On the Alaska Highway

Watson lake is a bit of a drag and it doesn’t improve until at least Fort Saint John. Headed South on the Alaska Highway we saw a bunch of different wild life including bears, buffalo, eagles, fox, moose and caribou. While stopping to check out a Bison we met another fellow rider named Steffan from Germany, he was at the end of his travels having already been to the bottom of South America and was finishing in Alaska.

We headed out and pulled into Liard River Hot Springs Provincial Park to find out that we had the last spot available. All others were reserved and we knew our lonely friend would not have a place to go that evening. We booked the last spot and told the registrar to send Steffan to our spot when he arrived. It was about an hour later when our road side friend showed up thankful to share our spot with us.

Steffan is a good guy, on the last legs of his trip as he started over a year earlier in Chile. His last bit of the trip was going to be tricky though as his girlfriend was going to fly to Whitehorse to meet him and ride to Deadhorse and back on the back of his bike. That’s fully loaded buddy, good luck!

We had failed to research the locations resources and discovered that there were no groceries to be had and the local gas station was closed. Once the gas station opened we’d still have to pay $1.70/litre just to get out of town, the bikes didn’t have enough range to get anywhere otherwise. The major consequence of this was that we had very little food. Steffan was able to acquire some beer on short notice from a family from Whitehorse, good times! Deya and I asked people if they had any left over food or grocers we could buy but only one couple had anything. We got bagels and oats and it was fantastic.

The Liard campground is attached to some hot springs which were quite nice and we attended multiple times despite the less than average weather. The hot springs were probably the highlight of the stay.

After escaping the area we headed for Fort Nelson and bought expensive groceries, in hindsight we should have waited for Fort Saint John. Fort Saint John was the first bit of civilization we had encountered since we came into town to find a Tim Hortons, right on Veterans Way, awesome. We ended up spending the night in Dawson Creek, which is a nice city and Mile Marker ‘0’ for the Alaska Highway, but didn’t start feeling good about this stretch of the journey until we entered Alberta. Once in Alberta we found nice little towns like Hythe and fine roads all the way down through Grande Prairie and Grande Cache.

We spent the night across the street from an ugly, lonely and expensive provincial park near Hinton. After gut punching a rat in the middle of the night, who was trying to get into our tent, we set out across the Jasper park and headed to Clearwater for our family reunion. The reunion was going to be fun and assured us a dry place to sleep, good food, family and beer.