Driving from Toronto to Alaska is not for the faint hearted especially when using secondary highways.We found the Stewart Cassiar Highway particularly challenging. In places we had to cut our speed to 5 mph because there were huge pebbles protruding from the road surface. In other areas the road surface was just dirt which was quite smooth but became a slimy mess when it rained. The rewards were well worth it though as the illustration below shows.
The sides of the roads were strewn with wild flowers and different coloured grasses. They were also strewn with discarded tires and the occasional burned out car or RV.
We were thankful that we had converted our van to run on propane as well as gas. With a full load of fuel we could drive 1200 Kilometers without refueling.
We were fascinated by the colour of the Glacier at Bear Lake. It was so blue that it didn't seem real. It was nice to be so close.
As you can see by the state of our van, we drove on a lot of unpaved highways.
Klondyke Kate's is a popular eating place and very busy during the tourist season. We had a meal there.
This looks like an impossible job but if we were to go back to Dawson City it wouldn't surprise me to see this building well and truly restored.
We did eventually find ourselves in Alaska and drove on just about every highway. We were pleased to discover that all the highways in Alaska were paved. We had driven hundreds of miles on gravel highways in the Yukon. We did a circular tour from Tok to Fairbanks
and Anchorage and back to Tok. We took a side trip to Valdez which is where the Alaska Pipe line ends and the oil is loaded onto tankers.
We were driving down to Valdez when we saw a salmon spawning ground. There was a river so full of salmon that a tourist from a tour bus reached into the water and picked up a salmon with his bare hands.
We found a campsite right beside the water and across the bay we could see the oil tankers being loaded. I was wandering around and saw a sea otter swimming on his back and preening himself.
� 1997 len.peters@sympatico.ca
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Another place we went to was Diamond Tooth Gertie's Casino where there was more live stage entertainment and gambling. We came out of there at midnight and it was still broad daylight. When we got back to the campground we were standing around talking and completely forgot that people in their RVs were trying to sleep. It seemed impossible that it could be so light after midnight.
One thing we found interesting was that it cost us $2 to have a shower. This seemed to be a throwback to the goldrush days.
Mind you the showers were not a bit like they were back then. They were private modern showers housed in trailers, each with it's own large dressing room.
We watched some Indians carving a totum pole and they welcomed our questions and explained all the different features to us.
The salmon were climbing over each other in their frenzy to get get upstream.
The Alaska Pipe line was running parallel to the highway down to Valdez and there was a viewing area for tourists, so we stopped for a look and took some pictures. It was interesting to note that the pipeline was supported off the ground on steel cradles. It was something to do with the perma frost. The pipeline was thirty inches in diameter. It's hard to imagine how much oil that would move.
We were going to book a cruise to see the icefields but there was a two day waiting list.
There were some very interesting Indian carvings around town. One of them was huge. Here is a picture of it.
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