Mike's in B-ham

Now that we are about halfway through I thought I’d share my impressions of the first half of the trip.

Mark says we have gone 1884 miles; yikes that’s a long ways…

Anchorage – Man, it was cold up there, not sure if that was because of the shock to the system of going from early fall in Portland straight to winter but it sure felt cold. Anchorage is actually a pretty small city; at least it feels that way. I keep expecting to see the ‘downtown’ but I now think I may have seen it already.

It was good to get back together with the brothers; we haven’t in my memory gotten together without the wives and kids. It changes the dynamic with just us here.

Anchorage to Whitehorse – Wow is that some big country.

It occurs to me that the border guard that let us into Canada hated being up at that outpost. I guess I can understand but I think it would be fun to be up there meeting the folks like us who will make that run (the Alaska Highway)

It’s only two days later but I already can’t remember much about Whitehorse. Of course it was dark when we got there and dark when we left. The motel had a little bar that sold carry out liquor so when we sat and had dinner there was a constant stream of folk coming in and buying beer. They all seemed to know each other, and they all spoke with almost comically thick Canadian accents. I kind of wanted to ask if they were kidding, yucking it up for the tourists.

One of the things I noticed a lot up in the Yukon in general was a sense that everyone knew we were not from there. I think it was probably because it is not tourist season any more. It seemed like a lot of those places were already closed up for the winter and they were kind of surprised to see us come through.

Whitehorse to Fort Nelson – My main impression of this section was that there really are very, very few people up in this part of the world. The TomTom (now dubbed Lori) gives you distance to the next turn or corner. When we loaded our next destination (Fort Nelson) into Lori (TomTom) the next step was to arrive. No turns at all between the two towns.

The wildlife or ‘critters’ as Mark calls them, are really not afraid of humans at all. The caribou don’t even try to get out of the way when you drive up to them. We saw red fox, elk, deer, bear, moose, porcupine, and caribou and lot’s of other smaller ‘critters’

Half way through to Fort Nelson was the town of (and I use the term ‘town’ in the Yukon sense of more than one building within a mile of each other) Watson Lake. As usual we felt like outsiders. We bought lunch in this little deli counter at the back of the general store. The ‘girl’ that served us was possibly the manliest ‘girl’ I have ever seen. I kept expecting her to hop over the counter and challenge us to a arm wrestle…

The hotel in Fort Nelson was much friendlier than any of the others so far. They were the first folks I felt like weren’t surprised to see outsiders.


Fort Nelson to Prince George – This was very much our last day of real wilderness. We actually got cell coverage when we got down to Dawson Creek. When we left Fort Nelson we were back into the northern wilderness but by noon or so it was clear that the deep wilderness was behind us. Little gas stops and pseudo-towns started popping up more and more often; by about half way down to Dawson Creek the trees started to get bigger and look more like regular trees.