by Ted Hutz
(When last we saw Ted, he was riding across the Yukon Territory on his way to Prudhoe Bay, the northernmost place you can drive to from the Lower 48.)
Whitehorse is a neat small city of 22,000 right down on the Yukon River. It is the capital of the Yukon Territory, which has a total population of 36,000. Almost everything that happens in the Yukon happens right there in Whitehorse. I went to the bank just before it closed to acquire some beautiful varicolored Canadian currency that disappears rather quickly. I then located accommodations at the Backpackers Hotel, unloaded and took off down the highway thirty miles to the turnoff to Skagway, USA at the head of the Inside Passage.
This is where it all began in 1892 with the discovery of gold up in the klondike near Dawson, some 300 miles down the Yukon River from Whitehorse. Adventurers came from all over the world to Skagway and Dyea to climb up over the Chilcoot Pass with a year's provisions. The Royal Mounted Police would not allow anyone to cross the line over to Lake Bennet, where they could raft down the Yukon, until each man had a ton of supplies to last him for one year. Can you imagine the struggle to pack that weight back and forth to the summit? I first came in 1948 on a survey ship and tied up to the dock for two days. It was not jumping town then. A gravel beach, one dusty street, a few saloons, a general store and a bunch of ramshackle houses. It was all left over stuff from the Gold Rush fifty years earlier. The only thing moving was the narrow gauge railroad that hauled freight up over the White Pass and into the Yukon.
As I came down the paved road, I had to stop at American Customs. I smarted off at the officer and asked him what great misfortune had sent him up there. He looked at me oddly and said nothing. I coasted on down into the town. Has it ever changed! Three large cruise ships were tied up at the dock. There must have been 5,000 passengers loose in the downtown area, trying to spend some money. It looked like Carmel on Sunday afternoon. Helicopters were taking off from the gravel beach to take sightseers over to see the glaciers. There were light planes landing and taking off from the airstrip. The railroad was taking train loads of tourists to the summit. The railroad does not haul freight to the interior anymore. The new paved highway finished that. I had to stand in line to buy a beer. WOW! The streets were paved, but they kept the boardwalks. There were new houses here and there downtown. I guess the locals work real hard five or six months of the year, fleecing the tourists. Then they coast through the rest of the year. Maybe I'll go back one day in the off season! Right now, let me get out of this three ring circus and back to the boondocks. The girl BMW rider who worked at the donut shop, that Jim Luke befriended, has left town. Sorry about that Jim.
The following day was Saturday, and the road construction crews were blasting to relocate several sections of the highway. I would overtake a long line of stopped vehicles waiting to resume, because it was one way only. On a bike, one just putts up to the head of the line and chats with the pilot car driver. One fellow, John Highlander, told me a good story about Jim Anderson, the "outlaw pilot". John and a buddy had flown back into a sheep camp and overshot the landing area. They looped the plane into the bush, bending the prop and breaking the wing support struts. Jim had a hunch where they were, and the day following their disappearance, he flew up and found them. John said he wanted to climb right into Jim's plane and get the hell out because he knew his wife would be worried, but Jim said let's take a look at your plane, maybe we can fix it. So they dragged the plane out of the bush and righted it. Jim went into the camp kitchen and pried some 1"x2" battens off the walls, and with baling wire, he splinted up the struts to support the wings. Then he took off the prop and wedged it into the fork of a tree. They bent on it and beat on it with a sledge until they got it back in shape. Then they put it together and flew it out. John said the plane flew better than before the mishap.
Now it's time to go. On a bike, you just take off and go like hell to stay in front of everyone else. That way, you don't eat anyone's dust. The trouble is, the guys behind do not want to eat dust either. So it is a mad race on the gravel. Gung ho guys in new pickups would catch me, and then I just hoped they knew the proper drill to pass on gravel - get as far off to the left as you can and STAY OVER THERE until you get 100 yards ahead of the second vehicle. God save you if you are passed by a dummy that passes tight adjacent, then pulls right back into your lane immediately in front of you. That way you get peppered with bird shot gravel and worse. It is painful to the left leg.
By mid-morning, I gassed up at the cut-off to Haines. A guy and his wife came in with a clean, beautiful Harley. I felt sorry for them because they were headed for the construction area and were about to mess up the bike.
Later in the afternoon, I passed alongside the impressive mountains in Kluane Park, and onward to the border. I made it across and camped at Tetlin on the Indian Reservation. The next day, I reached Fairbanks at noon and went out to the Tanana Valley campsite. This is a neat campground. It has big, clean restrooms, hot water, coin operated washing facilities, wash rack for the bike, and lots of trees to make shade! Shade is important because it is hot during the summer in the interior. It was only $6. I stayed there for two days resting.
The following day, I took the bike over to the Fairbanks BMW dealership. You must picture this, because George Rahn operates his dealership out at the edge of Fairbanks in the woods in his front yard. He has several buildings situated around for various purposes, lots of motorcycle parked here and there in various stages of repair, and perhaps a thousand junk tires scattered hither and yon. George does all his own work and is quite a good mechanic. The amazing thing is that he actually sells and delivers new bikes from this presentation. George and I did lunch at a nearby McDonald's (Dutch), and then returned to take off the street tires and install a set of used knobbies I had hauled along for the 500 mile trip to the North Coast. Also I changed the oil because it had been 4000 miles from Lodi to Fairbanks.
George is an interesting person, and it is worthwhile to just go and talk to him, even if your bike is okay. All the time I was there, friends and customers of George's "Trail's End Dealership" dropped in to chat. I went back to the campground to try and sleep in the almost perpetual daylight. Fairbanks has about twenty-two hours of daily sunlight during the month of June.
One starts north from Fairbanks on the Steese Highway, which goes up to Circle City on the Yukon River. About ten miles out of town, you swing to the left on the Dalton Highway, known locally as the Oil Haul Road. This is because most of this road was built by the oil companies to facilitate the construction of the Pipeline and to service the personnel based up at Prudhoe Bay. Winter, when everything freezes solid, is the preferred time to haul freight. Nonetheless, I saw thirty or more opposing vehicles daily. They were divided evenly between big freighter trucks, smaller oil company pickups, and tourists in campers and small RV's. Perhaps two bikes daily, mostly new GS's.
The initial fifty miles from Fairbanks is paved. The next fifty to the Yukon River crossing are in excellent shape and popular with tourist sight-seeing vehicles. The one hundred fifty miles after that are okay. It was rough in spots, good in others. Coldfoot Roadhouse at Mile 250 has fuel, a restaurant, repair facility, and a hotel of sorts. This, and the nearby village of Wiseman, will be the last human habitation you see until Prudhoe. Oops, I forgot, there are a couple of Highway Maintenance stations and one drilling site along the way, but it is desolate country. Up the Koyokuk River and through the Brooks Range and down the treeless Arctic Slope, it looks like Highway 12 from Rio Vista to Fairfield, but on a much vaster scale.
Fuel is a problem, available at Yukon River crossing (Mile 100), the Coldfoot Roadhouse (Mile 250) and Prudhoe Bay (Mile 500). My GS is the 1980 model and has a 5+ gallon tank. I carried an extra 3 gallon plastic tank, bolted onto the back rack, but I did not need it. The lower speeds on the gravel gave me almost 50 mpg. I refueled at Prudhoe with the high-cost low-octane product. They calculated 5.4 gallons.
There is a decent accommodation at the Prudhoe Hotel, which is operated like a construction camp. It has good rooms, hot showers down the hall and three hearty meals per day. Those working up there pull a twelve hour shift, seven days a week for a month at overtime rates. Then they fly home to Anchorage for a month's leave.
The Arco Oil Company operates daily guided tours to the drilling sites, pumping plants and their offices. It is the only game in town, and on that basis, I recommend it. The manner of construction on the Arctic Slope is unique. The earth is permanently frozen in Northern Alaska. Buildings built right on the ground would thaw the permafrost into muck and then tilt and settle. So pilings are hammered into the frozen ground and stringer cross-beams are run approximately four feet above the ground, providing a platform. The barracks and offices are hoisted up onto this platform and sit there with the wind whistling beneath them. We were told that sometimes caribou would lie down under the buildings in the shade. The pipeline has a built-in ammonia refrigeration system in each of the pylon supports to maintain below freezing temperatures, and also to carry the weight without shifting. In June-July, they have six weeks of continuous daylight, and six weeks of corresponding darkness in December-January. It must be a terrible place to work in the winter, dark, below zero, always with wind blowing snow. They run the engines in vehicles 24-hours a day if they are parked outdoors.
I took two days to do the five hundred miles, arriving in Prudhoe at 1 PM for a late lunch and the afternoon guided tour. It had not been raining, and therefore the road condition was good to excellent. I could have perhaps made it on a Gold Wing, but it was reassuring to have the knobby on the front wheel when I went through those areas that were being regraded and rolled. They water the surface, and scratch on it until they have an inch deep of oatmeal. Then it is regraded and rolled. When dry, it seems like concrete, but in the process it is a gooey mess.
I departed after one night at Prudhoe. I worked hard and did three hundred fifty miles that day to the Yukon River crossing. I honestly felt heroic and very tired. The next day I arrived in Fairbanks at noon, reestablishing residence at the Tanana Campground. I went over to the "Trail's End" shop to make arrangements to remove the knobbies, adding them to George's cache of junk tires, and to reinstall the street tires. Then I hung around Fairbanks for a day and mused about the "old days" in 1948 and '49 when I lived up there. At that time, the only paved street in town was Second Street. It was two blocks long, one solid stretch of bars, cafes, gambling joints, work clothing stores, liquor stores, pawn shops, etc. It was a 100% rip-roaring mining, construction boom town. If you had sufficient to drink, you might choose to walk around behind the Federal Building/Post Office to "The Line". This was a block long of reverse plan houses. We would stroll down the boardwalk in the alley and gaze into the picture windows. Young ladies were on display in various stages of undress. One could chat with them a bit and negotiate to some extent. It was a free enterprise system, with nothing gratis.
All of this priceless, local color and tradition are gone today. The church ladies saw to that. The Chena River flooded into downtown some years ago, and in the redevelopment process "The Line" became a parking lot. Perhaps the girls were relocated to a suburban shopping center. In 1948 and '49 there were some seven to ten thousand persons living around Fairbanks. Now it is supposedly fifty thousand. How they all make a living, I do not know. However, the town has lost more than it has gained. Fairbanks does not have a Frontier Feeling any more.
So on Sunday, rather than going to church, the GS and I checked out and headed out on the Parks Highway. This goes along the edge of Mt. McKinley Park and south to Anchorage, pretty much along the route of the Alaska Railroad. It is a fairly new road and in quite good condition, which one cannot say about every highway in Alaska. I stopped in Nenana, a small railroad and river freighting town, quite well known in Alaska as the headquarters of the Ice Lottery. We true blue Sourdoughs would buy lottery tickets by selecting the time (right to the second) on which the ice in the river would break up and flow downstream. I bet on this of course, but I never won. If I recall, something between $50,000 and $100,000 was won there each spring. In those days, all of Alaska had a population of one hundred thousand, so apparently we all wagered.
Onward to Denali Park and Mt. McKinley. There at the side road which
heads up into the park, I suddenly had a sharp pain in the groin. At first
I thought it was a gas pain from the pork sausage at breakfast. Now the
fun and games ended. I got on the bike, gritting my teeth, and did the two
hundred miles to Providence Hospital in Anchorage. I was really frustrated
because I could not find the hospital at the location where Ted Jr., our
oldest son, was born in the spring of 1955. They moved the hospital to the
other side of town. I back-tracked and found it. As I parked the bike and
walked into the Emergency Room Admittance doorway, I knew that whatever
was wrong was going to delay the return trip. I wondered how long it would
be before I saw the GS again and was able to resume my bike trip south.
(Editor's Note: Ted was suffering from kidney stones. He has since had them removed, and was last seen at NorCal's Death Valley campout over President's Day weekend.)
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