2004/08 Yukon trip - The road home - Retrospective |
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Looking back at the trip, how did it work out? It was the longest road trip we’ve ever done, measured either by time (nearly three months) or distance (12000 miles). We lived quite comfortably in a restricted space, maybe because there was so much more room than in our Aussie Landcruiser. We became quite adept at moving around without colliding. We shared the cooking and cleaning, and found there were no conflicts between Sandie’s knitting and rock sorting and my photography and writing. We have a television on board, but of course in most places we visited there is no reception without a satellite dish. We expected this and brought along some DVDs to watch but I think we only did this three times. I’m not sure what this proves except that we old folks can’t stay awake in the evenings! Actually, with twenty hours of daylight, there are no evenings.
We tried not to drive for more than a few hours at a time, and we looked for interesting roads to drive rather than the fastest. This kept us off the freeways, and quite often we drove gravel roads rather than blacktop. Many of the really interesting spots are hidden away on those gravel back roads.
We’ve always thought that the main cost of these trips is the gas (petrol), and that is the same regardless of how many days we take for the trip. 5000 miles in a month costs the same as 5000 miles in three months. The other costs, though, like camping, food, and propane, relate to the time spent on the trip.
Our camping strategy was to avoid commercial campgrounds. They are usually little more than cattle pens and with few exceptions they don’t have any scenic advantages. They are also expensive - $20 a night for nearly 100 nights is a lot of money. So we first looked for free and scenic off-the-road spots and only used campgrounds when they provided access to parks, lakes, rivers or trails and were run by the forest service, the province, the town, the state, or other government agencies. In general these were either free or less than half the price of a commercial campsite. This strategy was a financial success, but the downside was that we probably missed some interesting hiking trails by not staying in more parks. We also spent a fair amount of time working out where to get water, dump sewage, and do laundry, but that was a good financial tradeoff. We moved around a bit more than we expected. When we’re pulling the big trailer, it’s a major hassle to park it, so we generally leave it parked in one place for a few days and take day trips out from that base. With the Tiger, even if we’re only driving a few miles to some trail head then we have to pack everything up and leave the site, so the tendency is to move on rather than return to the same site. We stayed in the same place a few times, such as Atlin, Dyea, and Inuvik, but most stops were one-nighters.
Our food strategy was to load up with groceries whenever we were in a major town, and to avoid buying in small places and at the ends of roads. And, of course, we had to treat restaurants as a major luxury, not too hard when they are hundreds of miles apart anyway. Eating out every day really kills the budget.
The cost of gas for 12000 miles at about 11 mpg was of course horrible, but much less than driving a small economical car and staying 100 nights in hotels! Not as cheap as an economical car and a tent, but I don’t think we would have lasted for 3 months in a tent. Gas out in the boonies was not as expensive as we’d feared. It was about $2 for a US gallon in the lower 48 and in the $2.50 to $3 range in the Alaskan outskirts. In Canada, it was 90c (Canadian) or so for a litre around Vancouver and the Island, and about the same on the Alaska Highway in the Yukon. Even in the middle of the Dempster Highway, it was $1.16, less than we’d feared. In the oilfields of Alberta it dropped to 72c a litre. (For those who want to compare US and Canadian prices, 1 Cdn $ per litre is about equivalent to 3 US $ per US gallon, so just multiply the Canadian price by three.)
The price variation on propane, which we use for cooking and heating, was more extreme, ranging from 40c a liter in the gas fields to over 80c in the far north. However, 25 litres would last us about two weeks so this wasn’t a big problem.
So how did the camper hold up? Well, for what we were doing it was definitely the ideal vehicle. It could handle most logging roads and mine tracks about as well as a four-wheel drive pickup truck could. The only real limitations were its width and height. The detail picture was not as good. The builders down in South Carolina were sloppy and inexperienced. We had quite a few water leaks and loose screws and disconnecting wires. We were in danger of losing the generator exhaust, the awning, sewage tank, kitchen tap, ceiling fan, and even the bull bar at the front. Some of these problems we could attribute to our rough treatment, but most were just the result of poor attention to detail. The one thing I expected to have trouble with was a spare tyre casing that I’d lashed to the roof. I was doubtful about even driving up our street after I’d put it up there, but it stayed solidly in place for 12000 miles!
The Chevrolet parts held up well. We had one headlamp piece fall off and when we got back we found we had a leak in the power steering, but both were fixed under warranty. The graunching noise that had plagued us for 7000 miles turned out to be too little clearance between the rear spring and a flange on the propane tank. When the spring was at full extension on a bump it would scrape across this flange and the tank would act like a huge bell amplifying the graunch noise. As the flange wasn’t even being used, I just hacksawed it off, regretting that I hadn’t spotted the cause a month earlier.
It took me a whole day to clean the camper, and then I had to clean the driveway, an amazing amount of dirt. Once the dirt was off we could see that the body panel has separated from the wheel well, and needs to be reattached and repainted. I also opened up the awning to find that one of the end pieces had shattered. Both problems are covered under warranty, but Provan people want to fix them at their factory in South Carolina. Neither problem stops us using the camper, so we’ll probably wait until next spring when we’d planned to head down south for a few weeks anyway.
One other casualty of bouncing around the Outback and the Yukon was the laptop computer. Its charging circuit was only working intermittently, and other parts were broken or working loose. Fortunately this was one of the rare times I’d bought an extended warranty, so I sent it off for repair of the circuit. From calling HP with the complaint to getting it back repaired was just over 4 days, and that included shipping to and from California. HP also fixed all the other problems without being asked. I thought I’d mention that to counterbalance the more common horror stories about computer repairs.
The trip as a whole was a great experience. It was very loosely planned, with the goal of being in Inuvik in the first week in August, but leaving us enough time to go to other places that looked interesting. As it turned out most of the great places were on side trips to places that weren’t in the original plans. We camped under the waterfalls in Smithers, saw the bears in Hyder, the Salmon Glacier, fireweed on the Alaska Highway, the glacier on Atlin Lake, the lakes and mountains at Kluane, the Yukon River at Eagle, the mountains of the Dempster Highway, the Inuit at Tuktoyaktuk, the rocks of the Pelly River, and the museum and mines at Keno. On the downside, a lot of mystical names, like Dawson City, the Klondike, Lake Laberge, Whitehorse, Inuvik, and the Alaska Highway, are no longer mystical as we have been to them. They all lived up to our expectations but now we carry memories instead of expectations.
The trip redefined our concept of “north”. Minnesota likes to advertise itself as the “Northland”. This is despite being at the same latitude as Turin in Italy. However, most Minnesotans realize that the real north is in Calgary and Edmonton, as that’s where the Alberta Clipper snowstorms come from. Until I started planning this trip I’d assumed that the Alaska Highway was about as far north as you could drive, unless you followed the pipeline road up to Prudhoe Bay in Alaska. We now know that Inuvik is over 500 miles north of the Alaska Highway at Whitehorse and about 1500 miles north of the USA border. Tuktoyaktuk can be driven to in the winter and it’s another 100 miles north of Inuvik, though still about 1500 miles of open water from the north pole. So that’s our new view of “north”. However, the Inuit who live in Alert, Nunavut regard Tuk as being on the southern limit of Inuit territory. Perhaps they go south to Tuk’s beach in the summer to sunbathe.
Our biggest surprises were the trees, the weather, and the bugs. I did not expect to see a forest north of the Arctic Circle, but the enormous flow of water down the Mackenzie warms the country enough for trees to thrive as far north as Inuvik. We had planned for cold weather, but our coldest night was the first night of the trip, in North Dakota, our most southerly campsite. We had mostly 60s to 80s in the Yukon and North West Territory, much warmer than we expected. We had read numerous warnings about the bugs and I’d packed head nets as well as repellant. I only used the repellant once and maybe should have used it a couple more times, but there were fewer mosquitoes than we have up at Voyager, and a lot fewer flies. But, before you rush to this paradise, I should mention that we kept hearing that this was an unusual year, much warmer than normal. We may have also been late enough in the year to miss the really buggy periods.
We hope we get the same good luck next year when we take the trip to Alaska with John and Edna. We’ll be using some of the same roads, the Cassiar and Alaska Highways, but the majority of the trip will be in southern Alaska, and new to all of us. This will be with the truck and trailer as we won’t all fit in the camper even if we keep John folded while traveling. We will of course also be meeting up with Karen and Stewart and Evan, who will be galloping around by that time and making life more interesting for everyone!