The ride from Watson Lake, which is mainly famous for its forest of signs (more on that later) to Dawson Creek in Alberta is long under the best of conditions. When 550 of the 600 miles are rain-soaked, it loses what little charm it might otherwise have had. Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against riding in the rain, and have done quite a bit of it on this trip. If you’re headed to the Pacific Northwest or Alaska, it comes with the territory. Some rains create a peaceful sense of melancholy, enhancing the landscape and the ride. The problem on this section of the trip is that a good bit of the landscape is quite spectacular, but also largely invisible with low cloud cover. As long as the road was good, I was able to make good time, even in the rain. It was important to keep an eye on the gas gauge – there really isn’t any room for error when it can be 100 miles between services. At the tourist info centers they even provide you with suggestions for where you should fill up.
No, the real problems came when I hit road construction. I had driven long and hard to reach Watson Lake, and I thought the worst of the construction zones were behind me (they were especially bad from Tok to Burwash Landing, on both sides of the US-Canadian border). Little did I know that the real killer was still ahead of me. I stopped in Toad River (famous for the collection of baseball-style caps nailed to the ceiling – currently around 8,000). I suppose they felt the need to compete with Watson Lake, which had cornered the market on road signs and distances to places all around the globe (a tradition started during the Second World War when a homesick Illinois boy put up a sign from his hometown with the approximate mileage – today there are something like 35,000 signs encircling the Visitors’ Center, and it seems to me that if 35,000 people are interested in showing how far it is to someplace else, that doesn’t say much for where they’re at). In any event, while eating my BLT (quite good with Canadian bacon!), I noticed a couple of mud-splattered bikers entering the store. They told me they had just come up (i.e., northwards) on some of the worst road they had ever seen. It was a construction zone in which the roadway wasn’t the normal gravel and dirt mixture, but instead just dirt, which had turned into a sea of mud with the unrelenting rain. One of them said that his bike had gone sideways on him, but that he managed to keep it upright. Within an hour I was repeating his experience. Riding through that muck was like being on an animal that was squirming, twisting, and trying to go any direction but forward. Two miles of those conditions had me exhausted – and relieved to be through it. After that, the remaining 400 miles felt like a bagatelle.
The area of southern Yukon Territory and Northern Alberta that I went through has an economy based almost entirely on resource extraction – timber, oil, gas, and coal among others. For long stretches of highway there were prominent signs warning against trespassing or parking because of the danger of poisonous gas leaks or venting. I later found out that this has to do with the natural gas extraction process. In other places huge swaths of forest had been clearcut – but reforestation was taking place. Coal extraction was carried on using monster trucks and electric shovels. I found out more about this when I stayed last night in Hinton, just outside of Jasper National Park, at Aunt Bea’s B & B. Bea and her husband Ray are now both retired, but he used to be an Alberta Forest Ranger, which mainly involved checking on remediation efforts by the natural resource companies. He also kept an eye out for poachers, and explained to me the incredibly complex laws and exceptions that make up the hunting customs of Alberta. For many people, it remains an important supplement to their diet; for others, it’s a major source of income through guiding and hunting-tourism. Ray has a house full of trophies (he hasn’t killed all of them himself – as an employee of the Park Service he often had the opportunity to get animals that had been killed by others or in accidents). Among other denizens of his living room were a stuffed bison head, a bighorn sheep, a snowy owl, a great horned owl, a black bear, a gigantic bull moose head, and various others. I spent several hours talking with Bea and Ray about life in Alberta, both then and now. They also introduced me to the rules of Canadian football – the season starts on July 1, Canada Day. Their beloved Edmonton team was playing. The field is much larger than in US football, and each team only has three downs to make ten yards (not the four we have). The game is much faster paced – lots less down time, lots more emphasis on the kicking game, and no silliness like the “fair catch” rule. When you catch the ball, you had better run with it, because the other team is going to be after your ass.
Our conversation finally ended when they informed me that I had changed time zones when I crossed into Alberta – it’s on Mountain Time, rather than Pacific. I had lost an hour, so it was time for bed.
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