Hyder, AK

STEWART ACCESS ROAD

I woke up in the barn the next morning, relieved to find that neither my food nor I had been eaten or even nibbled at by the Bear. Perhaps it had taken the night off. I unpacked my Ursack and put the contents away back into my panniers. We ate a rude breakfast of fruit and protein bars before getting an early start out. It felt good to be back on pavement again. We only needed to ride about a hundred miles this morning to get to our destination for the day – Hyder, AK. Yes, we would finally be in Alaska, and we would enjoy one day of light riding and plenty of rest. Now that we had put enough distance between ourselves and our homes, we felt entitled to do this.

It was brisk morning’s ride. The weather was crisp and a little cold and foggy. Enough that I broke out the winter gloves for the first time, which performed superlatively. My heated vest and the gloves kept me warm and toasty as I whizzed through the mostly straight beginning end of the Cassiar Highway.

Before long, we had hit the intersection with the Stewart Access Road, a 40 mile long stretch of road that led to the little town of Stewart. Little did I know then that this road would also turn out to be the twistiest, most scenic and delightful road through all of our Alaska travels.

We turned west onto the Stewart Access Road and within a few miles we were greeted by the sight of the most enormous snowcapped mountains amid gorgeous scenery. After the first few twisties had passed, I pulled over and told Sarah that I was going to have to take a much more spirited pace and I would meet up with her at the end. She nodded and said that she would probably take a more relaxed pace. That decided, I took off and roared through the landscape, leaning the bike over as much as I dared to and gradually warming up to this brilliant road, the remoteness only occasionally broken by a few meandering RVs that I impatiently overtook, and reveling in the scenery that unfolded before me. This is where I reached pure riding nirvana becoming one with the road, dancing with it, taking on each exciting turn, ripping through it and looking excitedly forward to the next one, and the next, and the next, until…

Until I turned right onto a downhill corner and was slammed in the face by the sight of the first enormous glacier I’d seen in all my life. I did the only thing I could do – pulled off the road, slowed to a halt, stopped, ripped my helmet off and stood and gawked. A quarter of an hour later, Sarah turned up and pretty much did the exact same thing and we screamed in delight at each other at the breathtaking sight in front of us.

We took quite a few pictures here, but no pictures could do justice to the sight and presence of this – our first landmark in a journey that would bring forth many wondrous sites.

THE SEALASKA INN

When we had finally had our fill, we rode the last few miles to Stewart. We stopped here briefly to fill up our tanks with gas. I went inside trying to find a connector to my tire pressure gauge but didn’t have much luck.

From Stewart a mile long gravel road leads into the town of Hyder, AK. A dead-end town as it were, and this is also the road that leads out of town. This was our second border crossing back into the United States, although curiously enough we did not have to go through customs to get in. We were finally in ALASKA! This was of course a minor triumph because no roads lead from Hyder to the state of Alaska, and you have to come back out and ride north for about a thousand miles north before getting to Alaska again, but even so, it was something. The only reason for us to go here was that we had consistently been told by riders to visit here and get “Hyder-ized”. We didn’t really know what this entailed but were keen on finding out. :)

Half a mile after crossing the border, I pulled in at the first inn I saw that had motorcycles parked outside it – the SeaAlaska Inn. It was a modest affair with small, clean, affordable, ancient rooms. We walked into the bar to talk to the bartender about getting a room and got one on the ground floor.

The bar is where we ended up being Hyder-ized. I am unfortunately not allowed to say any more about this outside of the fact that I was in state to do any more riding for the rest of the day after we were done. We also ordered some of the most delicious pizza I have eaten and devoured it like we had been starving for days. I believe this was the first real meal we had had since we had started off.

Fed and watered, we now looked to the other bikers to socialize and exchange notes. As with most riders we had met, they too were travelling south and had already ridden through all the terrain coming up ahead of us. I pulled out my map of Alaska and they gave me copious amounts of information on the conditions of the roads ahead and what we could expect in the days to come. What we heard was not very good – they had been rained on for the past two weeks and had been cold and wet and miserable. They hadn’t been very much impressed by Alaska and were glad to be leaving it for warmer climes. They had ridden through most of the country and the fact that this had been their least favorite stretch didn’t bode much good for us. They had also made it to and back from Prudhoe Bay – that holy grail of destinations for adventure riders – worth riding to just to say that you had done it, but not very much fun to and back. Much like the riders who had ridden to Inuvik up the Dempster Highway, these riders described the Dalton Highway as wet, sludgy and with slick, dangerous mud. They had had an encounter with a herd of caribou, which fortunately had ended well for both man, machine and caribou in question.

Our bartender told us about a spot up the road where one could go look at salmon in the river and bears that came to catch the salmon. They had had a bear sighting earlier in the day, so there was a good chance that there would be more. Seeing as I was still not keen on riding, I hopped onto the back of Sarah’s KLR, resolving to keep my eyes firmly shut and imagine happy thoughts until we reached our destination. We stopped a bit earlier than we had intended, when she saw another rider on an 08 KLR. As she pulled over next to him, he turned out to be a kid of about seventeen years of age who was traveling with his dad. This was the second father-son pair we had encountered in this town. We told him where we were headed and he cheerfully agreed to follow us and come along.

Before long, we got to the salmon watching site. The ride itself wasn’t too bad except when we came onto more and more loose gravel.

We dismounted and paid for our tickets to go onto the observation deck and lo and behold – another first for me – the sight of enormous salmon swimming through the river or resting. We waited for quite a while, but the bears never showed up though.

Sarah and the other dirt bike riders, in the meantime, were hatching plans to ride the dirt roads to go see another glacier. I opted out of riding along, choosing instead to hitch a ride with another ride to go back to the hotel and rest.

I got back and took a long shower, trying to feel clean again. I then went back out to the bar and sat with a group of riders (Miles and ?). We got beers and pizza and proceeded to spend the evening exchanging riding stories, embellish some details and fabricating others from scratch.

Sarah rolled in later in the evening with Andrew, Jody and Derek with stories and pictures of the gorgeous sights they had seen and a video of a grizzly they had encountered.

We stayed up for a couple more hours before I decided to go crawl into bed for some much needed rest. Sarah – in keeping with being Sarah – partied into the small hours of the morning.

LEAVING HYDER

The next morning I woke up feeling refreshed and rested. I got out of bed, yawned and stretched, and got cleaned up before heading out to the bike with the first armload of things that needed to be packed away. I also took the opportunity to give the bike a once-over and it was probably a good thing that I did because I found that my rear tire pressure was almost 20psi, well below the recommended 35psi. I splashed it thoroughly with water to check for a slow leak, but it didn’t uncover anything.

We rolled out of Hyder that morning to cross the border back into Canada. I had a bone chilling moment there when I realized that my passport wasn’t in my jacket pocket as I had expected. It turned out to be in the innermost pocket under the waterproof lining though and I was able to breathe again. The customs officer looked at the passport and informed me that my visa had expired. Umm… no, it hadn’t, I said. It expires on the 6th of November. No, we use month/day/year here, he informed me. No, you don’t, you’re Canadian – you use day/month/year. Apparently, the good folks in Stewart are used to using US standards instead of Canadian, leading to this misunderstanding. Thankfully we were able to clear this up and I was soon on my way, looking forward to once again riding the twisty goodness of the Stewart access road back to the Cassiar.

We stopped at Stewart first to get some much needed food. This was the best breakfast I had had in a long time and I wolfed it down hungrily.

Outside the hotel in Stewart, we saw a BMW parked with an ADVRider sticker on it, which excited us considerably. We met the riders and chatted excitedly with them. All we had in common was that we posted on the same discussion forum, but out here in the middle of nowhere, it was enough to forge a bond of kinship. We talked and exchanged email addresses and promised to establish contact when we got home.

Leaving Stewart, we were finally ready to tackle the next leg of our journey – the mighty Cassiar Highway.

The Cassiar Highway

ON TO THE CASSIAR

I had heard about the Cassiar Highway almost a year ago from my next door neighbor – a guy who went up with the fishing boats in the winters and I’d heard that it was by far the more treacherous way to get into Alaska with a lot of unpaved sections and ripped up roads from the bad winters.

We stopped at the intersection with the Cassiar for a quick break and were shortly joined by a group of KLR riders. As we stood and chatted, a passing hitch-hiker came up to us with a gigantic watermelon, which he offered to share with us. Not questioning the surrealness of the situation, a knife was quickly produced and we proceeded to slice open and divide it amongst us. It was disposed of very quickly, after which we dispersed and went our separate ways,

After this brief, magical interlude, we saddled our horses and took off – up north on the famed Cassiar Highway. After months of dreaming and mixed expectations, there we were finally on it. If any road in the United States could be considered to be a destination in itself, this was it.

Time was when travellers would need to pick which route they would need to take to get to Alaska and the choice lay between the Alaskan Highway and the Cassiar. The former was by far the popular route – scenic and safe, a straight line path through thousands of miles of wilderness that stretched between Dawson City to the east and end at Fairbanks, AK in the north west. As a popular tourist destination, it was better maintained and fixed at the end of every winter. There were more rest stops and towns along the way.

The Cassiar on the other hand had a reputation for being the more treacherous one. It stretched from south east in Hazelton to north west to the border between BC and the Yukon, where it met up with the Alaskan Highway. It was 350 miles of a narrow, twisting road with few stops for gas and food along the way, very few turnout spaces and next to no shoulders for stopping in. I had heard that it would get really torn up each winter and be ravaged by frost heaves. Travellers on this road needed to make sure that their vehicles were primed and have plenty of spares in case of eventualities. Rest stops were few and far between and there was at least one 200 mile stretch where we would encounter no gas stations.

As far as road conditions went, we were in luck. By July, a major part of the highway had been fixed. We had been warned of one bad stretch about 40 miles long towards the end of the Cassiar, but that seemed very far off now.

It was almost mid-day by the time we got on the highway, so our hope of getting to the end within the day was alas not to be. We hoped to make it as far as possible before energy started to fade and hoped that we would find a place to camp down at at the end of the day. I had packed some of the leftover pizza from the SeaAlaska Inn for lunch, along with some fruit. I had also filled up my extra gas can and strapped it down to the pannier. I knew this time it wasn’t just insurance – I was going to need it. I was a little worried about my tire pressure from that morning, especially with not having my air compressor working, but there was little I could do about it.

The weather that day was brilliant, as it had been from the start of our journey, and for this I was grateful. We set a good pace when we started off as we were eager to cover a lot of ground. The Cassiar was narrow but well kept and we flew through the miles.

The highway stretches for a good 350 miles, so we didn’t have much hope of finishing it that day seeing as it was well after noon, but we were determined to cover as many miles as we could. It was beautiful, remote, complete wilderness with barely any traffic. This is where we started seeing bears and elk.

As usual, I had tunnel vision and I focused on nothing but the road ahead, while admiring the scenery in my peripheral vision. Sarah on the other hand saw every black bear, deer and caribou there was to see on the sides of the road. When she was in the lead, she’d point them out and even take pictures, while I had a mild stroke at watching her comfortably steer the bike with one hand, while looking off to the side and focussing to take an image, all the while going 70mph.

I remember one surreal moment when I happened to sense something in the distance and I braked gently. A few seconds later, a gigantic elk cantered out across the highway and disappeared amidst the trees to the left. It was almost a magical moment, fraught with danger on one level – if  hadn’t braked,  wouldn’t have seen it in time and it would have been a head on collission. This was when I started to feel like I was almost in a fairy tale.

The one memory I have of the Cassiar is that it was littered with lakes, amidst its gorgeous wilderness. At first I had the urge to stop at every lake and take photos, but soon I found myself getting blase about them. This was of course in part because we needed to keep going.

We did stop a few times at the more scenic ones when we needed to take a break for a snack, only to find that taking our helmets off for too long was not a good idea as we were swamped by a deluge of insects.

We passed few cars and were passed by even fewer. There were few RVs that crawled along at a snail’s pace, as is their nature, but they didn’t hold us back for very long.

DEASE NUTS

Our energy started to flag towards late evening by when we had covered about 250 of the total 350 miles and we neared the first major sign of civilization – Dease Lake. As we neared town, I noticed that Sarah wasn’t behind me anymore. I pulled over to the side of the road to wait for her to catch up. As I turned my engine off and looked around, I happened to spy a movement on the other side of the road. My eyes caught sight of a black bear and I froze as I tried to recall every piece of advice I had ever read about what to do when within the vicinity of a bear. Should I stay put? Or start the engine and take off and risk it chasing me? They say that bears are surprisingly nimble for their size and can get up to 35mph. I knew that it would take my fully loaded GS at least a couple of minutes to get up to that. After a few minutes of indecision, I snapped the ignition off and took off down the street like my life depended on it and didn’t stop until I came to civilization – or what passed for it up in these parts anyway.

Thankfully the bear had had other things to do and hadn’t given chase. I recall seeing a couple out for a walk about 50 paces from the bear and wondered to myself if they were all quite mad up in these parts. Perhaps bears hanging around the town outskirts was such a normal phenomenon that they’d just walk past it and possibly tip their hats to it as it grunted back.

As these thoughts passed through my head, Sarah pulled up beside me laughing and asking me why I hadn’t pulled over earlier. As I pulled my helmet off, a little irritated, she showed me a picture on her camera. Apparently someone had spray painted over the “Welcome to Dease Lake” sign to make it read “Welcome to Dease Nuts”. It has amused Sarah enough that she had turned around to go take a picture, and I believe she was giggling about it for days later.

I told her my bear story and suggested that we might want to camp in a more populated part of town.

We stopped at a restaurant to eat where we met a woman called Frida. She belonged to a First Nation tribe and co-incidentally also used to ride an F650 GS. It was her birthday and she invited us to meet her later at a nearby pub for drinks. She said that the food there was good too.

Since the restaurant we had sat down in looked to be a little on the expensive side, we shamelessly got up and left and went in search of the pub she had menti0ned. She had been right about the food – we ordered some salmon and rice. It turns out the salmon had been caught fresh from the neighboring river and it was the tastiest fish I had ever eaten. Hunger might have added to some of the taste, no doubt, but I realized now that  previously frozen salmon from the neighborhood grocery store would never quite satisfy me.

Frida turned out to be a lovely person – intelligent and knowledgeable, and she told us a great deal about the town and its politics. We spent a good couple of hours talking before calling it a night.

We asked Frida if it would be okay for us to camp on the police station lawn. There had been nobody inside for us to ask permission from. She said that it probably wouldn’t be a problem, which is all we needed to hear.

We were really tired by now and decided to just pitch Sarah’s tent and go to sleep.

I slept well that night.

THE END OF THE CASSIAR

Day6: 37N, Yukon Border, Gold Nugget, 97W (Alaskan Highway), Teslin, Whitehourse (Beezkneez Backpackers)

We woke up the next morning to the sound of pouring rain – not the most pleasant sound to hear from the inside of a tent. I walked to the gas station across the street and used their bathroom for a good long time to clean up and look somewhat presentable. A bit of a losing battle because this marks the point where we started looking permanently bedraggled, unclean and unwashed. I hadn’t changed my clothes in at least a week and the reek was beginning to settle in. It was so much a part of the adventure though that at some point I stopped fighting it. In a way, it felt like my own little rebellion against society and the images of perfectly made up women we get bombarded with day after day. I stank, I hadn’t washed in days, I was muddy and filthy, but I felt glorious and was having the time of my life!

I scrounged for something edible in the store attached to the gas station and sadly settled for a couple of Power Bars and trail mix. Sarah and I ate while loading up the bikes and gearing up in the drizzling rain. A police car pulled in just then and the cop got out and walked towards us. We weren’t in any shape to make a run for it though, so we just stood there with sheepish expressions. He was rather pleasant though, in spite of finding out that we had camped on his lawn without permission.

We did the final unpaved sections of the Cassiar in pouring down rain and got the bikes well and truly dirty for the first time. I was a bit apprehensive about this stretch because of my complete lack of experience in dirt but it was pretty easy and we went a good 60-70mph clip.

In a few hours we found ourselves crossing over from British Columbia into the Yukon.

The Yukon! We were finally here. We were still too tired to truly exult but my word we had ridden our bikes from Seattle to the mighty Yukon!

Alaska

Prologue
Heading North
Hyder, Alaska
The Cassiar Highway
The Alaskan Highway
The Glenn Highway
Anchorage
The Seward Highway
The Richardson Highway
Stopping in Slana

Puget Sound Safety Adventure Camp

Someone mentioned that I was on the Puget Sound Safety Adventure Camp webpage and sure enough I am. Makes me feel all mushy looking at the photos and seeing the guys I hung out with there. I’m still in touch with a couple of them. :)

Wish I had taken the class on the snowy day though. O.O That looks like quite something.

South Coast and Volcano Region, WA

Day 1: Towards Copalis Beach

Day 2: Astoria

Day 3: Towards St. Helen’s

Morton

Days travelled: 3
Miles covered: ~650 mi