairbanks, on a normal graded highway, and we must have been going over 85 or 90 as we approached town. We made it back to Boyleīs hostel. Weīd been ambivalent about returning, but now we were just happy to have a place waiting for us. Only, it wasnīt.
"You fellahs want a room?"
We mentioned that weīd said weīd want a room when we were there last. He still didnīt remember us. We mentioned that our stuff was (presumably) still in his garage.
"Well, a few days ago, if you were looking for a bed, it would have been a different situation, but you see now Iīm full." He mentioned the possibility of us camping in the back yard with tents. Clearly, reservation or not, we werenīt getting beds. We got our stuff out of the garage, and headed back out to the street. Weīd found this place from Daveīs Letīs Go Alaska. I only had the Milepost, which was good for all of the small towns outside of Fairbanks and Anchorage, but useless here.
We tried a nearby hotel, and even if we shared a room it would be over $80. "Dave, what else does Letīs Go have?" I asked.
"Well, this was ranked number one... and recommended with the little thumbs up...", he said uncertainly.
"Number two canīt possibly be much worse. Letīs try it..."
We decided to head to the Alaska Heritage Hostel. As we crossed the avenue we went into the area that I had not like days before. Old collapsing houses with plywood windows, yards full of rusting vehicles, burned out buildings, surrounded by trees. It reminded me of Flint, Michigan as shown in Roger and Me. We kept going down the street a few blocks and the area improved marginally. We finally found the hostel. Turns out the Heritage part is that the house was a whorehouse during the pipeline boom - many an Alaskan man has fond memories of the place - and in the area nearby, there were a couple of crackhouses. Weīre told that the neighborhood has improved in the last five years, which seems to mean that the occupants of the crackhouses abandoned their dwellings to the elements. We are camped out in rickety bunk beds in a dank basement room with concrete floors and aging paneling. On the plus side, the owner also is a motorcycle enthusiast, and after hearing of our trip is taking a me-casa-es-su-casa approach to us working on our bikes in his garage. Iīm hoping to make my repairs a little more permanent and do an oil change, and maybe wash off the calcium chloride before it rots through my bike. Dave and I took a stab at it yesterday with a hose, but the stuff really sticks, and it reappears as soon as it dries.

I also need a rest day before heading south. Dave sounds like he intends to head down the long dirt road that runs through the park around Denali (aka Mount McKinley), and Iīve had more than enough dirt for a while, so it looks like weīll part ways in two days. Too bad - Iīve never ridden with anyone before for any distance, and it was fun, though I think I cramp his style a little since Iīm still learning to deal with mud and deep gravel. Dave has also planned this much more extensively than I have, and reserved a coveted camping spot in Denali long before coming up here, whereas I never gave it a thought. This means I can probably camp nearby and take the bus in, which is fine for me - everything beyond the Deadhorse run is a bonus.

August 11 -Denali

Iīve put up my tent by a stream at a hostel near Denali. The white noise of the stream does a nice job of drowning out all but the largest trucks on the highway nearby. The mosquitos are as bad as most other places in Alaska. After Coldfoot we didnīt see them, so I forgot how bad they are here.

I was happy to clear out of Fairbanks this morning. I had two full days there, enough to do my oil, fix the turn signal that was smashed in the crash, properly clean the bike, and make more permanent repairs on my rack. I even was able to make a headlight cover out of a small square of plexiglass that I bent to the shape of my headlight with my blowtorch lighter, putting in some clear furniture glides as spacers. As fine a roadside repair job as Iīve ever done. I also saw a movie, and got caught in the rain yet again on the bike.

The hostel was really starting to get depressing. Ed, the owner, was also working on his bike - he was in a crash 2 weeks ago where he wrecked the front end running into a car. He says that the driver ran a stop sign, using a lot of racist terminology to describe the situation. He had a concussion and was unconscious for 2 days. So he got his bike running, and went out again without a helmet. Less and less to worry about protecting, I guess. Then he got weird about not being able to find some kind of tool in his garage, whereupon I packed up all of mine and put my bike away for the night.

There was also a girl about 20 years old hanging around. It was unclear which of the guys there she was living with, but last night she came down from her room over the garage complaining that no one she knew in town was home, she couldnīt find anyone, and anyway, it was Saturday night, so she was GOING OUT one way or another. With her 3 year old girl in tow, she got in her car and peeled out for the liquor store before going cruising. She reeked of perfume, which I realized later probably was to cover the alcohol.

Lots of hostels have books lying around - you take one, you leave one for the next guest. Most of them are airport novels, but this place had AA books - kinda interesting since Iīd never seen one before - and John Birch Society literature about how Dubya is letting the U.N. take over the U.S. Army and the U.S. in general, which I had a good laugh at.

The racist alcoholic fuckup strain of Alaskan culture was not something I ran into a lot of - the environment is so unforgiving outside of the cities that most people depend on each other and are decent to each other, and have to be pretty together. But after driving around, I didnīt find any part of Fairbanks to be much better. I headed out a few hours after Dave, because heīs going to ride all the way back to Tok and then take the old Denali highway in. Perhaps Iīll catch up with him in Palmer, where Betty and Nancy have invited us to stay.

The ride towards Denali was pretty decent, on a good highway with no gravel patches. It rained of course. This was to be expected. Denali (which is also known to people from the Lower 48 as Mount McKinley) is so big it creates its own weather. Denali is 20,320 feet tall -Mount Everest, by comparison, is 29,035 feet. However Denali rises from little more than sea level, a total of 18,000 feet, whereas Everest is on the Tibetan plateau, so Denali is by far the tallest mountain from base to top. The top of the mountain is covered by clouds 9 days out of 10.

I couldnīt see the top of Denali, but the foothills of Denali one ridge away were some of the tallest mountains Iīve ever seen. Denali itself was an enormous bulk of stone dwarfing them that disappeared into a cloud that swirled around it. It was the kind of sight that gives you vertigo as you look up at it, and I was still miles away.

Dave has a plan to stay at Denaliīs base for 7 days, which gives him a pretty good shot at seeing something. Iīm going to stay tonight and then see what the weather is like in the morning. I have it in my budget to take a flightseeing tour, and if any breaks in the clouds appear Iīll go for it. Otherwise, Iīll head south to Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula.

Dave just walked into the cafe where Iīm writing... more later.

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