07.05.07July 4: Glennallen, AK to Valdez, AKPosted in Uncategorized at 12:06 pm by jwalters Happy Independence Day! We got up from the RV park in Glennallen and decided we better have a look at Matt’s battery. Before we left on our trip, we added some heated grips to his bike, and recently his bike’s battery would not hold a charge, even on low beam and no accessories on. The battery terminals did not make their way loose (which often happens on these single cylcinder “thumper” engines) what we found was his battery was dry. So right away that morning I set out on my bike to find some distilled water. But remember, this was July 4th, so finding an open store in a small town may be a challenge.
I found an open grocery store (it wasn’t a challenge it was the only open place in town), but to get to it, I had to drive through the crowd that had gathered for the parade. The parade was to start at any time but the local sheriff let me go through. Cautiously riding my loaded little motorcycle, with tons of stickers on it, some kids thought I was the start of the parade in the “clown car”. Well, I wasn’t, but I still gave the Vanna White wave as I drove by. Once I got a jug of distilled water, there was nothing to do but watch the parade, for it had started, and there is only one way in this small town to get back to the RV park, and that road was filled with 4-H floats, prom queens, and 30 year old fire trucks.
Once we filled Matt’s battery with distilled water, the neighbor with a fifth wheel let us use his battery charger for a few minutes. That was all it took, and we were back on the road. After 6,000 miles you expect things like this, but it was a relief to be back on the highways of Alaska! We headed out to Valdez, AK. It was a short ride, but we wanted to get somewhere by the water for the 4th of July. Unfortunately, it doesn’t get very dark here, and fireworks don’t look as spectacular as they do down south. The ride to Valdez was awesome. It started off with a pretty straight and uneventful road, but within no time we were in the mountains, and looking at really tall waterfalls. We also met back up with the Alaskan pipeline! We didn’t realize it until we got here, but we have traveled to both the start and stop of the Alaskan pipeline. The start being in Deadhorse, AK (Prudhoe Bay) and the stop here in Valdez.
Some really neat Glacier ice as we got further into the mountains.
Around this glacier we took some trails that led us closer to the ice. Below you can see where the pipeline was buried into the mountains.
Just after the Thompson Pass, we found some more trails that wandered off into the distance. These motorcycle’s of ours are perfect for these trails. So we wandered off for a while. Came to some great scenery.
Back on the paved highways, we were getting close to Valdez. With only a 120 mile ride today we enjoyed taking some back country detours. As we got closer to Valdez we came across a bunch of waterfalls right off the highway. Very cool!
Once we got to town, we grabbed a motel. We haven’t had a motel in over a week and a half. Life is good here. We get our own toilet, and I unwittingly washed my hair twice in the same day. That’s some kind of record on this trip. After we got into our room we headed town to the water and checked out some boats. Like trains and planes, I could walk these docks and look at ships all day.
As of writing this, it is 10am. We are waiting till 11am when they have to kick us out of the hotel. We have some miles to cover over the next couple days as we make our way to Haines for our rondevoe with Alaskan Marine Highway, which is a ferry system that will take us down to Bellingham, Washington (Seattle). To get to Haines, though, we have to travel back into Canada and backtrack the Alcan to Haines Junction, where we will head south to Haines. See you then!! |
07.06.07July 5: Valdez, Alaska to Beaver Creek, YukonPosted in Uncategorized at 5:13 pm by jwalters We left the comfort of our hotel room at Valdez at 11:30, checkout was at 11:00. We got the bikes loaded up and started off the day in pouring rain. Valdez is almost completely surrounded by mountains, except of course, for the small ocean inlet. This region gets a lot of rain and snow every year, and today was no exception. We got all geared up in our rain suits, and lucky for us, about 40 miles out of town, once over the mountain pass, we were in blue/cloudy skies. We had good roads back to Glennallen and onward to Tok.
From Tok, Alaska we retraced our steps on the Alaskan Highway. (I am in Canadian right now so no usage of the term Alcan) Just south of the Canadian customs is the town of Beaver Creek. We stopped here for the night just as heavy showers came in. We got some really cheap motels with a community bathroom. At $37 a night Canadian, these places were cheap. And we got what we paid for. But hey, its better than sleeping in a puddle!
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07.07.07July 6: Beaver Creek, Yukon to Haines, AKPosted in Uncategorized at 7:19 pm by jwalters We got up at the crack of noon and hit the road from our luxurious hotel suite. The Alcan leaving Beaver Creek was under a lot of construction and we spend the better part of the afternoon waiting at construction sites as they blew up sections of rock ahead. They they’d have to clear it before the pilot car would let us through. Usually the wait was no more than 20 minutes, but it made for slow going. Take a look at our scenery though, not a bad place to hang out. The Alcan traffic up here seems to be predominantly RV’s and fifth wheels.
When we made it to Destruction Bay, we ate at the same gas station/restaurant we ate at on our way up. The waitress remembered us, and was real nice. We ran into some cars that we heard about from some others the day before. These old cars are going to try and make it up the Dalton highway to Prudhoe Bay as well. These cars will never look the same.
We made our way to Haines Junction, the ride was pretty uneventful. Although we road the same highway in the opposite direction already, heading south had its own set of marvels. Heck even the gas station’s around here have brillant views out their back door!
From Haines Junction, we got off the Alcan and started heading south towards Haines. This highway would turn out to be one of the best roads we’ve ridden yet! All of the RV traffic followed the Alcan so that left us with almost no one on this stretch of road, ~150 miles. In this stretch we went through thick forest, then into snow capped mountains, dropping back down into rocky forested mountains before coming into the spectacular town of Haines. We had no idea this little town was such a cool place. I would recommend this stetch of highway from Haines Junction, Yukon to Haines, AK to anyone in the area. Here we are just south of Haines Junction.
The road surface through this pass was awesome!
It really started getting cold as we climbed into the mountains, on a bike you have no one to talk to but yourself. It give you a lot of time to think about a lot of random stuff. That afternoon, I started thinking back to my chemistry and thermodynamics classes. Namely, the ideal gas law: PV=NRT. P in this equation is pressure, and T is temperature. As P drops (ie atmospheric pressure drops as we climb the side of the mountain) so does the T (temperature) if the equation is to remain equal. Ok, not exactly a brain buster, but that’s what came to mind as we went from 70s weather, into the mid 40s as we passed the Haines Summit highway post.
We made our way to the US border crossing where the border patrol asked us the usual questions. Then we opted to stick around for a while and shoot the breeze with the fellow motorcyclist, one of the customs officers. He has a bike similar to my DR 650. He was asking me where I got some of the after market parts on my bike and I was happy to help out. Living around here, our bikes are a perfect size for some of the trails, and I can see why he opted for the Suzuki DRZ-400. From the US border we had 40 miles to Haines, AK. The last 40 miles were fantastic. We started a long decent to sea level, where we quickly warmed up. Once we got back into the tree line, the scenery jumped out at us.
We made it into Haines, and found this little town to be a good time! Check out that sky, the sunsets up here this time of year is unreal!
We ate at a local sea food restaurant, where I met this lion in the parking lot. He is an Alaskan Malamute and is quickly losing his winter coat. The owner was playing in a band inside the sea food restaurant.
That night we met up with a couple that were traveling in their van. They are from the Baltimore area. Dave is a architect looking for work up here, and Megan (I think, please correct me if I am wrong you two) has been in camera sales. They told us about the trouble they had getting their van fixed on the way up here. I hope you don’t have to buy anymore $100 “tune ups”! We had a couple beers with them, but Matt and I had to ride over to the Ferry depot, so we called it an early night. We sleep next to our bikes in the parking lot most of the night.
That’s it for now, our ferry is just leaving, the Alaskan capital. If we don’t post anything for a while its because we don’ thave internet access at sea. We still aren’t sure how much connectivity this ship has. We’ll see! |
07.07.07July 7: Haines, AK en route to Bellingham,WAPosted in Uncategorized at 11:14 pm by jwalters Turns out our wireless connection on the Alaskan Marine Highway works pretty well. Its a slow connection, so I had to downsize the images on our daily repository, but they are there, you just can’t get the ridiculously large images. Taking a look at my onetankatatime.net server logs, I went from serving 100MB of data each month to over 5.6GB! To combat this surge on my poor poor cable modem, I changed the start page, so it only shows the latest 2 entries now. By doing this, the server doesn’t waste time loading images from previous posts, if they aren’t needed. To go back to older posts, you can click on the “previous entry” links at the bottom of the page. Ok, well here we are. Hanging out for the next couple days aboard the M/V Malaspina. Cruising down the inside passage, catching whales out the window and walking the deck with views on both sides!
Let me back up to this morning. We got into the ferry terminal late last night after grabbing some late dinner and hanging out with Dave and Megan. Instead of grabbing a camp site somewhere for 5 hours, and run the risk of missing the ferry, we decided to sleep at the terminal. After all, we have 3 days on the boat, so we’ll have plenty of time to get caught up on sleep. We were the only ones in the parking lot that night. I think some folks thought it was odd, as they pulled in to the staging lot, to find me sleeping on the ground beneath my bike. Sometime in the early morning, 4am’ish, I moved inside because the mosquitoes formed an alliance sometime in the night and began their assault on my face. Around 7 am, lots of folks started showing up. A couple guys pulled in on KLRs and started asking us all sorts of questions about our bikes. John and Mel are their names. Nice guys, but both Matt and I were still half a sleep when they pulled in, and were caught off guard. They had just come from a motel in Haines, and were well rested…
Before loading up, we ran into a couple on bicycles we met earlier in our trip in Tok at the Salmon Bake RV Park. They had ridden down to the ferry and were hanging out with their loaded tandem bicycle. We boarded the boat, and got a great spot in the cabin area. We have our own set of seats, and even a table, as you can tell from the picture above. We could also sit outside, but we chose to keep our belongs in doors, and just go outside during the day. Some folks choose to sleep outside as well, but it gets really cold at night. We’ve been camping outside for 3 weeks now, so we figure we’ll take advantage of a roof over our heads for the time being.
Tell you what, its been one relaxing day. We got off the boat in Juneau, AK, the state capital. We had a 3 hour lay over there, giving us some time to take a walk into town. Currently, we are heading to Petersburg,AK, where we will have another short docking, but we will probably stay on board till another stop somewhere down south. Nice to see that we are finally getting some darkness at night, its making sleep a lot easier. Until tomorrow!
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One Tank At A Time Page 5 |