road trip to Alaska

What a drive! Winter on the Alcan Highway is something to be treasured. You mightn't hear this much in casual conversation, but Canada is sitting on the world’s best stash of trees and some of the grandest scenery too.

The route to Alaska is through rural country, so you’ve got to have the tools to survive for a few days in case of snow burial or something equally interesting. Fortunately, we made it without so much as a flat tire, which is a first. The critters we saw were bison, caribou, moose, coyotes, and a wolf (dead, but hey). Liard River Hot Springs is our favorite spot. Is this out of control, or what?:

At a grocery store in Grand Prairie, British Columbia, we found the largest row of bulk goods we’d ever seen. If we stood at opposite ends and talked in normal inside voices, we couldn’t hear each other. With mouths agape, we filled baggies with gummy snakes, dried mangos, trail mix concoctions, mints, and so forth. Sure, we had to write all the codes on those little white tabs, but life ain’t free. The thing that almost messed everything up was the checker lady. As she weighed each baggie, she leaned forward to key in the codes, and her voluptuous bosom threatened to add ounces, nay, pounds, to each item. I’m always a little leery of those scales anyway, but this was positively nerve-racking.

Perhaps the quintessential Alcan experiences were at Watson Lake, a few days into the drive. We met a young couple and their baby and cat, moving from Northern California to Anchorage. It’s quite something to meet people moving to Alaska for the first time, especially in the dead of winter, because they are filled with anticipation and an abandon that is truly unique in the moving world. You can’t be slight of heart for that! We chatted with them until the restaurant closed and then kept track of each other the rest of the way home. The next morning, we were to leave Watson Lake early and get in a big day’s drive. Instead we faced one of the curses of small, isolated towns but at once the blessing too. Somehow there was a miscommunication between dear husband and I, and traipsing back and forth to load the pickup, we locked ourselves out of the motel cabin, our computer still inside. No one at the office/house heeded our knocks, so we left for a breakfast joint to wait for the cabin owners to awaken. The lady at the restaurant said, “Nobody answered, huh? Jerry would be gone working, but Shirley should be there. She doesn’t work. Did you knock real loud? Did you lay on the horn? Let me call ‘em.” So, call ‘em she did, at home and on the cell with the same results as us: none. “Well,” she said, “Go down to the such-and-such motel, because Jerry has coffee down there at 10:00 sharp with the guys.” So we did. But the waitress at that motel said Jerry had only been in one day that week. We thought of going to the high school to find the teenage kid who’d checked us in the night before, but Jason remembered he was going on a skiing field trip. As we waited for Jerry, a third lady drove up in a suburban and said, “I’m here to help. Heard you’re locked out of one of Jerry and Shirley’s cabins. Well, they’re on a trip, but I’ve got an extra key.”