3.a AK, BC & YT — Klondike Highway

The next leg of my ride started with a climb up out of the Yukon River valley. Klondike Highway separates from Alaska Highway up there, and then it’s 330 miles to Dawson City. Three days on a road bike accompanied by a support van — a few more on a loaded mountain bike. 😀

The terrain is small, rolling granite hills, mixed with many lakes and patches of gravel. The Cordilleran Ice Sheet left that all behind only 12,000 years ago. The country here is sparsely populated (fewer than 10,00 people live outside of Whitehorse), which adds to its charm.

I’ve written before about the social magic a bicycle tourist enjoys on the road. I arrived at Braeburn Lodge, my first stop on the ride to Dawson City, in the middle of the afternoon. Some trucks that passed me a few miles back were parked there. I went in, and there were the truckers eating $5 cinnamon buns. (There’s a Cinnamon Bun Airstrip across the road, and they stage a 200-mile Cinnamon Bun dog sled race in the winter.)

They though I was making good time and wondered if I was going far. I said, ‘Yeah, is this the way to the North Pole?’ They responded with some misdirection. Then I told them where I was going. They wanted to know if had a tire pump (I had two) and if I’d had any flats (none). We engaged in more banter while I waited for my hamburger.

The “lodge” looked like it was a roadhouse back in the day. There was an old piano with candlesticks mounted on either side of the music rack, and the room was big enough for a dance floor at one end.

The hamburger arrived on a homemade bun about 9″ in diameter and 3″ thick. I had to cut it up like a pizza to eat it. It was the biggest hamburger I’ve ever eaten by far. Good though.

I asked the waitress where people camped around here, and she said I could camp by a (dry) creek a quarter of a mile back. There was even an outhouse there. She told me, “We have a family of bears that lives around here. Don’t worry, you’ll hear the dogs barking if they come around.” Very comforting.

There was a prairie dog town there too. Two of the young ones were having a wrestling match. I hung my food in a tree, set up my tent, wrote in my journal, and studied my map.

Robert, a cyclist from Germany, joined me. He had ridden to Jasper, AB from Vancouver, BC and up the Alaska Highway to here. He was about 20 years old and was hauling an amazing amount of gear. For example, a big camera with four lenses. Oh to be 18 again.

The next morning I got up before Robert and headed for Carmacks. He must have started a half hour after I did because he caught up with me at lunch time. I rode with him for a while, but I couldn’t keep up for long. The map shows where Carmacks fits in the ride.

Later, I met a cyclist from Valdez, AK coming the other way. He advised me not to ride from Fairbanks to Anchorage because it is mobbed with RV’s and motorhomes. No problem. I was planning to take the train anyway. He also said the first three miles of Top-of-the-World Highway out of Dawson City were bad. They only had a base layer of 2″ gravel and they were steep. Oh well, I could walk the bike. (It turned out to be fine when I got there.)

It was an easy ride to Carmacks — downhill with a tailwind. It’s a pretty town of about 500 — mostly First Nations people. I could have easily gone on but I’d have ended up in the middle of nowhere. Here in the park/campground, I had a table, water and a good place to hoist my food to defeat any bears. The general store was well stocked, and I now have enough food to get to Dawson.

There was a guy sleeping on a table in the group shelter (just a roof and tables) when I got to the park. I figured he was drunk. Might have been. Turns out he was blind, and someone had dumped him off here. A fellow from North Dakota helped him get across the bridge because he wanted to get to the other side of the Yukon River.

Now that the drama was over, I could go use one of the tables and I’d be able to hoist my food up to a beam. I fixed some hot chocolate and a couple in a motorhome brought me a hot homemade bun to go with it. They had baked it over an open fire.

All the while I had been riding along beside the Yukon River there was a Klondike Centennial Canoe Race (1897/1997) going down the river. I watched one of the big canoes come in at the Carmacks checkpoint. The crews were required to rest for three hours here before going on. This team got passed by most of the other canoes during the night because they got too sleepy and had to stop.

I had a hamburger and a sundae at “Penny’s Place”, which was not much more than an open-air stand. They were good, but the hamburger was just a quarter-pounder. I talked with a Russian there who worked in Washington, DC. He went to Alaska the year before and liked it so much he came to the Yukon. He took a picture of me with my bike to remember our conversation.

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