2004/07 Yukon trip - Trek to the Arctic - |
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The country to the northwest was beautifully green, from the bogs, full of “black” spruce trees, to the mountains which also look to be covered by a kind of spruce. It’s very pretty country, with a line of high sharp mountains peaks off to the western horizon.
The road was less pleasant, paved, but with lots of areas where frost heave and “thaw bulbs” have destroyed the surface and created wavy bumps. The local term for it is “porpoising” and it was giving a lot of the bigger vehicles a pounding, particularly those pulling trailers. Apparently building roads across permafrost is a tricky business and the original builders of the Alaska Highway did not get it right. The highway is steadily being rebuilt, and the approach seems to be to build new sections of road and just abandon the original.
In the meantime you have to cope with bumps and holes and strange cambers as well as patches of slippery gravel. We were just pulling out of a rest stop when we saw a car spinning down the gravel road towards us. It shot off the road and slid backwards down into the ditch. The driver, a young black man from Missouri, was OK but a bit shaken. At first it looked like he could get his Ford Taurus out of the ditch by backing up to where we were, but then I noticed that both of his offside tyres were completely off the wheel rims. He wasn’t driving anywhere! He was lucky we had a satellite phone as we were able to call up the next little place, Beaver Creek, and find that their tow truck drivers were off on road pilot duty, and then call Kluane Village and get them to come out 50 miles and tow him in. This was going to cost him a bundle, with a hundred miles of tow truck time, and two tyres at Yukon prices, but it was better than being stuck at the side of the road. Probably not too many of the “good old boys” driving to Alaska would stop for a black man. We wished him the best of luck, and left him waiting for the tow truck.
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Alaska and Taylor Highways (Tok and Chicken and Eagle) |
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We crossed into Alaska with no problems. The guard wished Sandie a happy birthday for the previous day. Just like at Skagway, the Canadian and USA border stations are 20 miles apart, each close to a local community where the guards can live. Just like at the 49th parallel, the border between Alaska and the Yukon is marked by a clearcut corridor through the forest. It’s even marked by a diagonal line on the Alaska Highway itself.
Almost immediately, we were into the Tetlin Wildlife Refuge, a massive area that preserves the forests for moose, wolves, and migratory birds. It was 70+ degrees and the sun was shining, so we decided to quit driving for the day and enjoy the black spruce bog, with its billions of stringy spruce trees, cranberries, and mosquitoes. Actually, that’s unfair, as there were surprisingly few mosquitoes in this bog, provided we stayed out of the shaded area. We pulled into a campground on Deadman’s Lake just inside the refuge and surrounded by bogs.
In these black spruce bogs, the plants are living in the top few inches of ground that melt in the summer. There are many feet of ice, permafrost, underneath those inches of soil. The permafrost has been frozen since the last ice age, but you can see the effects whenever someone builds a road or trail. Removal of the insulating vegetation causes a few feet of the permafrost to melt, so the trees next to it tilt over and fall towards the trail. However this is rarely a serious problem as the trees don’t get very big here. A two inch wide, fifteen foot high tree is probably a hundred years old.
The fireweed here looked different too. The flowers were about done and the plants were covered in silky white seeds, and the plant stems themselves had also changed colour. The flowers go almost blue as they shrivel and then the stalks turn bright red, so the big swaths of fireweed are still very visible.
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