Update 11a

As I left things, I had just done the Dempster. That evening I took the ferry across the river to the provincial campground and stayed the night there yet again.



I woke up fairly late in the morning and was dicking around with my gear until early afternoon when I heard some rumblings--wondered if it was a truck or the ferry down on the river. The morning was sunny and the sky was blue overhead. I looked through the trees and the slope to the west; cloudcover was building above the ridgeline. The cloud continued to creep higher and further across the sky, and the rumblings began to get stronger, so I put a rush on things and got out as fast as I could. I had stopped checking the weather a while back; isn't much you can do about it anyhow, as one local put it.



So onwards I went, back over the Top of the World. The rumbling seemed to have been caused by the clouds feeding off the moist warm air above the Yukon river. I caught drizzle here and there, but managed to dodge any serious downpours.



Once I got to the Alaska border the road got crappy and boring. I continued north via the Alaska Highway to Delta Junction where I aimed to ride down the Richardson Highway to the Denali Highway. The rain and low clouds thickened into a battle line as I approached the Denali.



Once I entered the mountains there was a real chill in the air, maybe 45F. My hands got quite cold in my wet summer gloves, even with the heated jacket and grip heaters.



The Denali Highway itself was phenomenal, and even moreso in mixed clouds and rain.



After so much time up in god's country I am a little sick of turning a corner on an easy road under clear blue skies and seeing YET ANOTHER OMG HUGE EPIC MASSIVE VISTA #64,348. For me, wet and cold reinforce the terrible beauty of the north. Sure, from pictures and from tour buses or RVs you can see that the north is vast, powerful, and indifferent. But what sets it apart from oceans or deserts or prairies is the latent sense that sooner or later it wants to eat you and floss its teeth with your bones. If the bears and mosquitoes don't get you in summer, just wait for winter. And if not in one winter, then eventually. The north is patient. Glaciers may now recede before the rise of man, but in time they will come to reoccupy their temporarily vacant homes. I don't think you've been north until you've felt that threat blended in with the beauty.

You can camp anywhere on the Denali Highway. Just pull off the road as far as you'd like, and throw up a tent. I'm a huge chicken and I like to meet people so I rolled into the state campground 20 miles outside Cantwell. The next morning was nice and sunny, so I got to see the contrast in the landscape versus the day before.



I stopped at a gas station in Cantwell and it was a dreary run-down affair. Both the station and the connected diner were in disrepair and unmaintained. The diner said it was open under new management, but looked like it would have an inch of dust on everything inside. In the station, half-wired fluorescent light fixtures hung from the ceiling and the few goods that they had were clustered in little islands on the vast stretches of old shelving.



The road into Anchorage was pretty boring again. You got a few glimpses of Mt McKinley, but then it was a tall trees on both sides of the road for miles. I was so bored that started riding the dirt frontage roads that parallel the main highway; used by locals on ATVs in summer and snowmobiles in winter I imagine.



After 5 minutes of this kind of exercise a nearby shotgun? blast sent me back onto the main road. At first I thought one of the bear bangers in my backpack had gone off, but no. I was being passed by a beat-up rusty old truck with a suspender-wearing redneck and a trailer full of ATVs, perhaps he was having fun, or perhaps someone wasn't happy with a dirty motorcyclist hooning it up on their frontage. In Alaska you can make a good pastime of looking at road signs and debating the caliber or gauge of ammunition used to blast holes through them.

My feelings of displeasure with Alaska did not last long. I rode on to Willow where I took a shortcut over Hatcher Pass Rd. to Fishhook. It's not a high pass, but after days of seeing the landscape at a distance, riding right through it was a nice change.



(The 35mph sign made me laugh.)

There was still daylight left so I pushed on down the Kenai Peninsula toward Homer, AK. I made it about 20 miles out of Homer when I had to stop and camp; it was near midnight and after nearly 500 miles on the road I was a little beat.