July 3, 2008: 293 miles, from Tok, Alaska, USA to Haines Junction, Yukon, Canada
This morning, Mike said that he was woken up at 3:00AM, by his cell-phone ringing. It was someone from his work…calling to ask him if he was available for something or other! The guy obviously was unaware or had forgotten that Mike was on vacation, and especially that he was in a time zone 4 hours behind the East Coast, so Mike nicely told him that it was 3AM in Alaska, DUDE!!!!! Much apologies, before Mike switched off his phone to get some more sleep. 
On the road again. Man, this road was full of frost heaves. I was surprised at the very noticeable decline in the condition of the roads between from Canada’s asphalt road, to Alaska’s. Canada clearly spends a lot of time and effort in ficing their roads, as witnessed by the amount of construction and repair going on in the early and mid summer, whereas we saw very little repair in Alaska, that I can recall.
What we DID see, however, was some of THE MOST STUNNING landscapes so far! Absolutely gorgeous!
…and, if my wife karen could have seen this little goslings, she would have gone “Ohhhh!!! Nufff, nuffff! Aren’t they so CUTE!!!!!”
It was on this section of road, that I had an almost surreal experience!
With me in the lead of our little group, as usual, I was riding through a shallow cutting in the hillside, with the small cliff-face on the left, and a drop-off on the right, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye, a very large bird flying along the top of the cutting in front of me, and to the left. He was flying parallel to the road, so I was coming up to pass him.
I then saw that it was an eagle, or a very large falcon, with a squirrel in his claws, and amazingly, he then dropped lower and flew along the road, just ahead of me. He clearly had not seen or heard me yet (testament to our quiet stock mufflered bikes!) and as I came up behind him, and to his right, it felt as if though I could literally reach out and grab him! He was probably no more than 10 feet away from me, when he must have heard the bike, or seen us coming up behind, and he dropped the squirrel almost in my lap!
Can you imagine the insurance claim from that one…..”Well, I crashed the bike when an Eagle dropped a squirrel onto my head!”
I was so excited by the close encounter with my first eagle on the trip, that I stopped the bike, and we had a good laugh at my potential insurance claim….
Later, we crossed the border back into Canada from the USA, and met, for the very first time ever, a less-than-friendly Canadian border guard. She was brusque and all business, although not really rude. I guess she was just tired or not having a great day, and didn’t want to have to deal with motorcyclists with their helmets and other issues (although by now, we’d got into the habit of removing our helmets and sunglasses, before they even asked, to allow the photo cross-reference identification against our passports.
Riding along Lake Kluane, we crossed the southern end, which is a huge mud bank and quite amazing, if somewhat ugly amongst all the beauty, before riding past the nearby ghost mining town of Silver City.
Silver City is one of many abandoned settlements one sees from the road, and I always wonder what it must have been like for whoever lived there, to have to just get up and leave. Real sad, I’m sure, especially if there were families involved. This stretch of road was pretty quiet, and at times, especially as it gets dusk, we find ourselves feeling just a touch melancholy, as if though someone’s dreams were shattered one day a longtime back, and all we see of them now, are these remnants of their existence, being scattered about by the seasons and weather and animals, to one day, be totally gone and be just someone’s memory.
Excuse the touch of sadness here, I s’pose with such a lot of time to think about things on the road like this, it’s inevitable. A bright blue day and some rest will surely snap me out of these thoughts and back into wonderment of these surroundings….
Some more of beautiful lake Kluane, I believe….
Somewhere on one of the lakes, the road construction crews were blasting the cliff face, and this delayed traffic, causing a long line of RVs and cars and a few bikes to stop on the road. Folks were out walking their dogs, etc, and one couple had this magnificent German Shepherd out.
We eventually tired of waiting in the heat, at the back of the line, and rode past the long line of cars to join some bikers in the front, as is customary up here, and we ended up being the first ones threw the road works after they stopped blasting to let some traffic through.
Finally, we arrived in Haines Junction, and stopped to search my handy camping book for a good campground with showers and laundry (these were always our two main criteria for any campground – showers and laundry!), and found one near the main intersection of the highways in town.
We negotiated with the lady in the office for a site, and she said that we should just ride around and note the number of the site we want, and come back and let her know which one, which we did.
We made a big mistake with this one…..due to the mosquitoes! We’d selected a site with thick bush around us, for a little more privacy, but only afterwards realized that this was the breeding ground for many, many battle squadrons of mutant killer mosquitoes. Huge, fearless, hungry, angry, kamikaze, rabid mosquitoes, who’s sole aim in life was undoubtedly to suck every last drop of blood from our poor bodies. They had 2-way radios, internet communications, satellite phones, radar detectors and GPS systems with them, to so efficiently hunt us down and suck us dry.
The little bastards! Jeez, how we hated them! Jaryd placed burning mosquito coils all around our tent site, and we built a large campfire to try to smoke them out, to no avail.
Jaryd looking a little weary, as we all were at this time. It was around midnight…and look how light it still was (although nothing like further up north, where the sun hardly goes down at all at night in summer.
Anyway, after pitching tent and taking a walk around and to browse the shop contents at the office, we decided it was time to find a place to eat, so we hopped on the bikes and headed up the road, took a left at the main intersection in town, and came across a little fast food joint which contained a veritable bevy of bronzed beauties working the kitchen. Seriously, these young ladies were significantly better looking then most, and Jaryd no doubt felt a little embarrassed at the Old Man and Mike ogling the ladies. Hey, we’re still allowed to LOOK, you know!
It’s actually quite funny how, before the trip, I’d spent so much time and money on the bikes, getting farkles installed that we really, truly did not actually NEED, and not anywhere NEAR enough on the very few items we REALLY needed – such as much more comfortable seat! I would swap so many things right now, this far into this trip, for a decent, comfortable seat! Forget the fancy brakes, shocks, 2-way radios, GPS, and all that other non-essential stuff….and spend enough on ensuring you’re going to ENJOY the actual time on the bike, which in my case at least, means being more comfortable!
Enough of the day-dreaming and random thoughts. Back to the present. We finished the grub and headed back to Mosquito World, where I had a nice shower and plugged my now-dead camera battery into the outlet in the public toilet, hoping it would still be there the next morning. (It was).
I met a nice young couple on bicycles, at the open-air wash basin (for camp crockery and silverware) and he told me that they were on their way south from Prudhoe Bay to Tierra Del Fuego (the southern most city in South America), by BICYCLE. Now, my friends, THAT is hard-core!!!! That makes our little 9000 mile motorcycle trip look like a Sunday afternoon ride in a limo, by comparison! I wished the crazy buggers the best of luck, and walked over to a lady camping alone with her ADV stickered BMW 650 motorcycle. We chatted a bit, and I learned that she’s broken up with her small party of bikers on their trip from Anchorage, I think, and I sensed that she wanted to spend time alone, so bade her good night, and headed back to our little mosquito hell campsite. 
Jaryd was adding more and more wood to the fire, in the clear hope that if he built the fire big enough, it would literally singe the wings off the battle squadrons of “Mozzies” (as us South Africans like to call them), but to no avail.
Tomorrow, we are heading back past Whitehorse (hoping to get some distance past Whitehorse, as we didn’t want to stay at the place with the hard-core business hippy lady, but we’ll see how far we get), and then we will be back on the same piece of the Alaska Highway that we rode, but in the other direction, from about 10 days earlier.
It felt kinda sad to be heading home, but we were also starting to miss our family, so not all bad or sad, to be on the way home!
Heartbreaking you didn’t get to do the Dempsey, but these pictures are just breathtaking! Good for you!