Day 15 - The Top Of The World Highway

I'd always known that today was going to be a bit of a slog.  It's almost 270 miles from Dawson City in a long arc round to Beaver Creek, which doesn't sound too far, but I knew the road wasn't going to be an easy one.  There were two border crossings, from Canada into the USA in the morning, and then from the USA back into Canada later on in the day, having traversed the Alaska stage.  But other than going back down through Whitehorse, making the journey over 400 miles, there's no realistic way of getting around to Haines Junction, which is our destination for the last part of our holiday.

What intrigued me when I was planning this part of the trip was the name of the road we were going to be driving on; it's Highway 9, but they call it The Top Of The World Highway.  What an evocative name, how could we not take it?

We caught the ferry that operates daily from downtown Dawson across the Yukon River.  The road climbs quickly, leaving the small town far behind and giving breathtaking views of the river valley below.  Soon the road surface becomes unpaved, like the Dempster Highway, but it's easy enough to drive on if you take it steady.  The views from the road are staggering as you look out over the Ogilvie Mountains to the north, and the Klondike Plateau and the Dawson Range to the south.  There is, however, a distinct problem in photographing these brilliant views, because there are always trees in the way!  The road takes you up ever higher until you are riding a backbone ridge (there's probably a geological name for this) on the top of the mountains, and you understand why the road gets its name.  Either side of you it seems the world stretches away forever, as if you can see to the ends of the earth.

After a while we got stuck behind some RVs.  We've seen them a lot on our Canadian holidays, and usually you can get past them easy enough, but on this road there are few passing opportunities; you just have to grin and bear it... well, bear it anyway.  Soon enough they pulled into a rest area, and we were on our way again.

Our first stop was the customs post on the US/Canadian border.  We got through here okay, thanks to the green waivers Billy Belushi had stapled into our passports in Skagway a lifetime ago, and were back in Alaska.  Here the road became awful.  Really dreadful.  The Americans seemed to be digging most of it up.  It was as bad as, if not worse than, the road up Keno Hill; poor Arthur was taking a right beating.

Thankfully relief came in the shape of the crazy town of Chicken, Alaska.  When researching this holiday I found the place, and was barely able to believe it existed.  As most towns are in this part of the world, it's only tiny, and grew up around a mining community; indeed, there's another of those huge dredges here.  Originally the town was going to be called Ptarmigan because of the ubiquity of said bird in the region, but none of the miners could spell "ptarmigan", so they called it Chicken instead.  This is really true.  Everything there is chicken-related.  They've just gone bonkers with the chicken motif, even serving a chicken liqueur; thankfully I was driving, so couldn't partake.

We grabbed a chicken and mayo sandwich to go (we've been to a place called Chicken and we've been to a place called Mayo, so it seemed appropriate), and set off, conscious of the fact that we still had a fair distance to travel, and that the border crossings close at 8 pm (that's Alaskan time; they close at 9 pm Canada time, but we were utterly confused at this point as to which border crossings were working to which time zone).  Just out of Chicken we came upon a lone moose, tromping about in a pool, lazily gulping down weeds.  They're ugly beasts, but so huge and magnificent to watch... from a distance; moose kill more people than bears do.

We carried on until we found a rest area, and ate our sandwiches (along with some fabulous potato salad they'd given us), then carried on our way.  The sun was out, the temperature, even in Alaska, even this high up in the mountains, was in the high teens and even hit the twenties at one point.  I was starting to watch the fuel gauge, wanting to top up with fuel at Tetlin Junction where the road we were on (now called the Taylor Highway) joins the Alaska Highway.  The problem was, when we got to Tetlin Junction, I couldn't see a gas station anywhere.

I was working out mpg in my head, trying to calculate against the "kilometres left" on Arthur's readout (the Americans work in miles, the Canadians in kms), when to my left I saw something which at first I thought was a dog, then realised was in fact a small black bear.  Sandra spotted it too, "ooh-ooh"ing and reaching for her camera.  We slowed down and watched the fellow as he eyed the road from the safety of the long grass.  I'm no bear expert, but I'd say he was either in his first or second summer, probably his second.  I couldn't see a mother bear around, so he could have been on his own (he could also have been a she).

He trotted up to the edge of the road and started to walk along it, both of us videoing and photographing frantically, while trying to enjoy the moment; it was, after all, the first bear of this holiday.  Then another vehicle came down the road in the opposite direction, and the bear slipped back into the undergrowth.  We waited a while, but he didn't come back out.

We started off again.  I reckoned we would have about 30 km of spare fuel in the tank if we had to go all the way to Beaver Creek without finding a gas station.  Just to be sure, I knocked the air con off.  Well, every little helps.  We stopped a few more times for photo ops, and just to look at the staggering views (because most of the time they were just too big to photograph).  The Kluane Ranges started to come into view, and behind them the Saint Elias Mountains, and behind THEM... well, it was difficult to tell where the snow-topped mountains ended and the distant clouds began.

At a tiny place called Northway, population 71, there was a gas station and we filled up, then headed down the last few miles of Alaska and over the Canadian border... where the road turned awful again.  The Canadians are revamping this section of the Alaska Highway, and we had to endure about ten miles of gravel, construction and potholes before finally reaching a paved road again.  There it was just a few miles to the Canadian customs post (where Jim Joel's green US visa waivers were unceremoniously removed from our passports), and then a final couple of miles to our accommodation for the night, the 1202 Motor Inn at Beaver Creek.  It gets its name because when it was built it was at mile 1202 on the Alaska Highway, but the road has changed a lot since those days, and now it's at mile 1169.  Or it would be if the Canadians measured things in miles, so actually it's at km 1935.  Whatever, it's got a big plastic polar bear over the door, and it's quiet and got a comfortable bed, which is what we need after our long but satisfying road trip.