A few long days

We arrived Friday night in GP at 9pm, what a looong day. We met Brenda Stanvick, who I used to work with in RD and her fiancée Ken for a beer. They are doing really well and she doesn’t miss RD so much when are weather there is the pits, like all spring! Ken is really nice.
We Left Saturday morning at 9am and headed to Dawson Creek for breakfast. It is only 100kms or so away so should be fine. Weather is looking good, sunny and warmish, 11 degrees so far. The weather network said 19degrees in Fort Nelson. Bring on the heat! The road was nice and not too much traffic which was good because as we rounded a curve 2 deer were on the left hand side of the road contemplating crossing. Brian cranked on his brakes and I honked my horn madly. One deer went left and the other went directly in front of us! Freaky stuff! Damn deer. What are they thinking?! It didn’t help as well that a car had come up quickly behind us so we had to pin it and get out of there. No time to stop and think or check your pants!
We stopped in dawson creek for a great big breakfast and then headed north, our destination today is Liard Hotsprings which is about 700kms away. The road to Fort St.John was great and there were even breaks in the clouds where this really warm bright light would shine through. Weird. All good things must come to an end. It is a 4 hour stretch of boring road between Fort Nelson and Fort St.John. About and hour into it, the rains came. It was FREAKIN’ COLD! Brians GPS said it was 6 degrees. I decided I am going to get any type of electric apparel I can get. Pants, vest you name it I am putting it on my body. Up to this point I pretty much just followed brian but when I saw the sign for Pink Mountain Lodge, I buzzed passed him and turned into the parking lot of the lodge. I peeled myself off my bike and we went inside this gloriously warm dining room. We sat near the huge woodstove and ordered some coffee and lunch. While we were there we met a great couple who were sort of stranded there. They had travelled from Pensylvania on there motorcycle, which happened to be the same bike as Brians, a BMW 1200GS. They had arrived at Pink Mountain the day before and had encountered snow. Huge snowflakes and minimal visibility. I felt kinda bad for them because I am pretty sure this was no luxury hotel. Well we sat there for about an hour and a half and chatted bike stories and they were super nice. They were headed to Fairbanks, AK so we hope maybe they will stop in Dawson City when we are there and we can chat some more. Things got better after Pink Mountain. It never really got too sunny for long periods but it was definitly warm, 19 degrees. We stopped for gas at Fort nelson and we were going to stop at a grocery store but before we could find one, the town ran out. So we kept on going. About an hour north we were on this straight stretch and I could see this brown shape on the right hand side of the road walking on the shoulder and I thought it was a person so I moved to the left of my lane getting ready to go around them. Well these brown shapes turned out to be a mother moose and her baby! Brian cranks on his brakes as do I and good thing too because instead of it heading to the right into the trees, it has to veer in front of us and go to the bush on the left!. They were huge!!! The mother moose had to be 8 or 9 feet tall. Way over Brians head on his bike. And the legs! Crazy animals, they high balled it into the trees and we went on our way. I wish I had a helmet cam because I could have gotten some good pictures of that. Up the road we met another man in a huge motor home who was from florida. We told him about our mooses and they had seen 4 or 5 bears but no moose. I am not sure I want to see bears. He was going to anchorage and valdez. We said we might see him there. The rains came again for a while and it got a bit scary when it was rainy and the sun was shiny and you cant see much from the glare on the road and I just hoped we didn’t run into any more animals. Then we started crossing these bridges with metal decks and all these grooves. That was nasty because it feels like your bike is going to fall over and then you see a semi coning onto the brisdge towards you, Yikes!! I hate those bridges!
Stopped for coffee at Toad River for a coffee warm up and decided to get to Muncho lake instead of Liard Hotsprings tonight. There is a lodge at Muncho lake and a campground at Liard. Hmmmm. I am starting to see a trend here. Toad River and Muncho lake park are some of my favourite places on the Alaska hwy. it is so beautiful here. Thank god the lodge had a vacancy! And a lounge with wine too!! Yay No butt fatigue yet either!
When we left RD my odometer read 4032kms today it says 5607kms. Our highest elevation was 1295meters and that was at the Summit pass and the coldest temp was 5.5 degrees.

Thursday June? I am already losing track of days and time. We made it to Whitehorse and spent the night in the campground there. It was nice and close to town. The drive up was pretty and the road was great. There seems to be a lot of BMW’s on the road up here to Alaska. A lot of RV’s too. We stopped on the side of the road to take some photos of some HUGE buffalo laying and eating in the ditch and I pulled a u-turn to pull in behind Brian’s bike and the shoulder of the road was really soft and it caught my bike tire and my bike fell over and propelled me off into the ditch. I was fine and when Brian saw my bike laying down the first thing he did was take a picture of me next to my poor bike laying on its side on the gravel. I was scared because of the freakin buffalo 100 yards away. They didn’t seem to mind tho, I think we were lucky there weren’t any baby buffalos there or things may not have been as nice. I think I gave a pretty good show for the 4 or 5 RVers that were parked behind us on the road!

We made it to Whitehorse with no other issues, the road was great and the weather was nice.
We left WH the next day and went up the Klondike Highway towards Dawson City. We met some other bikers on their way up to Alaska at Pelly Crossing. That was were we met Andy aka Spicy McHaggis, who was riding a Russian Ural with a sidecar. This ural is a replica bike of a BMW the Russians stole from the Germans in WW2 and then reverse engineered it to make their own version. He was taking it up the Dempster highway to the Arctic Circle. A lot of people told him you couldn’t do that on that bike but he was willing to prove them wrong. We all ended up fuelling up at Stewart Crossing where a Swiss military vehicle (Pinsouer) with 6 wheels, showed up. We had the whole eastern block of Europe parked at a small gas station in the Yukon there along with our BMW’s. That was probably one of the weirdest things I have seen on the road so far. Andy and us camped at Moose Creek campground and in the morning he headed for the Dempster and we went up the Silver trail to Mayo and Keno City where we toured the museum and had awesome homemade pizza at the Snack Bar.
We ended up at the Dempster Highway turn off at about 5pm and as we fuelled up the bikes, a couple of riders pulled in who had just come from Eagle Plains. Ben (Skwanka) and Dave. They said the road up the Dempster was pretty good and we should have no problems. Up to that point we had heard that the road could be pretty sketchy at the best of times. They said they had passed Andy on the road and he was headed for Eagle Plains that night and then the Arctic Circle the next day. Good to know he wasn’t having any troubles with the Ural. We took the plunge and headed up the Dempster. 370 kms of gravel road to Eagle Plains. 30 or so more to the Arctic Circle. The first mountain range we saw was the Tombstone Mountains. AMAZING!!! I have never seen anything so awe inspiring before. I took a bunch of photos but they will never portray what the views are really like. Truly fantastic. We travelled on over this road that was in pretty good condition for the most part, doing 60-80 kms/hour. Some spots were pretty scary and you just climb up and up over tons of mountains. You could see in every direction for miles and miles. We were going to camp at Engineers Creek but when we stopped we were totally swarmed by a frenzy of mosquittos. It was disgusting. We decided to go the next 180 kms to Eagle plains. It was 830pm and we figured another couple hours and we would be at the lodge. We pulled in at 1045pm. Tired and sore I got a 6 pack of coronas while Brian got the room and we were thatnkfull we made it without any incidents. We had heard of guys wiping out, breaking down and not even trying to venture up the highway on their bikes and here we were safe and sound in a room with dark curtains(thank god because the sun never sets here) ready to have a great sleep. In the morning we had breakfast with Andy and he had already been to the Circle and back so we ate and then headed up on our own. I couldn’t believe we were at the Arctic Circle. Holy crap. We took our pix and headed back down the Dempster towards Dawson. The road back seemed to go a lot smoother and faster for some reason. Pretty cold and rainy but otherwise great. We made it to the Klondike corner in 6 hours. Our bikes were covered in muck and so were my legs. I seemed to get the worst amount of dust and grime because I was always behind Brian. I look at that dirt as a testament of our journey to Eagle Plains and back with a lot of pride. What a ride. Awsome. We made it to Dawson and met up with Andy, Dave, Ben, Carry, Mike, Klaus, SGT Marty, Alexander(from Holland) and had a few beers and talked about our tours up the dempster. Milke and Klaus had made it to Inuvik in one day. It took them 16 ours to do 750 kms. that had been our original plan but I am thankfull we changed our minds because I guess they were calling for snow in inuvik. Yikes!! Klaus hit Pink Mtn the day after we did and met the same people from Pensylvania that we had seen there. It is really cool how everyone we have met on this trip has either talked to someone we have or heard stuff about other riders that we have. It is a cool group of riders. the guys we have been hanging out with here in dawson are telling me that I have to start hanging out on the Adventure website that they are all addicted too. It is like facebook for adventure bikers. That site is where they all have the funny handles like Spicy Mchaggis, Skwanka and Sgt Marty.
I will hve to think of what name I could use.....hmmm
Now we have a few days of rest here in Dawson City, I guess the rally people are getting here today (Thurs) and all the festivities start tomorrow. Tonight at midnight we line up all our bikes in front of the Downtown hotel. I think it will look like a friggin BMW convention. There are quite a few in town already.