My last update left me in Colorado, Im now in Alaska, so Im am doing a travelogue to just fill you in on where the trip has taken me and some of the places that I have seen, sorry if its rather long, Ive just been a slack arse.
After having the 4th July weekend with friends, while I happily waved the Union flag and a tear came to my eye at the loss of one of the colonies. It is of course a great celebration, for which I am not exactly sure all Americas actually realise what they are celebrating, just as in the UK we don’t really teach our kids why we are burning to death a “Guy” on November 5th, history and time just blurs it in to a ritual. But of course America is a proud country and its populace are extremely nationalistic, too much at times. And this simply over flows on 4th July, when everything is available with the stars and stripes emblazoned across them, plates, cups,serviettes, camping chairs, t shirts, shorts – you name it, you can get it with a flag on.
But travel is about observing your surroundings and enjoying what you see around you and this is the first time that I have been in the states for this holiday and it is a special time. Americans are some of the most hospitable people you will ever meet, some English that I know, being of a conservative nature, find this rather over powering, but if you open yourself to this hospitality, you really do find genuine friendship and a sincerity in there, something that I have to be said you don’t find everywhere.
So moving on from the festivities of Colorado, I made my way up to Yellowstone to try to find Yogi bear. But it would seem that the hordes of RV driving tourist had scared him away to his cave, perhaps that he shares with Osama, now would that be great if they found him living in the US. Now Yellowstone is a fantastic place and I have always wanted to go, as I have wanted to see wild bison for as long as I remember. The advantage you have when travelling in the US,is that there national park system is one, extensive and two, that everything is easily accessible. The down side of this is that everyone and their granny can get there with relative easy. Therefore, they become something of a Disney Land, with motor homes and 4x4 blocking every turn. Heaven forbid that an animal should be so foolish as to walk next to the road, then you have a tail back more akin to Friday evening on the M25, its hell on earth.
I did however manage to see the bison that I desired, as one conveniently parked himself right by the camp that I had my tent pitched at, so I was able to sip a nice cup of tea, whilst gazing upon these magnificent creatures. The herd that roam the 2.2 million acres of Yellowstone, number around 2000. That is in contrast to the some 30 million that used to roam the mid states of America. This has to be one of the saddest and cruellest exterminations of an animal by man. We (humans, this is not a national thing) slaughtered these beast firstly for there coats, leaving the carcass to rot on the plans, then for there meat to feed the workers of that rail roads and then in one of the worst events of the 19th century, to starve to death the Indian tribes that used to follow the great herds on there migration, and who used every part of the animal for there survival. Man has and still does such despicable things.
I rode on through Wyoming and in to the big sky state of Montana, where cowboys still roam the range and the horizons seem to stretch to the ends of the earth. The rides were long and the scenery at times rather monotonous, and when it rains, it really rains. I arrived at Glacier National Park in one of these storms and was glad to find some shelter under which to pitch my tent and get some warm food inside myself. The next day was bright and sunny and I rode in to the park to do one the fabled “most beautiful” roads in America, the Highway to the Sun, well Im sure it would be, if again it was not for the tourist horde, which I know I am one, but you always want these things to yourself, bad timing I think, Im sure if I returned at the end of September, I would have an open road. But alas I didn’t and I also ran in to one of those pain in the arse anal bastard road workers, how threatened to radio the cops because I had filtered past a line of stationary car, please, get a fucking life. At this point I had had it with the place and I returned to my camp for a swim in the remarkable warm lake and to enjoy the last rays of the sun the day had left.
Up bright and early I was able to get to the Hwy to the sun, without to much drama or nazi jobsworths reading me the riot act. I crossed the Canadian border and headed west in the direction of Vancouver, with the sun lowering in the sky and directly in front of me. There is nothing like riding in to the sunset on warm evening, with not a care in the world. I arrived in Vancouver on Saturday 26th July, to meet up with a fella I met in Laos and who lives right in the heart of the city. It was quite a shock to be in a city again, with cars and people all around, horns beeping and pedestrians crossing the street at inappropriate times, mainly the drunk ones that is. Vancouver is a very bright and cosmopolitan city, but every city has its underbelly. I was warmly greeted by Bobby and told to rapidly get my self cleaned up, which was quite a task after 2 weeks of camping and getting the odd wash in a river, as we had to get up to Whistler to meet up with friends of his. Shaved and scrubbed up we headed up the highway to a place I last visited to ski back in 97 and here I got to spend the weekend in a comfy bed, drink good wine, eat good food (vegan, umm) and swim in a beautiful clear lake and lounge in the sun, tough life at times.
I met up with Axel, my riding buddy over on Vancouver Island. We had parted company when I has hamstrung in Mendoza, Argentina. We shared a bottle of rum and talked shit for the night ( not hard for me) then , slightly hung over I made it up the island to visit a mate from India whom lives in Comox, 3 hours north. I spent a couple of night there, filling in the day with a few bits of work on the bike and some sea kayaking out to a friends yacht for some supper and a few glasses of wine to watch the sunset. Axel and I met up on the Saturday and took the ferry across to the mainland and started out northward journey.
Now you are probable thinking that Im in Canada, cool weather, pine trees, snowy mountain, but let me tell you, the interior of British Colombia get almighty hot in summer and we spend the first couple of days riding in 3o+ degrees and roasting our arses off and I can assure you that there is nothing like jumping in to a clear blue lake at the end of a long hot ride, it really is fantastic. We spent a few days with a friend of mine, Tyler, who has been guiding on a few raft trips that I have done around the world. Last time I saw him was with malaria in Uganda. His home town of Quesnel is a huge logging centre and he showed us around some off the plants and explain how the pine beetle in decimating the trees of the area, a natural phenomena that is occurring from Colorado, all the way up to Alaska. The little bugger has got a grip due to one, milder winters, but two,human intervention in naturally occurring forest fires. The result is that in some areas, 90% of pine trees will are dead or dying. A good time to bye cheap pine if you need any!
We headed north again and towards the Yukon, a name I have associated more with cartoons from my childhood that anything else. I remember watch little gold miners running around with pick axes and gold nuggets, all with very strange accents and long grey beads, formative years obviously. We stopped at the town of Watson Lake and hitched a quick spine with a helicopter pilot that Axel had met in Colombia, he was up there helping out with the forest fires, the same ones we had witnessed the day before and that had almost blocked the sun in the sky with a thick haze. It looks unattractive, but nature needs this process to clear out the dead wood and as described earlier, the pests that feed on the timber. In our short time on the planet though, we fail to comprehend the loss of the forest and the fact that it takes 50 to 60 years to fully re-grow. Its just another symbol of how small and short our lives are on this great planet.
Next stop was Whitehorse, which was a boom town in the Klondike gold rush of the late 1900s, a brief my momentous period when 1000s of gold hungry “stampeders” sold everything there had in the hope of sticking it rich, which of coarse very few did. The place is a somewhat dull affair, with what has to be the most expensive take out food on the planet, justified with the frase “that’s the way it is in the north” a frase that would ruffle my feather more than once.
We had come in this direction, as we wanted to ride the Dempster Hwy. There are two roads that lead way up the north, the Dempster, in Canada and the Dalton in Alaska. Both cross the Arctic Circle and the Dalton actually goes a little higher, but the Dempster has the better scenery and neither actually gets you to the Arctic Ocean, so we opted for the Dempster. Its 750kms of dirt road and if you get caught on it in the rain, it can be a real nightmare as it turns to a slippery mud bath. Fortunately we had the weather with us, even if the forest fires were keeping visibility down to 3 or 4 kms, a shame when at time you can possibly see 120.
The overnight stop is at Eagle Plains, a rather desolate place, but there is camping and more importantly fuel. The next day we hit the real bench make, the Arctic Circle, which is really just a sign in the tundra, but is a major milestone when you have ridden up from Tierra del Fuego in Argentina. We pushed on for the day as we wanted to get in to Inuvik, our final destination at a reasonable hour and we had two river crossing, fortunately by ferry, and a lot more dusty dirt road to finish. We arrived in to Inuvik at around 8pm, feeling tiered from the dust and the concentration, that on a motorcycle you have to apply at all times, even on a good dirt road you never know when the road might change.
Inuvik is a box ticking exercise in reality, there is not much there of interest, it is just the end of the road, the farthest you can go north (in Canada). Being this far north though does have a special feel, there is 24-hour daylight, although we had missed the all night sun, and there is atrue frontier feel about the place, because it is the frontier. You can go a little farther north to Toktoyuktuk, but only be plane, and an expensive one at that.
I showered the next morning and just let the hot water run over as if trying to wash away all the aches and pains of the journey and reflecting on all the countries and events that have led me to this point. It’s been 7 months of almost constant moving and over 25,000 miles. I could have done quicker; I could have done it slower. But the most important thing is that I have done what I set out to do, ride from one end of the Americas to the other. If I am blowing my own trumpet I don’t care, but Im bloody proud of it. Im no hero and many people have done it in the past and will do in the future, but when I look back a few years in my life, then I would never thought I would have done what I have done in the past few years. I felt tired after that shower, but also immensely relieved that most of the journey was behind me, and I could now start to think about what else I want to do with my life. I did very little that day- there wasn’t much to do anyway – I just felt like sitting still.
We rode back down the Dempster and on to the town of Dawson City, another gold rush city that sits on the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers. Part living city and part museum, Dawson is the kind of place you go to escape the rest of the world and hence attracts its fare share of “characters” most of whom are no doubt running from something in there lives or from themselves. This is where I ran in to the “that’s the way it is in the north”, but this time it ruffled my feathers too much. Its not just the words, but the way almost everyone uses it to justify what ever it is they are talking about and therefore you have to accept it that way. After 25 years of retail, I can tell you that if one of my staff ever said that to a customer, I would dismiss them on the spot. Things are the way there are because people make it so. In a town where there only have 4-month season, custom service should be a priority and one lady didn’t appreciate me pointing this out to her. Ill get off my soapbox now, sorry, it just really pissed me off.
Dawson is 150kms from the Alaska border and as you depart Canada, you ride over the Top of the World Hwy, a beautiful stretch of road that exposed to the weather, but provides hue vistas of the outlaying mountains. As soon as we had crossed the border, things instantly changed. In Canada, gun ownership is not a big thing, unlike the US, were the right to bare arms is seen as being next to religion as something you most have, remember “God, Guns and Guts”, and hunting is at the front of many peoples priorities. Within 3 miles we come across a scene that was to say the least macabre, beads to Caribou littered the floor around several ATV with riffle racks, blood ran from the back of pick up where the animals had been butchered. Gun toting red necks proudly showed off their day’s kills and explained how and where they hunted and how they carved up the poor fallen beasts. The same creatures that only the day before I had patiently, if frustratingly, tried to photograph. I felt sad and disgusted at this abuse of nature. And this is only the Caribou, let alone the moose, bear, wolf or anything else on four legs.
We rode through the one horse town of Chicken, yes there is a town called Chicken, Alaska and on to the town of Tok, where there were more Caribou heads strapped to the seats of ATVs, which I am sure will be proudly displayed on the wall of some trailer.
