AK-AZ Day 4: Reintroduction to Civilization (July 25)

Cumulative Mileage: 1830

Stone Sheep appeared as we entered a section of the Rockies very different in character from the mountains of Alaska and the Yukon we left behind. These were carved not by glaciers, but by water forming extremely steep-sided V-shaped valleys and pointy peaks. It looked like very difficult hiking, but there were some really fun looking streams and we imagine some great routes could be found with some careful map analysis.

Stone Sheep in a rugged landscape

The road for about 120 miles from Liard Hotsprings was an exciting mix of tight corners next to ruggedly steep limestone mountains and many steep climbs and descents. Stone sheep hiding behind blind summits on the road presented an additional challenge. This area was also great for seeing wildlife – we saw 3 groups of stone sheep, a grizzly bear and 2 groups of caribou – all before lunch!

Grizzly Bear

Grizzly visiting the road right in front of our car

After the steep limesteone cliffs following Liard Hotsprings, notable landscape types included striking forested plateaus, and spruce forests reminiscent of Fairbanks. Between Fort Nelson and Dawson Creek, the landscape became a vast series of gradually rolling agricultural fields, similar to England.

Are we in England? I think we took a wrong turn somewhere…

We pulled off the highway for supper beside a beautifully quiet river that provided welcome calm from our long drive. Looking at the trees and their reflections in the slow moving water, we thought back to some of our discussion on the drive while reading Gary Snyder’s Practice of the Wild: it is we who attribute meaning to what we see; the trees don’t know they have a beautiful reflection, the water doesn’t know it’s moving slowly as opposed to quickly; through being, they realize the essence of themselves; perhaps looking at things from this perspective could help us to see the essence of things, as Dogen did of the ‘mountains and rivers walking’, instead of only what our mind attributes to them. In all our travels we seek meaning in experiences, but maybe we should think to differentiate between experienced meaning, and meaning attributed only by our minds and their perception by relativity.

We were very sad to see a dead black bear by the side of the road, from its injuries presumably killed by a passing car. I initially felt really angry about this tragedy, but then we have been clocking up speeds of 70 or 80 miles an hour, and it could just have been bad luck on the part of the driver and the bear.

We drove late in an attempt to get to Seattle on time on Monday to see Ty’s family. At about 9.30pm, we stopped at a petrol station to refuel our tank, which with only a quarter full wouldn’t have got us the remaining 100 miles to Prince George. But the petrol station was closed and the pumps weren’t set up to take card payment out of hours. We had to drive a 45 mile loop off the highway to a much more remote town in order to refuel! It amazed us that this road doesn’t seem to have 24-hour card payment petrol stations – apparently locals drag extra fuel around with them in the winter. Something to bear in mind in the future!

I was dozing off when Ty suddenly put the breaks on and a large moose loomed into view, taking up the whole of the neighbouring carriageway. We were nearly at a stop and with a bit of road left to dive into, but it was nice that it decided to lope off in the other direction—you can never tell with moose on the road, they are pretty stupid and seem to move at random!

Fireweed nicely accents the roadsides

AK-AZ Day 3: Liard Hot Springs (July 24)

Cumulative mileage: 1018

In the morning we crossed over the continental divide drooling over the ideal off-trail hiking among rolling rocky ridgelines and beautiful streams. The sky above was sunny and blue, and yet it was somehow still raining on our car! We suspected yesterday’s raincloud had dispatched a follower to linger just above the Subaru. We were a bit concerned about dwindling fuel as distances to functional fueling stations in this landscape are unpredictable and can be up to 100 mi or so.

Easy alpine hiking around the continental divide

Jutting cliffs followed in the descent into forest beyond the rolling alpine of the divide

We descended through changing vegetation and geology, finding our first Pines (Lodgepole?) and jutting cliffs (wish we had a Roadside Geology for Canada!). To our surprise, shortly after passing a “Caution—Bison” sign, we were indeed confronted by a group of ~25 Wood Bison lounging and munching grass on the roadside. Bison were extirpated in BC in 1906, and reintroduced in 1995. The population has increased from the 49 introduced individuals to 100 in 2007—still a far cry from the >168,000 that roamed NW North America in the 1800s. These animals reach about 2m in height and 2000 pounds. In a second group we saw, a pair crossing the road behind us were clearly taller than the car!

Caution: Bison

Wood Bison!

We arrived nice and early at Liard Hotsprings, about 3pm, and after the obligatory shot of Scotch (the Canadian ‘zero-tolerance’ law regarding alcohol and driving had left us with some catching up to do), we headed to the hotsprings for a much needed soak. The forest around the hotsprings is quite diverse with typical boreal forest shifting to a warm wetland rich in minerals. The warm, humid microclimate created by the hotsprings allows for a unique plant community to occur including a particular fern that is peculiar to hotsprings. We were impressed that the natural character of the hotsprings had been maintained, instead of being “improved” as so many are.

Soaking

AK-AZ Day 2: Six Hundred Miles of Rain (July 23)

Cumulative miles: 750

Camp 1: gravel pits offer solace to thrifty campers!

Morning coffee: Ty experiments with the coffee maker on top of the Subaru at Camp 1

Beautiful moth at Camp 1

We crossed over the border into Canada at about lunchtime (~300 miles from Fairbanks). The first 150 miles or so of the road in the Yukon Territory required skillful maneuvering among the constant fissures and potholes over a road whose waves of tarmac resembled more a tumultuous sea. All day we passed under the most impressive raincloud we’ve seen, providing continuous rain for six hundred miles!

The last couple of hundred miles of Alaska provided views of stunted black spruce, marshes, and the vast spruce burns that characterise the Alaskan interior. The next several hundred miles traverse broad subalpine valleys around 3000 ft in elevation. Stunning peaks and varicolored rivers keep the driver entertained. Near the continental divide, after Haines Junction, we saw former burn areas completely dominated by young Aspen trees. In some places we noticed remnants of fallen burnt trees intermixed with hundred-year-old Spruce and a subcanopy of Aspen all stunted to the same height. Those examples seemed to demonstrate perhaps at least one hundred years of post-fire succession in which each stage still remained—the burnt wood, the Aspens, and the Spruce—demonstrating the very slow turnover of the boreal forest.

Typical interior Black Spruce and Sphagnum bog.

A scenic pit stop at Haines Junction

A very rainy day

The car system is working excellently so far, despite being packed to the brim. We’ve hooked up my subwoofer bass and computer speakers using a power inverter plugged to the car’s cigarette lighter for some quality sound. We’ve created easy-access locations for everything including hanging stuff sacks from a rope tied between the ‘OS’ handles, and a ‘kitchen in a basin’ neatly stored in the back. When we want to cook in the rain, we prop up the hatch and tie the camping tarp from the roof rack to a tree and stake out the corners for a quick and dry cooking and dining area.

BC seems to have the annoying habit of barricading their gravel pits, so finding a campsite required an hour of searching on dwindling gas in the dark (the absence of 24hr light is a novel aspect that comes with heading south). We camped on a muddy wing of some dirt road heading to a designated hunting area—it all looks the same once you’re in the tent though.

AK-AZ Day 1: Exodus Under the Midnight Sun (July 22)

Cumulative miles:  130 (!)

The last day of packing was, as expected, more time consuming than expected!  Ruthless separation of needs and not-needs spawned piles of items for Fairbanks’ re-use sites: covered areas to leave give-away stuff at the trash dumps.  The efficiency of those sites is amazing; some items were gone the next day, and on our final trip the stuff was snatched up right from the trunk of Chris’s car!  We enjoyed a final drink on the deck of Pike’s over the Chena River with Chris—we owe Rhiannon and him MUCHO for allowing us to trash their cabin for two days and of course tie up a couple of loose ends for us—> Thanks guys!  We will miss our Fairbanks friends lots, we promise to be back for many cool trips in the future.

Fairbanks: Ty saying goodbye to Chris after a beer at Pike’s

Fairbanks farewells: Chris,  Marielle and Ty

Our 9:30pm departure from Fairbanks was about 12hrs later than originally planned, which has unfortunately precluded any spontaneous river floats along the Al-Can Highway so far.  It’s been heart-wrenching to drive past such breathtaking scenery, spectacular hiking, and ideal packrafting rivers, but we’ve planned to spend more time in Washington and California, so we’ll have to return to this vast and beautiful country for future epic trips.  We’ve been scoping out and making notes of every good river, and on the Alaskan side, drawing possible routes on our Topo! software.

Between Fairbanks and Canada we saw two large moose, and those have been the only charismatic macrofauna we’ve seen so far.  That wonderful northern latitude low-angle sun painted lingering pink skies mirrored by droves of flowering fireweed as we pulled into a gravel pit at midnight for our first camp, having covered just 130 miles for day 1 (gravel pits make excellent free camp sites along Alaskan roads!).  Teeth were brushed ‘on the hoof’ as a caribou might do while plagued by the blood thirsty hoards (mosquitoes).  We thanked modern civilization for the invention of lightweight tents so we could sleep peacefully without concern of massive blood loss (for those of you who don’t know Alaska, we consider the mosquito our State Bird).

AK-AZ Setting off on our 3,500 mile drive!!!

Miles travelled: 0
Location: Fairbanks, Alaska

Hello all,

Sorry not to have kept you up-to-date with our summer - time and internet have been sparse. Ty and I went out at the week end on a hiking and packrafting trip with my friend Lily and our friends Ed and Anne, who we met at the white water course later summer. Ed is now renting out packrafts in Fairbanks, and both are SUPER fit! (Anne is training for an ultra marathon and ran 35 miles the previous w/e, ug!!) Suffice to say that I was the slowest on the trip, and found it a good challenge to keep up the pace - we managed 14 miles hiking on Saturday and completed the rest of the hike and a good float the next day, making about 38 miles in all! Not bad for 2 days. We were back in Denali National Park and the scenery was beautiful. Not too much bush-wacking either.

Ty and I had a fantastic time on the Amazon-PIRE field course in Brazil last month - posts and photos on this coming soon I promise! We met some amazing people, who we very much hope to keep in contact with as friends and researchers. It was a great introduction to the options available for graduate research and to the Amazon in particular.

Over the last couple of days Ty and I have been packing up all our worldy possessions. We just managed to stuff everything into the Subaru and now we are about to set out on our 3,500 mile journey to Tucson, Arizona, for the start of graduate school! First stop will be Liard Hotsprings in British Columbia, Canada. It's already 8.20pm and we haven't left Fairbanks, so we probably won't make the border tonight. We hope to get as fair as Tok.

I can't guarantee how much internet access we'll have on the way down, but we'll do our best to keep you updated!

Marielle.