Dease Lake, B.C. to Hyder, AK

We left Dease Lake on the 18th, after a 3 day stay to take care of some business back home.  Now we are on the road again!

Biked the next 2 days thru mostly rain.  Stayed in a small cabin at Tatogga Lake Resort.  A couple had just purchased this resort a month before.   Wow, these Canadians sure know how to do home-made food!   We were just getting ready to leave there and Ralph noticed his bike rack was broken and had to repair it.  The owner had a small shop that came with his purchase of the property that looked more like a junk yard, but we dug thru and found some tools to use and repaired his rack.  Then, Ralph used the air compressor there to add air to his tire, which did not release when he went to pull it off and it blew a hole in his tire.  So, back in for a tire change (not bad, first flat in 1630 miles so far!).  The owner there was watching us and asked us, “Now why, would a couple like you choose to travel this way, when you could just buy a small car, with large windows and drive slowly and see the same things?”  We asked him, “Why, would a couple like you want to buy a resort to maintain and do all the cooking, cleaning and fixing yourselves?”    We couldn’t understand his lifestyle and he surely didn’t get ours!  Sure got us thinking tho, “Why are we doing this???”  Well, I can’t go into all that now, but as you read on hopefully you will understand!

On July 21st we had only a 30 mile ride from Bob Quinn airstrip (an active Goldmine) to Bell II (a Helicopter ski area ).  Well it was so beautiful, with snowcapped mountains, streams, waterfalls and avalanche areas that it took us most of the day to arrive at Bell II.  We ate, set up camp and immediately headed for the outdoor hottub!  Wow, that felt great after almost 1700 miles of cycling!!  (finally, somewhere to soak our sore muscles!)  But, it did not take long before our pesty friends found us in the tub and drove us running out of there for the indoor saunna!  Only 1 or 2 were found in there and we were able to KILL them!!    Later that day, 2 bikers arrived coming all the way from Key West, Florida, Jin and Glenn.  We shared stories and places to stop and get good food.  They had ridden since April 4th, and were ending their ride in Anchorage, biking for the Lance Armstrong cancer, “Livestrong”.   The next morning, we came across 18 more bicycles coming north from Texas to Anchorage.  This group is from the University of Texas and students ride every year to support cancer research!  This got us thinking we need to add a link to our website soon for a cause we want to support. 

We left there on the 22nd and biked on to Meziadin Junction.  This was a provincial campground on  a really beautiful lake with millions of mesquitos, but worth putting up with for the views!  Got tent set up and the manager came around and told me that a mother bear and 2 cubs had been hanging out by the site I had just set up in, soooo, took the tent down and moved down by the lake in by all the RV’s!! 

Well, we made it thru the night and then had a 36 mile bikeride thru the most beautiful place, we both agreed, that we have ever seen in our lives!!!  We were on Hwy 37A over to Stewart and Hyder, AK.  Wow — our necks actually got sore from looking up!  We had to keep stopping and taking pictures.  Vibrant blue hanging glaciers and waterfalls coming off the tops of mountains – 6,000 feet above us!!  There must have been a million waterfalls all within a few miles.  Then we came to Bear Glacier, which comes all the way down to the road we were on.  The was so much water coming out of the bottom of the glacier and pouring out into a small lake, that is was like a small river (about like the Crystal River in the summer).  This glacier has melted substantially in the last few years, was not a lake there just a few years back! (Global warming!) 

Arrived in Stewart, a small town of about 200 people that had 37 feet of snow this winter!  They had a base of snow of 27 feet after it all fell and many building collapsed from the weight!  This area has the world record for most snow ever, they get average a 150″ per year or 13 feet!  Guess they went over the average!  Steward is at the end of a canal that comes in from the Pacific Ocean.  Then you stay on the road for 1 more mile along the shore and cross the US/Canadian border and are in Hyder, AK with a population of maybe 25 people!

Hyder, has been our home now for 4 days!  Cool little town with 2 bars, a motel, 2 coffee shops, 2 campgrounds, and a Fish Bus (resturant), all at the base of ”Green Mountain”.  This mountain has the most vertical relief from Sea to Mountain top, around 6000 feet, with waterfalls coming off of it, very green trees and grassy slopes, with some snow still on top!! (So, of course, this is the ”boring” view we chose to have out of our tent for the last few days!) 

From our base camp here, we have gone up “Fish Creek” to view a mamma Grizz with 3 cubs, catching and eating Salmon on the creek.  They have a great viewing boardwalk, built by the Forest Service that you pay to go on and the bears are right below you in the creek catching and eating fish and feeding their babies.  The Salmon come here to spawn and then die in July and August and the Grizzly’s come to feed on them.   So far, the bearwatching is slow because they only have 7 – 10 fish per day coming upstream.   Every AM and evening between 6 and 9 o’clock, she comes at some point to catch the Chum Salmon, (about 24 – 36″ long), then takes it to the babies and they fight over it, you can hear them growling and fighting.  Then they lick their paws and she gets them another one!  Then usually a Male Grizz will come and she gets her young ones and leaves.  The same Mother bear was here last year when the 3 babies were real little.  This year will be the last year she will teach them to fish and survive and then she will abandon them! (oh, so sad, but the natural process of nature!)

From Hyder, Ralph biked (about 20 miles up), Pat rode (smart) with a group from the Nederlands up to view Salmon Glacier.  We could not see the top because of fog, but it comes down a valley and then splits 2 ways and you can drive right up to it!  Spectacular blues again, crevasses across the glacier and hugh icebergs floating in the lake at the other end that are approximately 100 feet tall.  In about a month, when the ice melts enough, this lake drains and the icebergs are left sitting on the ground and the water rushes down the valley towards the town.  It’s an exciting event all the towns people go out to watch!

Our plan is to leave here tomorrow, if we can pull ourselves away, and ride back over the Stewart/Cassier Hwy, while straining our necks again and then head south to Hwy 16 over to Jaspar, B.C. and Banff for more neck-staining beauty!

We miss all our friends and relatives back home, and the many, many friends met along the way, but like our new friend from Alaska says, “travel makes us appreciate each other!”  We find the people we meet and friends made along the way are the most valuable part of our trip.  They get you thinking and wondering and ask you questions you probably have never asked yourself or even thought about before.  Wow- what an experience – we encourage everyone to travel and see our beautiful world and all the interesting people out there to meet!  We have been discussing levels of crazy with our newest friends, Gary and Kathy. ( We think they are crazy, crawling through the bushes and grass, pushing their fishing rods in front of them, to get to the next great fishing spot, where all the grizzly bears hang out, only to catch and release the fish again! )  Well, they think we are more crazy doing what we do, as I’m sure many of you do too! 

Until next time—  Bikin’ On!  Ralph & Pat

Pictures – Prudhoe Bay to Haines, AK

                                                

Skagway, Alaska to Dease Lake, B.C.

Haines is a great little town on the inland passage with a population of about 2000, we spent July 4th thru the 7th there.  We finally pulled ourselves away from all the biking/camping friends we had met at the grassy meadow camping spot overlooking the waters of the inland passage with beautiful mountain views and took the ferrry to Skagway (a 45 minute ferry ride past more beautiful mountains and waterfalls on each side of the fjiord).

Skagway is another beautiful Mountain town on the waters edge.  Reminded us of Estes Park (as Forrest said).  From there, Pat took the narrow guage trainride up White Pass for the first 30 miles, and Ralph opted to bike up!    Was a rainy day again, but the views were still really incredible from the train.  (For those of you that have riden the Silverton-Durango train, multiply the beauty and scenery by 10.)  It was all built on cliffs - they blasted the rock away in 1898 during the goldrush - to make an easy passage to the Klondike Region of the Yukon Territory.  There are waterfalls on each side as you ascend the pass, and has the longest steel bridge in the world, which the train no longer uses.  From the top, we biked on thru the high rolling Southern Yukon lakes region.   This was a network of long, long interconnected lakes.  We found a great camp spot with our own private beach and very few mosquitoes that night! (Lake Tutshi, a deep teal color).  That evening, we got entertained by a bald eagle hanging out in the trees right above our campsite.  We then feel fast asleep from the long days ride to the sound of the waves hitting the shore only 10 feet from our tent!  Wow, what luxury!  (Don’t know if we have mentioned them before, but the mosquitoes are quite obnoxious and almost always present as soon as you stop pedalling.  They’ve been an unwanted part of our company and we will certainly not miss them if they decide to leave us!  It’s not very often we can relax at camp unless we’re in the tent – so the times we can be without the pesky bastards are heaven!).

 We then passed thru Carcross, Teslin, then onto the busy and most times boring Alcan Highway (They’ve taken the fun out of that road by making it safe – straight and boring).  We try to do big days on the Alcan just to get to the good roads.  We met a Chinese biker on a road bike travelling from Vancouver to Prudhoe Bay – couldn’t communicate very well, but was great hearing of other places he had travelled – NY to LA, Japan to Viet Nam, Lakes region of Argentina.  His next adventure is to hike the Great Wall!  He says he’s too old to do any more bike trips.  We told him about 68 yr old Dan, and told him what my friend David has always said, “we are just young boys in old skin!!!”  We had dinner with a lady at the jct to the Cassiar Hwy who reminded me so much of my mom that we called her “Ida II”.  She was a great time – one of those Everready Bunny types I hope to be when I’m her age.  She told us about all her solo travels around the world – impressive! 

The first day on the Cassiar wasn’t anywhere as beautiful as our friend had told us it would be “That John Denver’s full of s#it man!!”, but it soon turned out to be “Knock your socks off-beautiful”, as our friend had promised – Thanks Monk for the advise!  We stayed at a beautiful lake with a cloud of our buddies, then ran into my new heroes – 3 guys from Spain that have been biking for SEVEN YEARS!!!!!!!  They’ve biked the entire coast fo Africa, India, Indonesia to Japan, China to Mongolia, South America, Austalia, and presently North America to Inuvik!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We saw a bear cub they had stopped to look at across a small lake.  Later that day we saw 2 other bears,  mostly all black bears here.

We got to a place called Jade City, with free coffee!!  Yeah, right- we ended up spending some bucks on Jade jewelry, great marketing skeem!  The Jade is mined in this area, 85% of Jade comes from this area of the world.  Then on to Dease River crossing, where we camped at a beautiful RV site that a couple from Wisconsin own and come up here every summer.  Spent Sunday AM hanging around and drying things out from the rainstorm the night before, Pat went to their morning service and then we got invited to a potluck!  Wow, did Ralph eat again, (he had trouble biking the next 45 miles)!  We biked on in the afternoon towards Dease Lake, where we are now.  Arrived in the pouring rain, so did not pitch the tent, and stayed at a nice log Inn (awe, no mesquitoes in my shower!?!)

Our plan is to leave here tomorrow and continue south on the Cassier Hwy.  We are planning to take the detour 40 miles toward the ocean into Alaska again, to the town of Hyder to observe glaciers and Grizzly’s feeding on the Salmon!

We love all the comments from everyone, please keep in touch and let us know at what point you want to join in for awhile and we will help make it happen.  You might see some pictures soon on our site, we have had some technical difficulties and sent them on to our lovely daughter, Crystal.  Until we find computer access again, — Bikin On—– Ralph & Pat

  

Tok to Haines, AK.

Happy 4th of July!!!  We rolled into Haines, Alaska late pm 7/3 after a 95 mile day of the most awsome country so far!!!!  It’s hard to believe we haven’t updated since Tok – so – here it is:  We did a lay-around-and-eat day in Tok (emphasis on “eat”), then headed on down the Alaska Hwy toward the Canadian border, stopping at roadside pullouts to read the signs about the crazy mining days, the local vegetation/animals (a moose can lose up to a pint of blood/day to mosquitoes – I think I’m close today – biting mosquitoes are all females – we now call them “bitches”), and other interesting stuff.  The St. Elias range started appearing in the distance and we soon were riding in a broad valley beside them – absolutely georeous country now. 

We saw our first Black Bear eating garbage along the road!  He was more interested in that than us.  We didn’t have any pudgy tourists to hide behind, so we did not stop to take photos.   The scenery keeps getting prettier and prettier and the mountains higher and higher, but the road is still easy biking.  Some friendly folks stopped us on the road and gave us candy bars, ( where’s the shots of tequila?) 

We spend a day biking along Kluane Lake, a huge lake, absolutely beautiful!  Then on toward Haines Junction.  At Haines Junction we had a celebration for our first 1000 miles (5% of the trip) with some great organic wine, cheese and crackers.  The next day was Canada Day,  so we got to eat alot at a free BBQ!!  We met a Swiss couple on a tandem bike.  They are also planning on biking to the tip of South America!   We also met some motorcyclists from Washington and had a long talk about our trip.  One of them asked me how many calories I burn in a day.  I said I don’t know, but maybe somebody can figure this out for us.  This is what I ate today:

4 cream cheese danishes, a double hamburger with 2 cups potato salad, salmon fillet, half  red pepper, 3 egg salad sandwiches with 10 cold cuts, slice of carrot cake with thick cream cheese frosting, slice of strawberry cream cheese cake, date bar, monster peanut butter cookie, 3 glasses orange juice, 2 cups coffeee with cream and sugar, 2 and a half pork chops with cranberry sauce, 2 cups mashed potatoes, large dinnner salad with olive oil, large snickers bar- and I’m still kinda hungry- damn that 85lb bike!!! (Note: this is Ralph’s diet, not Pat’s!)

Biked from Haines Junction to Haines thru the most incredible country so far.  Met Doug and Evelyn at a campground and they invited us into their camper for fresh caramel rolls and we talked for hours. 

After and early start to our biking day of 4:30 PM, we finally saw our first Grizzly!!  He was huge, he was off in the distance, we didn’t stop! 

Spent the 4th in Haines!!  2 BBQ’s and fireworks!!  Ran into our motorcycle friends and also Doug and Evelyn and had a great time! 

Catching up on stuff today – maybe head to Skagway tomorrow on the ferry!

Bike on with a bang!!! Ralph and Pat