Back in the Yukon

I’M IN Whitehorse again, 9,751 miles downrange of Little Rhody. Got here yesterday after a few days riding north then east out of Alaska, from Homer to Anchorage to Tok, finally to the Yukon border.

I camped here in Whitehorse one month and 4,588 miles ago, on June 16. Father’s Day. Before the Dempster. Before the Dalton.

On the ride here yesterday, a cinnamon bun in Haines Junction helped me figure out what had been bothering me about those back-to-back rides up to the Arctic coast. I stopped for the bun and coffee at the Village Bakery. Mine was the only motorcycle parked out front. Until a young couple from Ottawa rode up on a V-Strom.

My thinking finally came into focus for me when they asked where I’d been on the piglet. They were headed up the Dempster and maybe the Dalton after that, the same order I’d taken. Should we ride the Dalton while we’re out here? Just to say we did it?

I said no, that’s the worst-ever reason to ride it. It’s the reason I rode it. And I think I’ve been feeling a bit suckered on that.

The Dalton to Deadhorse is so hyped on motorcycling forums. Now, having seen it myself, I said it was my opinion the riders from Ottawa wouldn’t be missing anything if they didn’t bother with it.  The Dempster is head-and-shoulders the better ride, the greater challenge, more fun, and it takes you through cultural spaces that are far more interesting.

It’s a true wilderness road. The Dalton is more a Big Oil industrial/wilderness mess patched together out of gravel and Mad Max asphalt.

There’s a reason why you can pull into Anchorage and find an outfit that will happily rent you a motorcycle to ride up to Deadhorse. Try finding one that will let you take their bike up the Dempster to Tuktoyaktuk.

I’ve come to the conclusion that American provincialism is the only reason the Deadhorse-to-Ushuaia run gets talked up as the motorcycling gold standard in this hemisphere. If I ever do the ultimate top-of-the-world-to-the-bottom run, it’ll be Tuktoyaktuk/Ushuaia.

Consider Denali v. Mount Logan. The same sort of thing’s going on there. The only thing Denali has over Canada’s tallest peak is another 759 feet of rock up top. Logan’s wilder, far more remote, has a much greater footprint on the planet (about 100 miles around the base of the mountain), and it hasn’t been turned into a lame-o tourist trap like Denali.

Denali and Logan are both magnificent mountains, to be sure, but Denali gets the word of mouth. It’s a safe bet most Americans have never even heard of Mount Logan.

So… no surprise that American motorcyclists have the Dalton on the brain. You hear how an ordinary man like yourself will be lucky to survive it. Just like Omaha Beach, 1944, there I cop to hyperbole, if only slightly, but somehow our little band made it all the way to Deadhorse alive, there to glory in victory and flex for selfies and bellow caveman YAWPS and whooo we crushed beer cans on our heads and yeah yeah all this puffed-up bullshit.

What they don’t report is that while they were starring in their own between-the-ears adventure movie a 19-year-old woman went pedaling by on a bicycle. And she can’t make the miles to get to a camp tonight; she’s going to scout out a place on the taiga, check for bear sign, make a judgment on whether it might be a safe place to pass the night, and take her chances. Talk about balls.

I guess there are overblown tales of the Dempster, too. The couple asked whether they could make it riding two-up, they’d heard it can’t be done. Of course it can. I told them of a young British couple I’d met in Inuvik. They’d been to the end of the road two-up and were on their way south now, to Ushuaia.

The road is just a road, I said. It can’t hurt you. Operator error is the only thing that can, and that’s always under your personal control. Everybody who got bashed up when I was there? Operator error.

So ride the Dempster, keep your wits about you, you’ll have a great time. And here’s to happy trails on your ride home to Ottawa.

They promised to shoot me an email when they get home, to let me know what they decided to do, and how it went.

Two nights ago I camped on Lake Kluane, at Congdon Creek, a place where Bad Mr. Grizz has made such a nuisance of himself the authorities resorted to an electrified fence.

Not to keep Grizz out of the campground. That he owns, apparently. Or so the fence builders have implied by, you know… building it.

No, the fence is to keep campers out of the campground at night. The campground proper.

That’s right. Campers are required to pen themselves in for the night behind an eight-wire electric fence. So who’s in the zoo now, sucka?

The water view from my tent.

No visitors came sniffing at the wire that night, but I wouldn’t have noticed if they had. I was deeply in the land of Zzzzzzz…

Kluane Lake is enormous, 50 miles long, average depth of 100 feet, 300 at its deepest. When the wind whips the surface into whitecaps it sounds like ocean surf lapping the shore. A lovely sound to sleep by. A motorman’s lullaby, if you will. We’re off to dream of a hobo heaven in the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

Nice and windy, all the skeeters and biting flies were grounded. On the chilly side, too, at 2,500 feet up. Really a nice evening.

See you tomorrow, world… Behind this electric fence my odds are pretty good. Unless I uh…  ‘lectrocute myself. I’m sure somebody’s peed on the fence by now; staggered out of the tent half asleep, slow to get their bearings in the wee hours, so to speak. Take a look, I’ll bet it’s on YouTube.

A glorious ride along the shore of Kluane in the morning. This isn’t the lake proper, just a shallow edge of it up at the head of the valley, kind of a natural wind tunnel. The sand eroding off the mountains blows down the valley for miles and out across the lake.

Wider angle on the same place.

On the ride east out of Alaska I saw a few big burns along the road. Alaska and the Yukon haven’t gotten much rain at all this summer.

I rode through more rain getting here; more in Indiana and Illinois than in Alaska, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories and British Columbia put together.

Free firewood at the motorcycle-friendly Eagle’s Claw camp in Tok. No campfires allowed for now, lest one accidentally burn down Alaska.

On my last night in Tok helicopters flew over the camp all night, lugging water to a burn on the other side of town. It sounded like Colonel Kilgore digging the Ride of the Valkyries and loving the smell of napalm in the morning.

Could have routed my way to Whitehorse via Dawson City, where I was three weeks ago, but the fires are bad up there. Roads have been closed, or there’s talk of closing them.

I hit that area at just the right time. Dumb luck.

The Donjek River, west of Kluane. Not a whole lot of water coming down the riverbed.

This entire part of the world needs a good soak.

It looked like rain when I got headed east the other day but it was nothing to speak of. Sprinkles here and there, never lasted more than a mile or two.

I could have made it here to Whitehorse on the front tire I was running when I left Rhode Island, but I had a chance to buy a good used one for short money in Anchorage, 40 bucks.

Actually, what the guy said was, “Thirty bucks and a six pack.” I said what kind of beer, the kind with beer in it? He said yeah he wasn’t fussy.

A walk to the corner-store cooler and I had a Continental TKC-80, 90/90-21. It’s the metric equivalent of the Kenda 3.25/21 I was running.

The nubs weren’t even worn off. I bought the tire at a rental place that leads group tours up to Deadhorse. Every bike leaves the shop with fresh tires, no matter how brief the last rental.

This tire didn’t go to Deadhorse. I doubt it even went up to the Arctic Circle.

I threw the tire aboard and installed it a few days later, in Tok.

It’s nice having a motorcycle shop in camp. Not that I needed supplies or tools, I was carrying everything required for the job, but the floor made a handy work surface on which to spoon the old tire off the rim, the new one on.

Readers say they like the panoramas, so I’ll close here with a few.

The Gakona River, from the Glenn Highway, Alaska.

From elevation, farther upstream.

Baked Alaska.

Bound for the Yukon, eyeballing rain that never amounted to much.

Donjek River, the Yukon, upstream from the Alaska Highway.

Downstream view

Wind-driven whitecaps on Lake Kluane.

Up the beach the other way

On my way out the next morning. The place where the air had sand in it.

Different view, same place.

Bound for morning coffee and a cinnamon bun in Haines Junction.

Tony DePaul, July 16, 2019, Whitehorse, the Yukon, Canada