Dempster Highway: Inuvik to Dawson, Alaska border, Eagle AK
(posted from Beautiful Downtown Chicken, Chicken, Alaska)
(This post covers 13-16 July, 2008)
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Wednesday, 16 July-
We had an ultra-quiet night, waking up to mid-Forties temperatures but a sunny sky and the promise of a warm day (it’s supposed to be 75 today). We drove the mile in to the Eagle Café for Labashi’s flapjacks and my biscuits and sausage gravy. As to taste, they were excellent-plus and the quantities were more than ample.
So yesterday we met Bo Fay at the gas station and, as I said, he’s originally from upstate Pennsylvania. Then today at breakfast we could overhear a central table of five or six local men-folk talking. They were talking the working-men talk about equipment and we listened in, hoping to pick up some local tips about gold prospecting. There was a bit of talk about scuba-dredges and how it’s tough to get good gear but then the talk turned to GPSs. And one of the guys told a longish story about trying to go to Washington, DC but finding themselves in southern Pennsylvania and thinking “We shouldn’t be going through Pennsylvania to get to Washington”. They then decided to use a GPS (no explanation of why they weren’t doing that in the first place) and it took them down I-81 and then ‘the back way’ through beautiful countryside and on into Washington. So much for gold-prospecting talk.
After breakfast we took the walking tour of Eagle with BLM ranger Steve Hamilton as our guide and with the German couple, Eva and Jahn. Steve was great (and has a son who lives in, guess where, Pennsylvania—east of Lancaster). Our ‘little’ $5 tour with Steve was a three-hour extravaganza of info about Eagle and its gold-mining history as well as interesting info about present-day Eagle.
Eagle was historically a First Nations site (Han Gwich’in) for thousands of years before a small amount of gold was found in the tributary streams and white men began moving in. This was well before the Klondike gold strike way upriver at Dawson. When the Klondike strike hit, Dawson exploded and there was renewed interest in the Eagle area but it didn’t have a Bonanza Creek. So the local guys faked a gold strike. Three of them pooled all of Eagle’s gold and traveled to Dawson, splitting up well before they reached town. One gent took the gold into a saloon and plopped it up on the bar. He bought the house a round and then asked the bartender if he could hold the gold for him—he had some business to attend to and didn’t want to be carrying it around. That meant the bartender had to go through the weighing process and give him a receipt, which meant that everyone in the bar soon knew there was significant gold in Eagle. The gent retrieved his gold and took it to one of the other guys, who went through a similar trick at another saloon and so on. Soon everyone knew there was a lot of gold in Eagle and miners hustled on down to Eagle where they lined up to buy land owned, surprisingly enough, by the three guys and/or their buddies.
Steve worked a gold operation for awhile as a young man, some thirty years ago. His job was to mind the sluice box, i.e , get the larger boulders out before they pushed gold-bearing gravel over the side and keep things going smoothly in the sluice. The sluice box was eight feet wide and thirty feet long. At one spot in the creek there was a large boulder which served as a natural sluice and it was gravel from under that boulder which one day laid color (gold) the entire length of the sluice. To Steve, it didn’t matter a whole lot—he was still just getting paid by the hour.
We also asked about the liquor store on American Summit. Steve said it was just a matter of the townspeople voting to keep the town ‘damp’—you could have and consume beer and liquor but you couldn’t buy it in Eagle. And, as Steve explained, when a town does that, the state enforces a five-mile no-sales ring around the town. Five-plus miles outside of Eagle puts you on mountainside so add a few more miles to get up to a level spot at American Summit (I think it’s 12 miles up there). Steve said Woody (whose wife Jeanne we had met on our way in) had gotten a ballot issue started to allow liquor in town and it almost passed one year. So he got it on the ballot again the next year but in the meantime people had had time to think about it and more than 70 per cent of people turned it down, banishing Woody and Jeanne and all the townspeople to make the long trek up to American Summit for their booze. But there’s no public drunkenness problem in Eagle.
Eagle is a dirt-street town of about 200 people and it’s governed by a board of seven who pick a mayor from among their ranks. In his 35+ years here Steve has served several times on the Board (and says “Almost everybody has to some time or another—it’s not exactly a sought-after job”). We saw the list on the community water building and see that Bo is currently one of the seven, in charge of solid waste and tax assessment and is ‘assistant mayor’ of the town. The community well, by the way is a pumphouse from which protrudes what looks like a gas pump. But it’s the town’s drinking water. Several times during our stay we saw pickups pull up and fill either ten or so five-gallon containers or an 80-gallon poly tank (I wonder how they get THAT off the truck? Drain it to a tank inside the house?)
Eagle’s electricity is generated by diesel generator but they placed it well away from the center of town and you really only notice its sound at the edge of town.
Eagle had telegraph connections to the outside world in the very early 1900’s. I saw a small utility building which had a ten-foot satellite dish behind it marked ‘AT&T’ and I saw a payphone at the general store and Bo had a regular landline phone. I saw ten or so four-foot satellite dishes and at first thought they were disused and had fallen down but then noticed they were all fallen in the same direction. They’re just pointing very low to the horizon to pick up the southern satellite(s) they need.
After thanking Steve for our tour, we drove back to the campground for lunch, then out to the ‘big’ airport (as Bo calls it), hoping to see some interesting planes. But there were only two STOL (Short Takeoff and Landing)-equipped bush planes, both with the big, fat tundra tires and both conventional-looking high-wing tail-draggers. Given the long drive in to Eagle and the fact that the road closes from October to April, I’d have thought more locals would have planes. But as Steve explained—they’re expensive to own and operate. And when he makes his 1100-mile roundtrip to Anchorage to see (for example) a medical specialist, he comes home with his truck fully loaded with supplies. He can drive the Anchorage trip for $300 in gas but a flight to Fairbanks is $250 and that again to Anchorage and of course another $500 to return.
We returned to the campground and while Labashi read, I decided to take off my left-front wheel to try to determine the source of a braking noise. In doing so, I noticed the ball joints have more play than they should. We drove over to talk it over with Bo and decided we should be able to make Fairbanks but will probably want to get it taken care of there—particularly if we want to consider more gravel-road destinations.
As we arrived at Bo’s shop, we saw our German friends coming out. They had just made arrangements with Bo to take a boat trip on the Yukon River in a few hours. We later learned this came about when they tried to make arrangements for a canoe trip with a local outfitter but he’s currently out of town. They were simply asking Bo if he knew when the other guy would be back when Bo offered them a trip in his boat—a beat-up old jon boat. It turns out Bo had gotten the old jon boat from an older woman who gave it to him when she realized she had been had by the guy who sold her a leaky boat and a small electric motor for use on the mighty Yukon. Here the Yukon is flowing 7 miles per hour and there’s no way an electric motor would do anything against that current. So that’s how Bo ended up with a boat behind his shop. And now he had just convinced the German couple it would be fine for a short Yukon float.
As we were finishing up talking with Bo, he said ‘Gee, I hope that boat fits on my truck’; he doesn’t have a trailer for it and it’s about a 14-footer. Then, “Geez, I guess I better find some life preservers; I better get moving” and shooed us out the door.
We later saw the German couple and they had had ‘an adventure’. First, Bo showed up with the boat roped precariously to the top of a small car. Then, he and Jann had to carry the boat through the woods. Bo’s buddy had told him it would be 200 meters through the woods to the river. But Jann said it was closer to 1000 meters (more than half a mile), tripping over rocks and roots and maneuvering the boat through the trees. Then Bo gave them two child-size life jackets—the only ones he could find. When they put the boat in, it started leaking right away and Bo said “Oh, damn—I forgot to bring a mug for you to bail out the boat—you’ll have to use your hands.” When we asked how bad the leak was, Eva held her fingers about two inches apart. I don’t know if that was just in one area or what but I’m sure I’d be going out on the Yukon with two inches of water in the boat just as we launched. No, wait, I DO know. I definitely would NOT be going out!
But they had a wonderful time on their trip and they were all smiles about their Alaska experience as we talked with them in the campground. Good for them!
Late in the day Labashi and I walked from our campground down to American Creek and to a beaver pond where we ticked off a beaver. In our defense, the only approach to the pond led us right up to an area where Mr. Beaver has been working very hard to shore up his dam—it’s all fresh mud and newly-cut sticks. We were only there a few minutes when we heard a loud SLAP of the beaver’s tail nearby. He then swam back and forth in front of us, ever nearer, stopping only to dive and slap that tail as hard as possible. As he got too close, I became concerned enough to ready the canister of bear-spray I’m carrying while walking in areas like this but he merely slapped his tail again and swam off. We apologized for trespassing in such a sensitive area for him and left, happy to have met him.
We then walked along an old gravel road and eventually came to the road leading to town so decided to walk in to the café for a piece of apple pie. We shared the very excellent pie (why can’t we get an apple pie like that back home????) and then walked back to the van for the night.
In closing today’s post, let me relate something Steve Hamilton told us. ‘Well you probably know that men outnumber women quite substantially in Alaska. They say that means the odds are very good for a woman. The only problem, though, is the goods are very odd.’
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Tuesday, 15 July-
After our long day yesterday, we slept in this morning and didn’t get underway until 10:00. As we were eating breakfast I thought we might have misjudged this. If there had been a three-hour backup at the ferry, that would mean a steady stream of traffic for the US border (about 60 miles away) and perhaps a long backup at the border crossing. But we took our time, stopping for lunch, stopping for a walk and enjoying the Top of The World Highway. The road had long sections of gravel but was actually very good—at least on a nice, sunny day like today. The scenery up there was fantastic. We enjoyed long, long views of mountains in all directions. Leaving the campground we had immediately climbed to the top and the road just followed mountaintop after mountaintop.
At the border we had no problems at all. A vehicle was just pulling away in front of us as we pulled up and we were on our way within minutes. After asking a few questions and taking our passports inside for a quick scan on the computer, the agent handed them back with a friendly ‘Welcome home, folks’.
The road on the American side was all dirt but was one of the better dirt roads I’ve driven…at least as far as our turnoff to Eagle.
Our side-trip to Eagle took us 65 miles of decent gravel road, sometimes very narrow and twisty but with few potholes. There were two avalanche sections which were spooky. They are single-lane road edging by over-hanging rock with a steep fall-off on the passenger side. I could see most of the road along the cliff as I drove so I could scan ahead for oncoming traffic. There were wider spots here and there along the way where one of us could have pulled off if we had met oncoming traffic, so long as it wasn’t a bus or large motorhome.
After crossing the second slide-zone we met an oncoming pickup with a big sign “Two buses coming behind” and the driver flashed me a peace-sign or the number two, depending on whether or not you read the sign. We were caught in a fairly narrow spot by the first bus but just pulled to the side as far as we could and let him idle by, just missing our mirror. A wider spot opened up a bit down the road and I pulled off there and waited for the second bus to pass. I wouldn’t have wanted to meet those guys in the slide-zone but I think that would have been prevented by the pilot-car. He would have radioed them to hold up until he was through and blocking oncoming traffic.
Near mile marker 120 Labashi saw a bear as we rounded a corner. I hit the brakes but was well past and had to back up. The bear had started loping away as I slowed so I only saw it very briefly. Full-size adult, brown in color, and I did not see the humped shoulder of a grizz. It may have been one but I’d have to say it was a brown-phase black bear—the first of those I’ve seen.
Our next stop was American Summit, a lonely outpost of a liquor store at mile marker 143. This is a little cabin of a place on top of the mountain and some 17 miles from the only town, Eagle. There we met Jeanne Woodall, a seventy-ish woman who now owns and runs the store since the death of her husband four years ago. The store is tiny. There’s only enough room for a bottles on the back wall, a small counter, and walking space for three or four customers. Stock is limited, Jeanne told us, to the favorites of the year-round residents ever since ‘the fire’. Not as many tourists come up here since ‘the fire’, which we could see had devastated thousands upon thousands of acres several years ago and nearly took the liquor store.
She seemed to have plenty of customers today. As we drove up three people were leaving with cases of beer and before we left two more locals came in to replenish their stock. We bought a fifth of O’Leary’s Irish Cream for $18.75, a bargain compared to the $29 Carolans (and Jeanne whispered to us “For my money it’s just as good”).
As we entered Eagle, we turned in at Mile 159 to Telegraph Hill Services, a gas station and garage. There we met owner Bo Fay and he’s a Pennsylvania native. He was originally from McKean County, PA, near Smethport and came up here 30 years ago. He has cars and plane parts all over the place. He owns at least three older tail-dragger aircraft, a Cessna 140, a Piper Super-Pacer, and a Cub. He never had formal instruction. He had placed an ad in the Anchorage newspaper saying he wanted to learn how to fly (this was 30 years ago) and a guy responded to the ad and showed him the basics. He also has at least ten cars and trucks. As we’d talk, he’d say, “Oh, yeah, I have a ’68 GTO in storage back in PA” and he nodded at a car across the parking lot: “Yeah, I get down to PA once in a while. I was down there in April and bought that car and drove it up here to sell”, etc, etc.
While talking with Bo, Labashi had the good sense to offer him some cookies and iced tea. We talked for a half-hour and he invited us inside to an incredibly-messy office (I felt quite at home!) where he offered us a chair and passed a 25-pound bag of peanuts and told us help ourselves. We talked and talked, finally interrupted by someone at the gas pumps. It was the German couple we had passed and been passed by on the way in. Then up to the pumps came a couple on two ATV’s. I saw the woman had two gold pans strapped on the front and a large storage box on the back. And the guy was wearing a wetsuit. Apparently he’s operating the suction dredge. They are from Washington state up here looking for gold. I wonder what they’re finding?
We drove on in to Eagle proper and stopped at the library. This one-room log-cabin library has wi-fi! But the bad news is they’re only open for another half-hour today and they turn off their internet connection after hours because some of the locals were using it to ‘look at the bad stuff’ and they’re not going to be a party to that (according to the librarian). But a half-hour is all we needed to check our mail so we were thankful for that time.
We then drove to the river—again the mighty Yukon we saw in Whitehorse, Pelly Crossing, and Dawson City. Here’s it’s flowing strongly. It’s silty with glacier-melt now (where it was green and clear in Whitehorse) and is moving at 7 miles per hour, bound for the Bering Sea.
We bought a few items at the grocery store and briefly checked out the café (hamburger- $10, fries $7) and promised ourselves we’ll have flapjacks ($5) and (hopefully) biscuits and gravy ($5) tomorrow. I see gas is $5.50 a gallon here… sounds good!
We then drove to the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) campground where we found a beautiful wooded site for $8. We and a German couple are the only people in the campground.
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Monday, 14 July-
We arose at 0630 this morning and were underway at 0700, hunting the mighty grizzled bear…hunting with our cameras from the van, that is!
We found rabbits, arctic terns, owls, lemmings, ravens, willow ptarmigans, and spruce grouse, but no bears.
As we ticked off the miles the road was really very good. I could do 55 on much of it without fear of being rattled to death by potholes. And the dreaded trip down the Seven Mile Hill (which had been very muddy only a few days before on our trip up) was a piece of cake. The rutted mudhole at the washout (on our trip up) was now only a low, softer spot about five meters long and barely noticed.
As we neared Engineer Creek we noticed the clouds gathering and before long we had light rain. But it only dampened down the dust. In that area we looked unsuccessfully for Dall sheep. We did see their trails high on the rocky mountains but no sheep. And we very briefly saw a young black bear step off the road into the bushes but they were too thick to see him any longer.
Our next significant sighting was two fox kits at kilometer 85. They were sitting atop a clay-bank near the road and we saw one suddenly disappear. There was a break in the clay and that’s apparently where their den is. It’s a little too close the road for their continued good health, particularly if the tourists start feeding them but hopefully they make it.
After our long day of bouncing down the Dempster Highway we were glad to make Tombstone Park. The rain had ended and we planned to visit the interpretive center and then maybe take a nap, then decide whether to go on to Dawson or spend the night at Tombstone.
I walked over to the interpretive center and turned around and noticed the van leaning a bit and the right-rear tire looking low. Within a few minutes, it was completely flat. I must have hit something coming down the hill or as I turned in to the Park.
The parking lot was a muddy mess but at least the rain had stopped and for once the mosquitoes and horseflies were leaving us alone. We spent the next half-hour changing the tire. That’s a lot of time for a tire-change but we had the mud to deal with, a jack that was too short (I had to let it back down and put a 2” board under it) and then the muddy spare to deal with. The spare was a new one but was a bit low so I also had to dig out the bicycle pump and add a few psi to the tire.
The flat renewed our desire to get to Dawson and a now, a tire shop. The trip was easy enough though filled with many more potholes, each of which seemed threatening now that our only spare was in use.
Once back to the hard road (the Klondike Highway), we buzzed in to town and immediately went to see my buddy Heidi for a tire-shop recommendation. She sent us to Tr’Ondek Automotive, a small shop with no sign and we arrived just 15 minutes before closing. I told partner Glenn that Heidi had sent us and that seemed to help—they backed a car off the lift and brought me in. Partner Dustin is a big guy and I was amazed how he tossed my large and muddy tire-wheel combination over his shoulder and took it into the tire shop. I asked if he knows Heidi from the visitor’s center and he said he hadn’t met her until two weeks ago when she brought her car in, complaining that nobody else would work on it. He fixed it and since then has had a steady stream of customers, all saying Heidi sent them.
Our tire repair cost us $22.26 and we thought that very fair. Dustin not only fixed the tire but also took off the spare, mounted the good tire, and winched the spare back up under the van in its storage spot (which is a pain to do by myself).
After the tire fix, we went back to see Heidi to thank her, water up, and find a good camping spot. She suggested we cross the Yukon tonight and camp in a government campsite over there rather than wait in the ferry line tomorrow; sometimes it’s up to three hours long for the ten-minute ride. We crossed and found a very nice site ($12). As I returned from paying the iron ranger, I saw an interesting camper, a small Hi-Lo and asked the folks there if they liked it. That started off an hour’s conversation and camper tour with a very nice couple from Whitehorse. And that’s where I heard the word ‘skookum’ used. In passing by the camper the gal pointed to the extended awning and said ‘It has a really skookum awning’. Later, after we exited, she pointed to the very sturdy metal stairs and said ‘Those are really skookum stairs—much better than our old (pickup) camper’s accordion ones.” Now the only use of skookum I knew to this point was ‘Skookum Jim’, the name of one of the three guys who made the first strike on nearby Bonanza Creek. But apparently it’s a common usage in Whitehorse.
Back at the van I slept very heavily after a long, long day.
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Sunday, 13 July-
We woke late after sleeping heavily at Jak Campground. We needed ice for our trip (the next stop with ice is 225 miles away) and I had foolishly assumed the supermarket would be open Sunday morning but it doesn’t open until noon. We tried two convenience stores and a gas station before finally finding it at the third (and last) convenience store in town… at $4 for 5 pounds of fast-melting chip-ice.
We had great weather today for our trip and were soon making a giant dust cloud on the Dempster, headed for Ft. McPherson. This is the dustiest portion of the Dempster and has an immense amount of gravel which passing traffic throws up at you in passing. Sure enough, our windshield took three hits, two chips and a star-crack with a long leg. That one will inevitably spread across the windshield. These were at least partially my fault. When I’d see a big truck coming I’d slow way down, almost stopping. But the cracks were caused by two small cars, one a Jeep towing an empty boat trailer and another a smaller passenger car, both of them flying along at 90 kph or so. I was doing about 70 kph and if I had slowed to 30 or 40, the hits probably would not have cracked the windshield. How else could I explain the heavy hits we had taken from trucks on the way up with no damage to our windshield? Closing-speed makes a difference.
We had filled up at Inuvik but I topped off again at Ft. McPherson where we also bought a few grocery items to get us to Dawson City. Our two ferry crossings had been uneventful, though in both cases we got to the ferry landing just as the boat pulled away. The MacKenzie wait was about 30 minutes, the Peel River about 15. On the MacKenzie ferry the attendant asked whether we had had any flats and when I replied no, he said everyone else he has talked to has had at least one and one guy had three. And one guy had a flat boarding the ferry—his tire hit the loading ramp in a place where it was kicked up by an underlying rock.
We reached the North West Territory- Yukon border around 1600 and decided to stay in that area even though it was an early stop. The area beyond was where the ‘Bigfoot’ folks from Calgary had seen the blonde grizzly and her two cubs. We spent the rest of the evening going back and forth on a 10-mile section of road, stopping often to glass the fields and hills, but no luck. On one of these trips we met a First Nations family (Gwich’in, I believe) who had come down to the border from Ft. McPherson for an evening drive. The guy told us we were in prime grizzly territory—he believes there are 15 or 16 which live in that area. He also asked if we had seen a cougar when we got off the ferry. We had indeed seen something catlike which I thought at the time must have been a Canadian Lynx but he said it had a long tail (I didn’t see that but had only had a fleeting view). There aren’t supposed to be cougars this far up but then again there aren’t supposed to be polar bears this far down and we had seen the polar bear photo taken August 9, 2007 below the Peel River Ferry.
We finally settled in around 2200 and read for a bit (I’m still on my Jack London biography and Labashi’s still reading Michener’s ‘Alaska’.
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(posted from Beautiful Downtown Chicken, Chicken, Alaska)
(This post covers 13-16 July, 2008)
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Wednesday, 16 July-
We had an ultra-quiet night, waking up to mid-Forties temperatures but a sunny sky and the promise of a warm day (it’s supposed to be 75 today). We drove the mile in to the Eagle Café for Labashi’s flapjacks and my biscuits and sausage gravy. As to taste, they were excellent-plus and the quantities were more than ample.
So yesterday we met Bo Fay at the gas station and, as I said, he’s originally from upstate Pennsylvania. Then today at breakfast we could overhear a central table of five or six local men-folk talking. They were talking the working-men talk about equipment and we listened in, hoping to pick up some local tips about gold prospecting. There was a bit of talk about scuba-dredges and how it’s tough to get good gear but then the talk turned to GPSs. And one of the guys told a longish story about trying to go to Washington, DC but finding themselves in southern Pennsylvania and thinking “We shouldn’t be going through Pennsylvania to get to Washington”. They then decided to use a GPS (no explanation of why they weren’t doing that in the first place) and it took them down I-81 and then ‘the back way’ through beautiful countryside and on into Washington. So much for gold-prospecting talk.
After breakfast we took the walking tour of Eagle with BLM ranger Steve Hamilton as our guide and with the German couple, Eva and Jahn. Steve was great (and has a son who lives in, guess where, Pennsylvania—east of Lancaster). Our ‘little’ $5 tour with Steve was a three-hour extravaganza of info about Eagle and its gold-mining history as well as interesting info about present-day Eagle.
Eagle was historically a First Nations site (Han Gwich’in) for thousands of years before a small amount of gold was found in the tributary streams and white men began moving in. This was well before the Klondike gold strike way upriver at Dawson. When the Klondike strike hit, Dawson exploded and there was renewed interest in the Eagle area but it didn’t have a Bonanza Creek. So the local guys faked a gold strike. Three of them pooled all of Eagle’s gold and traveled to Dawson, splitting up well before they reached town. One gent took the gold into a saloon and plopped it up on the bar. He bought the house a round and then asked the bartender if he could hold the gold for him—he had some business to attend to and didn’t want to be carrying it around. That meant the bartender had to go through the weighing process and give him a receipt, which meant that everyone in the bar soon knew there was significant gold in Eagle. The gent retrieved his gold and took it to one of the other guys, who went through a similar trick at another saloon and so on. Soon everyone knew there was a lot of gold in Eagle and miners hustled on down to Eagle where they lined up to buy land owned, surprisingly enough, by the three guys and/or their buddies.
Steve worked a gold operation for awhile as a young man, some thirty years ago. His job was to mind the sluice box, i.e , get the larger boulders out before they pushed gold-bearing gravel over the side and keep things going smoothly in the sluice. The sluice box was eight feet wide and thirty feet long. At one spot in the creek there was a large boulder which served as a natural sluice and it was gravel from under that boulder which one day laid color (gold) the entire length of the sluice. To Steve, it didn’t matter a whole lot—he was still just getting paid by the hour.
We also asked about the liquor store on American Summit. Steve said it was just a matter of the townspeople voting to keep the town ‘damp’—you could have and consume beer and liquor but you couldn’t buy it in Eagle. And, as Steve explained, when a town does that, the state enforces a five-mile no-sales ring around the town. Five-plus miles outside of Eagle puts you on mountainside so add a few more miles to get up to a level spot at American Summit (I think it’s 12 miles up there). Steve said Woody (whose wife Jeanne we had met on our way in) had gotten a ballot issue started to allow liquor in town and it almost passed one year. So he got it on the ballot again the next year but in the meantime people had had time to think about it and more than 70 per cent of people turned it down, banishing Woody and Jeanne and all the townspeople to make the long trek up to American Summit for their booze. But there’s no public drunkenness problem in Eagle.
Eagle is a dirt-street town of about 200 people and it’s governed by a board of seven who pick a mayor from among their ranks. In his 35+ years here Steve has served several times on the Board (and says “Almost everybody has to some time or another—it’s not exactly a sought-after job”). We saw the list on the community water building and see that Bo is currently one of the seven, in charge of solid waste and tax assessment and is ‘assistant mayor’ of the town. The community well, by the way is a pumphouse from which protrudes what looks like a gas pump. But it’s the town’s drinking water. Several times during our stay we saw pickups pull up and fill either ten or so five-gallon containers or an 80-gallon poly tank (I wonder how they get THAT off the truck? Drain it to a tank inside the house?)
Eagle’s electricity is generated by diesel generator but they placed it well away from the center of town and you really only notice its sound at the edge of town.
Eagle had telegraph connections to the outside world in the very early 1900’s. I saw a small utility building which had a ten-foot satellite dish behind it marked ‘AT&T’ and I saw a payphone at the general store and Bo had a regular landline phone. I saw ten or so four-foot satellite dishes and at first thought they were disused and had fallen down but then noticed they were all fallen in the same direction. They’re just pointing very low to the horizon to pick up the southern satellite(s) they need.
After thanking Steve for our tour, we drove back to the campground for lunch, then out to the ‘big’ airport (as Bo calls it), hoping to see some interesting planes. But there were only two STOL (Short Takeoff and Landing)-equipped bush planes, both with the big, fat tundra tires and both conventional-looking high-wing tail-draggers. Given the long drive in to Eagle and the fact that the road closes from October to April, I’d have thought more locals would have planes. But as Steve explained—they’re expensive to own and operate. And when he makes his 1100-mile roundtrip to Anchorage to see (for example) a medical specialist, he comes home with his truck fully loaded with supplies. He can drive the Anchorage trip for $300 in gas but a flight to Fairbanks is $250 and that again to Anchorage and of course another $500 to return.
We returned to the campground and while Labashi read, I decided to take off my left-front wheel to try to determine the source of a braking noise. In doing so, I noticed the ball joints have more play than they should. We drove over to talk it over with Bo and decided we should be able to make Fairbanks but will probably want to get it taken care of there—particularly if we want to consider more gravel-road destinations.
As we arrived at Bo’s shop, we saw our German friends coming out. They had just made arrangements with Bo to take a boat trip on the Yukon River in a few hours. We later learned this came about when they tried to make arrangements for a canoe trip with a local outfitter but he’s currently out of town. They were simply asking Bo if he knew when the other guy would be back when Bo offered them a trip in his boat—a beat-up old jon boat. It turns out Bo had gotten the old jon boat from an older woman who gave it to him when she realized she had been had by the guy who sold her a leaky boat and a small electric motor for use on the mighty Yukon. Here the Yukon is flowing 7 miles per hour and there’s no way an electric motor would do anything against that current. So that’s how Bo ended up with a boat behind his shop. And now he had just convinced the German couple it would be fine for a short Yukon float.
As we were finishing up talking with Bo, he said ‘Gee, I hope that boat fits on my truck’; he doesn’t have a trailer for it and it’s about a 14-footer. Then, “Geez, I guess I better find some life preservers; I better get moving” and shooed us out the door.
We later saw the German couple and they had had ‘an adventure’. First, Bo showed up with the boat roped precariously to the top of a small car. Then, he and Jann had to carry the boat through the woods. Bo’s buddy had told him it would be 200 meters through the woods to the river. But Jann said it was closer to 1000 meters (more than half a mile), tripping over rocks and roots and maneuvering the boat through the trees. Then Bo gave them two child-size life jackets—the only ones he could find. When they put the boat in, it started leaking right away and Bo said “Oh, damn—I forgot to bring a mug for you to bail out the boat—you’ll have to use your hands.” When we asked how bad the leak was, Eva held her fingers about two inches apart. I don’t know if that was just in one area or what but I’m sure I’d be going out on the Yukon with two inches of water in the boat just as we launched. No, wait, I DO know. I definitely would NOT be going out!
But they had a wonderful time on their trip and they were all smiles about their Alaska experience as we talked with them in the campground. Good for them!
Late in the day Labashi and I walked from our campground down to American Creek and to a beaver pond where we ticked off a beaver. In our defense, the only approach to the pond led us right up to an area where Mr. Beaver has been working very hard to shore up his dam—it’s all fresh mud and newly-cut sticks. We were only there a few minutes when we heard a loud SLAP of the beaver’s tail nearby. He then swam back and forth in front of us, ever nearer, stopping only to dive and slap that tail as hard as possible. As he got too close, I became concerned enough to ready the canister of bear-spray I’m carrying while walking in areas like this but he merely slapped his tail again and swam off. We apologized for trespassing in such a sensitive area for him and left, happy to have met him.
We then walked along an old gravel road and eventually came to the road leading to town so decided to walk in to the café for a piece of apple pie. We shared the very excellent pie (why can’t we get an apple pie like that back home????) and then walked back to the van for the night.
In closing today’s post, let me relate something Steve Hamilton told us. ‘Well you probably know that men outnumber women quite substantially in Alaska. They say that means the odds are very good for a woman. The only problem, though, is the goods are very odd.’
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Tuesday, 15 July-
After our long day yesterday, we slept in this morning and didn’t get underway until 10:00. As we were eating breakfast I thought we might have misjudged this. If there had been a three-hour backup at the ferry, that would mean a steady stream of traffic for the US border (about 60 miles away) and perhaps a long backup at the border crossing. But we took our time, stopping for lunch, stopping for a walk and enjoying the Top of The World Highway. The road had long sections of gravel but was actually very good—at least on a nice, sunny day like today. The scenery up there was fantastic. We enjoyed long, long views of mountains in all directions. Leaving the campground we had immediately climbed to the top and the road just followed mountaintop after mountaintop.
At the border we had no problems at all. A vehicle was just pulling away in front of us as we pulled up and we were on our way within minutes. After asking a few questions and taking our passports inside for a quick scan on the computer, the agent handed them back with a friendly ‘Welcome home, folks’.
The road on the American side was all dirt but was one of the better dirt roads I’ve driven…at least as far as our turnoff to Eagle.
Our side-trip to Eagle took us 65 miles of decent gravel road, sometimes very narrow and twisty but with few potholes. There were two avalanche sections which were spooky. They are single-lane road edging by over-hanging rock with a steep fall-off on the passenger side. I could see most of the road along the cliff as I drove so I could scan ahead for oncoming traffic. There were wider spots here and there along the way where one of us could have pulled off if we had met oncoming traffic, so long as it wasn’t a bus or large motorhome.
After crossing the second slide-zone we met an oncoming pickup with a big sign “Two buses coming behind” and the driver flashed me a peace-sign or the number two, depending on whether or not you read the sign. We were caught in a fairly narrow spot by the first bus but just pulled to the side as far as we could and let him idle by, just missing our mirror. A wider spot opened up a bit down the road and I pulled off there and waited for the second bus to pass. I wouldn’t have wanted to meet those guys in the slide-zone but I think that would have been prevented by the pilot-car. He would have radioed them to hold up until he was through and blocking oncoming traffic.
Near mile marker 120 Labashi saw a bear as we rounded a corner. I hit the brakes but was well past and had to back up. The bear had started loping away as I slowed so I only saw it very briefly. Full-size adult, brown in color, and I did not see the humped shoulder of a grizz. It may have been one but I’d have to say it was a brown-phase black bear—the first of those I’ve seen.
Our next stop was American Summit, a lonely outpost of a liquor store at mile marker 143. This is a little cabin of a place on top of the mountain and some 17 miles from the only town, Eagle. There we met Jeanne Woodall, a seventy-ish woman who now owns and runs the store since the death of her husband four years ago. The store is tiny. There’s only enough room for a bottles on the back wall, a small counter, and walking space for three or four customers. Stock is limited, Jeanne told us, to the favorites of the year-round residents ever since ‘the fire’. Not as many tourists come up here since ‘the fire’, which we could see had devastated thousands upon thousands of acres several years ago and nearly took the liquor store.
She seemed to have plenty of customers today. As we drove up three people were leaving with cases of beer and before we left two more locals came in to replenish their stock. We bought a fifth of O’Leary’s Irish Cream for $18.75, a bargain compared to the $29 Carolans (and Jeanne whispered to us “For my money it’s just as good”).
As we entered Eagle, we turned in at Mile 159 to Telegraph Hill Services, a gas station and garage. There we met owner Bo Fay and he’s a Pennsylvania native. He was originally from McKean County, PA, near Smethport and came up here 30 years ago. He has cars and plane parts all over the place. He owns at least three older tail-dragger aircraft, a Cessna 140, a Piper Super-Pacer, and a Cub. He never had formal instruction. He had placed an ad in the Anchorage newspaper saying he wanted to learn how to fly (this was 30 years ago) and a guy responded to the ad and showed him the basics. He also has at least ten cars and trucks. As we’d talk, he’d say, “Oh, yeah, I have a ’68 GTO in storage back in PA” and he nodded at a car across the parking lot: “Yeah, I get down to PA once in a while. I was down there in April and bought that car and drove it up here to sell”, etc, etc.
While talking with Bo, Labashi had the good sense to offer him some cookies and iced tea. We talked for a half-hour and he invited us inside to an incredibly-messy office (I felt quite at home!) where he offered us a chair and passed a 25-pound bag of peanuts and told us help ourselves. We talked and talked, finally interrupted by someone at the gas pumps. It was the German couple we had passed and been passed by on the way in. Then up to the pumps came a couple on two ATV’s. I saw the woman had two gold pans strapped on the front and a large storage box on the back. And the guy was wearing a wetsuit. Apparently he’s operating the suction dredge. They are from Washington state up here looking for gold. I wonder what they’re finding?
We drove on in to Eagle proper and stopped at the library. This one-room log-cabin library has wi-fi! But the bad news is they’re only open for another half-hour today and they turn off their internet connection after hours because some of the locals were using it to ‘look at the bad stuff’ and they’re not going to be a party to that (according to the librarian). But a half-hour is all we needed to check our mail so we were thankful for that time.
We then drove to the river—again the mighty Yukon we saw in Whitehorse, Pelly Crossing, and Dawson City. Here’s it’s flowing strongly. It’s silty with glacier-melt now (where it was green and clear in Whitehorse) and is moving at 7 miles per hour, bound for the Bering Sea.
We bought a few items at the grocery store and briefly checked out the café (hamburger- $10, fries $7) and promised ourselves we’ll have flapjacks ($5) and (hopefully) biscuits and gravy ($5) tomorrow. I see gas is $5.50 a gallon here… sounds good!
We then drove to the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) campground where we found a beautiful wooded site for $8. We and a German couple are the only people in the campground.
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Monday, 14 July-
We arose at 0630 this morning and were underway at 0700, hunting the mighty grizzled bear…hunting with our cameras from the van, that is!
We found rabbits, arctic terns, owls, lemmings, ravens, willow ptarmigans, and spruce grouse, but no bears.
As we ticked off the miles the road was really very good. I could do 55 on much of it without fear of being rattled to death by potholes. And the dreaded trip down the Seven Mile Hill (which had been very muddy only a few days before on our trip up) was a piece of cake. The rutted mudhole at the washout (on our trip up) was now only a low, softer spot about five meters long and barely noticed.
As we neared Engineer Creek we noticed the clouds gathering and before long we had light rain. But it only dampened down the dust. In that area we looked unsuccessfully for Dall sheep. We did see their trails high on the rocky mountains but no sheep. And we very briefly saw a young black bear step off the road into the bushes but they were too thick to see him any longer.
Our next significant sighting was two fox kits at kilometer 85. They were sitting atop a clay-bank near the road and we saw one suddenly disappear. There was a break in the clay and that’s apparently where their den is. It’s a little too close the road for their continued good health, particularly if the tourists start feeding them but hopefully they make it.
After our long day of bouncing down the Dempster Highway we were glad to make Tombstone Park. The rain had ended and we planned to visit the interpretive center and then maybe take a nap, then decide whether to go on to Dawson or spend the night at Tombstone.
I walked over to the interpretive center and turned around and noticed the van leaning a bit and the right-rear tire looking low. Within a few minutes, it was completely flat. I must have hit something coming down the hill or as I turned in to the Park.
The parking lot was a muddy mess but at least the rain had stopped and for once the mosquitoes and horseflies were leaving us alone. We spent the next half-hour changing the tire. That’s a lot of time for a tire-change but we had the mud to deal with, a jack that was too short (I had to let it back down and put a 2” board under it) and then the muddy spare to deal with. The spare was a new one but was a bit low so I also had to dig out the bicycle pump and add a few psi to the tire.
The flat renewed our desire to get to Dawson and a now, a tire shop. The trip was easy enough though filled with many more potholes, each of which seemed threatening now that our only spare was in use.
Once back to the hard road (the Klondike Highway), we buzzed in to town and immediately went to see my buddy Heidi for a tire-shop recommendation. She sent us to Tr’Ondek Automotive, a small shop with no sign and we arrived just 15 minutes before closing. I told partner Glenn that Heidi had sent us and that seemed to help—they backed a car off the lift and brought me in. Partner Dustin is a big guy and I was amazed how he tossed my large and muddy tire-wheel combination over his shoulder and took it into the tire shop. I asked if he knows Heidi from the visitor’s center and he said he hadn’t met her until two weeks ago when she brought her car in, complaining that nobody else would work on it. He fixed it and since then has had a steady stream of customers, all saying Heidi sent them.
Our tire repair cost us $22.26 and we thought that very fair. Dustin not only fixed the tire but also took off the spare, mounted the good tire, and winched the spare back up under the van in its storage spot (which is a pain to do by myself).
After the tire fix, we went back to see Heidi to thank her, water up, and find a good camping spot. She suggested we cross the Yukon tonight and camp in a government campsite over there rather than wait in the ferry line tomorrow; sometimes it’s up to three hours long for the ten-minute ride. We crossed and found a very nice site ($12). As I returned from paying the iron ranger, I saw an interesting camper, a small Hi-Lo and asked the folks there if they liked it. That started off an hour’s conversation and camper tour with a very nice couple from Whitehorse. And that’s where I heard the word ‘skookum’ used. In passing by the camper the gal pointed to the extended awning and said ‘It has a really skookum awning’. Later, after we exited, she pointed to the very sturdy metal stairs and said ‘Those are really skookum stairs—much better than our old (pickup) camper’s accordion ones.” Now the only use of skookum I knew to this point was ‘Skookum Jim’, the name of one of the three guys who made the first strike on nearby Bonanza Creek. But apparently it’s a common usage in Whitehorse.
Back at the van I slept very heavily after a long, long day.
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Sunday, 13 July-
We woke late after sleeping heavily at Jak Campground. We needed ice for our trip (the next stop with ice is 225 miles away) and I had foolishly assumed the supermarket would be open Sunday morning but it doesn’t open until noon. We tried two convenience stores and a gas station before finally finding it at the third (and last) convenience store in town… at $4 for 5 pounds of fast-melting chip-ice.
We had great weather today for our trip and were soon making a giant dust cloud on the Dempster, headed for Ft. McPherson. This is the dustiest portion of the Dempster and has an immense amount of gravel which passing traffic throws up at you in passing. Sure enough, our windshield took three hits, two chips and a star-crack with a long leg. That one will inevitably spread across the windshield. These were at least partially my fault. When I’d see a big truck coming I’d slow way down, almost stopping. But the cracks were caused by two small cars, one a Jeep towing an empty boat trailer and another a smaller passenger car, both of them flying along at 90 kph or so. I was doing about 70 kph and if I had slowed to 30 or 40, the hits probably would not have cracked the windshield. How else could I explain the heavy hits we had taken from trucks on the way up with no damage to our windshield? Closing-speed makes a difference.
We had filled up at Inuvik but I topped off again at Ft. McPherson where we also bought a few grocery items to get us to Dawson City. Our two ferry crossings had been uneventful, though in both cases we got to the ferry landing just as the boat pulled away. The MacKenzie wait was about 30 minutes, the Peel River about 15. On the MacKenzie ferry the attendant asked whether we had had any flats and when I replied no, he said everyone else he has talked to has had at least one and one guy had three. And one guy had a flat boarding the ferry—his tire hit the loading ramp in a place where it was kicked up by an underlying rock.
We reached the North West Territory- Yukon border around 1600 and decided to stay in that area even though it was an early stop. The area beyond was where the ‘Bigfoot’ folks from Calgary had seen the blonde grizzly and her two cubs. We spent the rest of the evening going back and forth on a 10-mile section of road, stopping often to glass the fields and hills, but no luck. On one of these trips we met a First Nations family (Gwich’in, I believe) who had come down to the border from Ft. McPherson for an evening drive. The guy told us we were in prime grizzly territory—he believes there are 15 or 16 which live in that area. He also asked if we had seen a cougar when we got off the ferry. We had indeed seen something catlike which I thought at the time must have been a Canadian Lynx but he said it had a long tail (I didn’t see that but had only had a fleeting view). There aren’t supposed to be cougars this far up but then again there aren’t supposed to be polar bears this far down and we had seen the polar bear photo taken August 9, 2007 below the Peel River Ferry.
We finally settled in around 2200 and read for a bit (I’m still on my Jack London biography and Labashi’s still reading Michener’s ‘Alaska’.
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posted by Bezabor&Labashi | 23:59
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