June 27, 2008: 368 miles, from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada to Dawson Creek, British Columbia, Canada
We woke up this morning, finished our laundry and went for the free breakfast at the hotel. This was definitely not as good as a Holiday Inn Express free breakfast, but it was sufficient to fill us for a few hours on the road.
As we’d unpacked EVERYTHING from the bikes the night before (remember our concern about theft in the larger towns?), we started packing the bikes and then Mike saw that my bike’s exhaust heat-shield was loose. One bolt had fallen off, and the whole shield was hanging by the remaining bolt. These single-cylinder motors are just like glorified lawn-motor motors, and they vibrate quite a bit, especially when run hard down the highway, fully laden, at 120 km/h (75 MPH). Nuts and bolts tend to vibrate loose, and so I’d removed many of the major nuts and bolts and applied “Loctite” solution to the threads, which helps prevent them from coming loose due to the vibes. I’d done the suspension bolts, the motor mounts, the frame bolts, etc but had not done the exhaust heat shield.
Anyway, Mike lent me his tools (as some of my tools were lost on the road when the tool tube on Jaryd’s bike lost an end cap outside of Lloydminster, yesterday. I had a spare bolt of the correct size, so it took a minute to fix the problem, and then we finished packing and headed out of town.
We were becoming quite excited at the thought of finally getting into the beautiful British Columbia area, and the prospects of seeing some wildlife, and more varied terrain!
Here, we’re just starting to see some signs of hills and the end of the dead flat plains of middle Canada…
Today, the wind was blowing really hard from our front-left (West), and we flogged the bikes to get to Dawson Creek.
Dawson Creek, just over the border in British Columbia from Alberta, is of real significance for us, as it is the start (Mile “0”) of the famous Alcan (Alaska-Canada) Highway, that extends for 2237kms (1522 miles) from Dawson Creek in it’s southern-easterly end, to Delta Junction, Alaska in it’s north-western end. It will be great to be riding this historically very significant highway!
We will be traveling well over half the length of the Alcan before heading off North at Whitehorse, to Dawson City, which is near the start of our final main highway – the dirt “Dempster Highway”, for our push across the Arctic Circle and to Inuvik, near the coast of the Arctic Ocean/Beaufort Sea.
The map below shows the length of the Alcan/Alaska Highway, and also that we are already further north than “Dutch Harbor”, the harbor made famous by the popular TV program “The Deadliest Catch”, a series about the crab fishermen of the Behring Sea. Dutch Harbor is on the end of that string of islands/penisula on the west side of the map below.
Looking at the Alcan Highway in blue, we would be heading north in Yukon province before the border with Alaska, and eventually up into the Northwest Territories, on our way to Inuvik.
So, late afternoon, we finally arrived in Dawson Creek, BC – and just had to stop at the signpost proudly proclaiming this to be “Mile “0” of the Alcan!
You can see that we were having fun, now that our “real” adventure was about to begin!
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We quickly found a nice campground that was sheltered with lots of trees, and had a laundry and nice showers, and pitched camp next to a young couple from Scotland, also touring on their bikes. They had brought their bikes over from the UK, and had already done The Dalton Highway to Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean, and were now heading back South. They warned us of the mosquito fighter squadrons up north in the Arctic tundra, waiting to attack anything that presents a blood-fest for their insatiable appetites!
This couple actually skipped sleeping over at the mid-point of the Dalton, as they did not want to ensure those biting mosquitoes again, so I was real happy that I’d packed my mosquito net hat, and told Jaryd that he needs to find a replacement for the hat he lost somewhere on the trip.
That night, I decided that I’ll treat Jaryd and Mike to a nice meal at a decent restaurant, and after speaking with a friendly older guy who was RVing with his wife at the campground, we decided to see if we could find the restaurant he said was very nice, in town.
We hopped on the bikes and rode to the street we thought he had directed, but had no luck with finding the place. Unfortunately, he could not remember the name of the restaurant, so we tried one of the more upmarket looking places in town.
It was a decent meal, although a little expensive, but we felt we deserved a little bit of luxury after a few tough days in the saddle.
We got back to the campground, and while the others said goodnight and hit the sack, I tried to map out the next day’s ride on the GPS in the tent, and catch up on some notes. I couldn’t wait to hit the road tomorrow to Liard River Hot Springs, as we knew we should see plenty of wildlife, and we’d be stopping a lot more for pictures. We need to leave early!