Stretch and RocDoc in Alaska, June 2007

[Stretch]

I know there are quite a few Alaska Ride Reports out there, but to a couple southerners, two weeks riding Alaska is a pretty big deal, so kindly bear with us.

Neither of us could get enough time off to ride our own bikes, so the plan was to fly in to Anchorage on June 1 and rent a couple 650 V-Stroms from Alaska Rider Tours.  This took a tad more prep work than we first thought, as we would have to build and buy electrical pigtails for our Gerbing jackets and to have accessory power through a standard 12-volt light socket.  Done.

Then we would have to pare our gear down to a pile that would fit on two bikes, sight unseen.




Done.  Bleh.

Nicole from Alaska Rider picked us up at the airport and took us to the shop to pick up our bikes.  We requested a stop along the way...



Rarin' to go.

At the suggestion of AKphotog, Tractor Rider, and others, we had supper at The Moose's Tooth.  One huge pizza and four five-glass beer samplers later, we were ready to explode...


We still had to collect food and other items for the next few days on the road, and some stuff you can't fly with - like lighters, sterno, white gas...

That gave us the opportunity to walk to Wal-Mart and walk some of that beer and pizza off.

We got back to AK Rider after a while and set up camp behind their place.  They allow free camping for motorcyclists and even provide access to a  bathroom and shower.



While we were still setting up camp, a few ADVriders dropped by to visit.


This is Corbin, JaquelineL (our own 'Hoon on the Loose in Alaska') and AKDuc.

[Stretch]

June 2.

We got up fairly early and broke camp, eager to head north to the Dalton Highway.  We went next door to the HD dealer and ran into none other than Tractor Rider, a fellow I had been corresponding with on ADVrider...


He thinks he's fooling folks by standing on that curb.


RocDoc and Tractor Rider

TR was great about telling us what roads to take and spots to eat and camp along the way.  Thanks, Bro!

RocDoc and I motored north out of Anchorage, heading to Palmer where we would take the Parks Highway to Denali Park and Fairbanks.

We stopped on the side of the road to take some photos, and this fellow on a GS pulls up to make sure we're okay (great folks, Alaska's riders).  He offered to take some photos of us and we chatted for a minute.  I asked him if he was on ADVrider, and he turned out to be Fugawi, another fellow I "know" from ADVrider.  (His username, Fugawi, is a running joke commenting on the fellow's complete lack of a natural sense of direction.  As in:  [Where the] Fugawi [?].  :mrgreen:



He was out on a fact-finding mission, to see if Hatcher's Pass was open yet, and asked if we wanted to tag along.  Hell, yes!

He led us on a short ride through the twisties on Fairview Loop, and then dropped by The Abbey.  Friar Mike wasn't at home, but we still got our photo taken in front of his shop...


After lunch, Fugawi led us out to Hatcher's Pass... which The Man said was closed.


Ignoring the sign, we wove through the gates and rode up there anyhow.  This time, however, the sign was correct.  It was socked in pretty tight with this cold slippery stuff...



Southerners playing in the snow.  I hadn't seen any in three years.



Coming back down to Wasilla, we bid Fugawi a big thank-you and goodbye, and we continued north on the Parks Highway.  In just a few miles we happened upon the other end of Hatcher's Pass at Willow...

  So we know what both ends look like, and a mile or so of the east end.  ADVriders on The Great White North regional forum report that the pass was still closed as of yesterday (June 17).


Included for us Triumph ADV fans.  Near Talkeetna.


I guess Alaska has 'necks also.  :D


This is south of Cantwell on the Parks Highway, looking north.  Denali and the Denali Range should be visible, but rain and fog had moved in.  Can't complain, though, as this was only one of two half-days that we got rained on.  The weather was otherwise perfect.


I really liked this.  It reminded me of the kitschiness of Route 66 in the bygone days.  This igloo was built in '75 or so, of wood-frame with plywood and spray-on foam forming the exterior.  But it wasn't structurally sound and couldn't pass inspection, so it was never completed or opened.  Damned shame.

[Stretch]

June 3.

We stayed the night at the Backwoods Lodge in Cantwell (nice Mom-and-Pop place).

The rain had stopped a few hours earlier and was beginning to clear.  We headed north to the entrance of Denali National Park, just 27 miles away.

We parked the bikes and hopped the tour bus.  I took scads of photos of Denali, but I won't bore you with a photo of each and every snow-covered mountain.






A local resident.  Dall sheep on Marmot Rock.


Grizzly bears way down there, near Polychrome Pass.  These are still wild bears, not the pathetic cookie-begging ones at Yellowstone.


Back on the road.


I couldn't pass this one by.  Near Ester, south of Fairbanks.


Camped for the night at an RV park in Fairbanks.  The lake in the background is a floatplane airport.  I had a pretty good time watching them come in and out the next morning.

[Stretch]

June 4.

We left town kind of late, tracking down a replacement helmet shield, but by some miracle we found the only AGV shield in all Fairbanks.  On to the Dalton!  


This is just north of Fairbanks on the Elliot Highway.  I love old trucks.  This is a snow train formerly run by Alaska Freight Lines.  The tires are about eight feet tall and each trailer is powered by a driveshaft from the one in front.  All-wheel-drive.  And a lot of wheels it is.


The southern end of the Dalton Highway.  Ahead of us are 414 miles of dirt and gravel (about a hundred miles of that is paved now, but loose gravel on the surface keeps your speed down and your attention on the road.  Fill your tank at Fox (a suburb 10 miles north of Fairbanks, 75 miles south of the Dalton) because there ain't no fuel for 250 miles.  We each carried a filled 2-1/2 gallon can, just to be sure.




The Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the only reason this road even exists.  Oil was discovered on Alaska's North Slope in the 1960's, but with the Arctic Ocean iced over for 8 or 9 months out of the year, it was impossible to move the oil out.

The only other viable option was to build a pipeline and pipe the oil from the oil fields around Prudhoe Bay to an ice-free port in the south (Valdez), 799 miles away.

The pipe diameter is 48 inches and heavily insulated to hold in the heat required to make crude oil flow well (145 F).  Twelve pumping stations are situated along the route to maintain the heat and pressure.


The pipe itself is free to move on its supports, allowing for expansion and contraction, and earthquake movement.

As sunlight heats the legs of the supports, there is the danger of the legs melting the permafrost below.  The pipeline would then sink into the slush.
These heat exchangers sap the heat away from the legs and disperses it into the air...





The Yukon River, Mile 56.




There is a restaurant / rest stop just across the Yukon, but during a road construction delay, we had been told by a DOT worker to eat at the HotSpot, 5 miles past the Yukon.

We weren't disappointed.  I have big hands, and look at the size of this monster...

I ate every bite, and Doritos and three Cokes.  Yummmaay!  They have cool T-shirts for sale too.


Finger Mountain, Mile 98.  I absolutely loved this place.  It was very windy here (most of the time, I understand) and overcast.  In all my travels, I had never visited anywhere that felt this primeval and old.  I fully expected a herd of Mammoths to come charging from around the rocks...





Moving on...

The road is paved from about this point all the way to Coldfoot, but piles of loose gravel had been recently placed in low spots and chuckholes.  I just about dumped it in a pile of loose stones, so we slowed down to a crawl when we encountered gravel, and moved pretty slowly over the rest of the area just to be sure.  No ambulances out here to carry a foolish rider to the friendly neighborhood ER.


The Arctic Circle.  This is the southern-most point at which the sun never rises or sets during the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.  The sun remains at an even distance above the horizon, merely circling around the four Points of the Compass.  

Also, the Arctic Circle remains dark for nearly three months during the Winter Solstice...

I thought it would be cold up here, but temps remained in the 60's.  Warm enough, it turned out, to hatch a blue zillion mosquitos.  When the shutter snapped for this photo, it was one of the few times we stopped moving and shooing bugs away here.


I couldn't resist.


Getting darker, but never completely.  About Mile 150.


Coldfoot!  Mile 175.  Much needed beer, food, and sleep.

[Stretch]

June 5.

We spent a short while kicking around Coldfoot, an interesting place, to be sure.


The restaurant / bar / Post Office / fuel depot.


The motel.

Everything here at the truck stop is a prefabricated building, trucked in on the Dalton Highway, also called The Haul Road...






This is Simon, from Great Britain.  He had bought that KLR brand new in Anchorage four days before, and was already on his way SOUTH from Deadhorse.  He has a couple more months off from work, and is headed for Argentina.  He must be somewhere in Mexico by now.  The folks around Coldfoot were calling him The Mad Brit.  A Studly Adventurer, no doubt.


Moving on...



Sukakpak Mountain, Mile 204.


The southern base of Atigun Pass, Mile 242.


From Atigun Pass itself, looking north.  Elevation is 4700 feet as it crosses the Brooks Range (also the Continental Divide:  On the north side of the pass, water drains to the Arctic Ocean, and on the southern side to the Pacific).





This is Scott.  He was heading south from Deadhorse, after having ridden up there from Sacramento.  At this point, he was still north of Atigun Pass.


About Mile 260 to about Mile 280, THE worst section of the whole trip.  The stones halfway-set in the road are the size of softballs, and the whole surface of the road was washboarded for over twenty miles.  We slowed to fifteen miles per hour, and it still beat the stuffing out of us.  It was at this point that we both were VERY glad that we were not subjecting our own bikes to this abuse.  My bike blew a fork seal, the only mechanical trouble of the whole trip.




We finally got clear of the bad section, and made pretty good time (40-50 MPH) for the next few hours.



Somebody back East is saying "Why don't he write?"

Caribou, probably.  Maybe hit by a truck.  Most of the rigs have huge grille guards, reminiscent of the Mad Max movies.

The road really improved at around Mile 300.  It was bone-dry, hard-packed clay, and no loose gravel.  We were able to hit 50-60 MPH for about an hour.


After a 20-mile stretch of pretty good pavement, the road turned back into dirt and gravel just past Pump Station 2 (about Mile 360).

The Arctic Tundra was thawing out, with water standing a couple inches deep as far as the eye could see...

It was like walking on a wet sponge, with ice-cold water squishing up around your boots.

I pity anything living out here when the water warms enough to hatch the mosquitos.

Despite the thawing tundra, it was getting much colder as we neared the Arctic ocean.  I would see exactly why the following morning.  It had been at least 75 where I found the caribou skeleton, but at this point the temperature had dropped over 30 degrees (we had a thermometer zip-tied to one of our bikes).  It was now 45, and would be 42 and windy by the time we arrived at Deadhorse.


Caribou.  The same species as reindeer, but not domesticated.

The road dis-improved itself for the last 50 miles to Deadhorse.  It was again washboarded with large, round, loose stones.


We made it!  

Deadhorse is the name of the town at the end of the Dalton Highway, the farthest north a citizen can drive in the USA.  Prudhoe Bay is the name of the oil town (and the nearby bay of the Arctic Ocean).  There is a security checkpoint just north of Deadhorse, and only oil company employees with proper credentials can enter Prudhoe Bay.  We were able to do so by submitting to a background check and giving them 24 hours notice (we had called that morning in Coldfoot, and would go on the tour of Prudhoe Bay and the Arctic Ocean the next morning.

Not much to Deadhorse, architecturally.  Every building is a heavily-insulated prefabricated building set on short stilts (to keep the permafrost frozen).  Everything is either brought in on barges by way of the Arctic Ocean, or on trucks by way of the Haul Road when the ocean's still frozen...



There are no weight limits on the Haul Road, and widths are limited only by the bridges.  Especially heavy rigs use a 'pusher truck' to help keep the load moving up steep hills.  At Coldfoot, there was a photo of a huge prefabricated module being hauled up to Prudhoe Bay in the ice and snow that was so heavy (and traction was so poor), it required twelve pusher trucks.






This photo was taken at 2:30 am.  No sunset on the Arctic Ocean this time of year.

[Stretch]

June 6.

Got up early in order to go on the oil field tour at 8:00 am.


Drilling rig.  These things are portable.  Once they've drilled as far as they want, they cap it, move the drilling rig to a new site, install a well head on the new well, and start drilling a new one.

The green sheds shelter the pump gear on top of the separate well heads.


An Arctic fox.  Sorry for the crappy photo.  It was taken from inside a moving van during the oil field tour.

We had been planning on doing the Polar Bear Plunge in the Arctic ocean - those crazy bastards that swim in ice-covered lakes just for the fun of it.  I had NOT been looking forward to it, but knowing it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I had resolved that I was going through with it...


But I was spared...



Thank God.

I picked up a few sticks of driftwood for souvenirs.  Our guide was anxiously scouting the horizon for polar bears, who are even badder than a ticked-off grizzly.  RocDoc and I each had .44 magnum revolvers with VERY hot loads, but we knew better than to try to get them through British Petroleum's security checkpoint.  But no bears this morning.

Not a lot to see in Prudhoe Bay, if you've seen Deadhorse.  The same non-architecture, but a lot more pipes, naturally.

From the ocean, the van returned to the Actic Caribou Inn, and we stocked up on beef jerkey, Snickers bars, and drinks, added a few layers, and headed back south on the Haul Road.

With the exception of the first 50 miles out of town, the road had miraculously improved in the 24 hours since we had encountered the bad section.  DOT crews had been working when we passed it the day before, and they have caught up with the bad section and had graded over 1/2 of it nice and smooth.  The downside is that they spread water over the road before they grade it, so it becomes very slippery when your rent-a-bike has street tires.  But we just slowed down and dealt with it.

We still made pretty good time, though, arriving at Coldfoot at about 7 pm.

Scott the bicyclist was there, camping out behind the hotel.  He had made pretty good time himself, especially considering he was creating his horsepower himself.


-------------------------------------------



June 7.

The day started very windy.  It was windy enough to make it a pain in the butt to pack.  We knew riding would be a booger if the wind was blowing crossways to our path.

It would be.

A late start became even later when we had completely packed, eaten, refueled, and were pulling away from the camp, when my bike started losing power and then died.  It restarted a time or two, then quickly died.

I knew that the bike would run if it wanted to, and repeated starting attempts would do noting but drain the battery.  Then I smelled it.  A faint whiff of diesel smoke, with no trucks upwind.

Dammit.

I have carried a BP gas card for years, and what color are their regular unleaded gasoline nozzles?  Green.

And what color did the diesel nozzle on Coldfoot's multi-fuel pump turn out to be?  You see where I'm going with this?

Can I even read the labels on a gas pump?  Obviously not.

Dammit, dammit, dammit.

Fortunately, I carry a pretty good provision of tools, including a siphon hose.  But it was at the very bottom of my saddlebags (at least I remembered which side), so I had to unpack everything to get to it.  Don't forget it's windy, so sand and grit are blowing into all my stuff sitting on the bare dirt.

I found an empty gas can and an empty five-gallon bucket, and siphoned 4.7 gallons of diesel out of my bike (after getting a mouthful and faceful, of course).  I put the containers in the waste fuel shed (not polluting Alaska by merely dumping it out), and went inside to wash up and brush my fangs.

Then I pushed the bike back to the pumps and refilled with high-octane (being oh, so careful to actually read the labels on the pump this time).  It took quite a few attempts to get the bike running, and I was hoping I hadn't fouled the plugs out to the point of no return.  But it finally did fire, idling erratically on only one cylinder for a minute or two before all the diesel was flushed out of its system.  Then the other cylinder picked up and I let it warm up.

Whew!

Now all we had to do was pack up and ride in that blasted crosswind back to Fairbanks, 260 dirt-filled miles away.

But it wasn't even to be that easy.


Yep.  Rain and wind.  Joy.

But looking back, it just wouldn't have been right to have ridden the entire Haul Road with perfect weather.

It was pretty slow going, with our Avon Distanzia street tires.  I have these tires on my Tiger, and believe me, whoever named these things 'dual-sport tires' was high.  

I didn't take a lot of photos this day.  It was pretty tedious riding, so when we stopped for a break, I simply relaxed.

We happened across Scott the bicyclist a couple miles north of Finger Mountain.  He wasn't enjoying himself either.  I offered to tow him up the hill to the pulloff at Finger Mountain, but he decided to ride it himself and then stop there for the day.  That was the last time we saw him, as we continued south, stopping for the night in Fairbanks.


Made it back to Mile 0!

[Stretch]

June 8.

Finally saw a moose...

On the Richardson Highway between Fairbanks and Valdez, our next destination.
This was to be the first of three we would see.  The second was crossing the road just in front of me, as we were coming around a blind curve.  Fortunately, that moose didn't want to be in the road, and we weren't speeding.


The Chugach Range, which we would cross at Thompson Pass.


Worthington Glacier.


It was getting cold up here in the pass, and the road surface was giving off a strange reflection.  I was worried that the fog was freezing on the road, so we rode pretty slowly over the pass.

We arrived at Valdez, just 30 miles away, without incident.

[Stretch]

June 9-10.

We spent this day just kicking around Valdez, seeing the sights and relaxing after our jaunt up and down the Dalton Highway and the remaining distance of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline from Fairbanks to Valdez.

The old town of Valdez is no more, having been wiped off the face of the earth by a tsunami just after the Good Friday, 1964 earthquake that leveled part of Anchorage.  The same tsunami also destroyed most of Seward just a few minutes later.

The following day, we went out with a sea-kayaking charter to paddle around the Columbia Glacier ice field.


Sea lions on the boat ride out to the glacier.


Our destination.


My first iceberg (okay, technically not a berg due to its small size, but who really cares?)


Sea otters.






We both agreed that we could have spent a lot more time here than we were allowed.  But that's the tourist business - leave 'em hungry for more.


We brought a small chunk of glacial ice back with us...



As the bottle got lower and lower, I enjoyed contemplating exactly how old that ice was.  The Harding Ice Field is the starting point for the many glaciers radiating outward from it.  It takes a matter of years for snow to turn into glacial ice, after which it is buried by more and more snow.  Glaciers move very slowly, so if this ice originated miles away at the center of the ice field and migrated down until it calved into the ocean here, it could have been very old indeed.  Many thousands of years, perhaps.

Makes me glad we keep good bourbon.

At the end of the evening, as I was mulling over the history of our chunk-o-glacier, I realized I could not let our timeless, noble piece of the Columbia glacier melt away in a motel sink, dripping ingloriously into a sewer.

So I carried it the two blocks to Valdez Harbor and slipped it back into the sea.

[Stretch]

June 11, traveled from Valdez back to Anchorage.  There were again delays due to road construction, and a little rain, but a good ride just the same.


"Steady, boys!  This one can shoot back!"

or...

Support your Right to Keep and Arm Bears.

Near Matanuska Glacier.

-----------------------------------

June 12.

Rode from Anchorage to Seward for some sightseeing by boat.  We made reservations for an all-day scenic charter the next morning, leaving us with a few hours to kill today...

Ever since I was a kid, I have been enthralled by Jack London's stories about the Arctic.  "White Fang" and "Call of the Wild", especially.  These two books are sort of the same, yet ass-backwards:

"Call of the Wild" is the story of a dog who turns wolf, and "White Fang" is the story of a wolf who turns dog.

Both dogs briefly served as sled dogs, and London goes into great detail describing the gear, sleds, clothing, dogs, and the mushers.  I've been a big fan of sled dogs and mushers, but down here in the Deep South, they're as rare as Transylvanian cowboys.

Lo and behold, 2004 Iditarod winner Mitch Seavey's place is just outside Seward, and he gives tours.  Hot damn, I know what we're doing this afternoon.


He has over a hundred Alaskan Huskies in his kennel, and breeds dogs for other mushers as well.  These racing dogs are not the big, burly Malamutes and Siberian Huskies we see in the pictures (although many non-racing mushers do still run them).

These Alaskan Huskies are the canine equivalent of marathon racers:  smaller and lean, with not a trace of fat anywhere.  They can be all different colors as well.  




This is Tread, the lead dog on Seavey's 2004 Iditarod-winning team.  He was TEN years old at the time.  What a fantastic dog, a true champion in every sense of the word.  He's retired now, leading a happy life of eating, sleeping, and humpin' da biznitches.  :D


In order to train pups, Seavey and his people use these wheeled carts to get the dogs used to being tied in and working as a team.  Dogs are a lot like people, in that some simply do not get along with each other, so the musher has to figure out which dogs work well with each other and use those strengths to his best advantage.

During tourist season, They give tourists a two-mile ride on the carts:

(http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v638/Stretch67/?action=view&current=IMGP0757.flv)
Click on this photo for a video.



This was our musher for the day, Mark Resiska.  Keep your eye on him.  He's training to run the Iditarod race next year (starts the first Saturday in March and takes about 9 days to run the 1,100 miles from Anchorage to Nome).

This was one of the high points of the whole trip.

[Stretch]

June 13.


We caught our charter boat the next morning for some sightseeing.  This gal had a catamaran hull, so she handled the chop quite well.  (The last thing anyone wants is for some nice old lady to barf on your shoes)

We went out for about six hours, cruising around Resurrection Bay and up toward Aialik Glacier.

We saw a humpback whale frolicking around, and a pod of Orcas (Killer Whales), but I couldn't get my camera on them fast enough to get a decent photo.  I've been otherwise very happy with my Pentax W-20 waterproof digital, but the camera has a large LCD viewscreen instead of a viewfinder, so I had a devil of a time trying to aim the zoomed-in camera at a moving subject.  RocDoc was using a Konica-Minolta digital with both a viewfinder and a large screen.  He was able to find and keep moving subjects in the viewfinder and get good photos.






A Black Bear on the hillside.


Aialik Glacier.  We spent only a little time here, I'm afraid.  I could have spent most of the day here, watching ice calve off the face of the glacier into the sea.  We were about a half-mile away at this point, but
we could clearly hear the booming and cracking as huge chunks fractured and fell.  The face is about 300 feet tall and about a mile and a half wide.

[Stretch]

June 14.

We rode from Seward to Homer the evening after our boat tour (you never run out of summertime daylight here) and spent the night of the 13th in Homer.  

The following day we were scheduled for a half-day halibut fishing charter with Rainbow Charters.  We picked up a one-day license and some lunch at the Safeway up the street and met the boat.



They had a good operation running here.  The boat was a 55-footer I think, with a skipper and two deckhands (college kids working in Alaska during summer break, like most of the summertime laborers in Alaska).

There is a two-halibut-per-day limit for each fisherman, with 16 fishermen (and wimmin) on the boat.  We were each issued two huge safety pins with your number stamped on them (1-16).  These were used to tag the fish you caught, and then the fish were put in the live well.

The boat ride out was about an hour and a half.

I'm usually a poor fisherman at best, and didn't expect to catch anything, but I do like boats, and enjoyed the ride if nothing else.  I picked out a rig (they're all the same anyway) and one of the deckhands handled the hooks, bait, and fish (less chance of some dumb tourist hooking themselves that way I guess).

Before long I pulled up a couple decent halibut.  Here's the larger of the two:



Here's one of RocDoc's as he reeled it up to the boat.


RocDoc

Photos of me and my fish are on his camera.  No biggie.  You know what I look like, and I honestly can't tell my fish from his anyhow.

Kinda hard to carry four 8-12 pound fish on an already fully-loaded motorcycle, so we had them fileted and packaged, flash-frozen, and FedExed home.

We spent the night in Homer again.

[Stretch]

June 15.

We sadly rode back to Anchorage with our trip coming to an end.  We found a hotel near the Moose's Tooth (see June 1's post) and walked over for more pizza and Alaska microbrews.

June 16.

Once back at Alaska Rider, we spent a few hours taking all our stuff off the rental bikes and laboriously repacking our original load + souvenirs into the same four bags.

Bleh.

Finally done, we had a few hours before we had to be off to catch our plane.

A young man from New York cruised in on his '07 GS Adventure, having ridden 7200 miles in the past two weeks.  He was going to spend a few more days in AK, then make his way back to New York.  He had done some serious riding, sometimes with 34 hours in the saddle.  Yowza!

Nicole took us to the airport at about 6 pm, and we caught the long, cramped, sleepless 9-hour non-stop back to Atlanta.

Thanks for tuning in!

[abruzzi]

I live those pics from Sukukpak and Atigun. But serously, we're going to have to photoshop your tiger over that strom!  :twisted:

Geof

[fano]

Nice trip.    One day!!!   :)

[Stretch]

Man, I daydream about that trip every day.

Ain't nothin' to it, 'cept to do it.  :mrgreen: