ALASKA; Day 15; July 29, 2013
After a restaurant breakfast at the hotel we departed Watson Lake, Yukon Territory at 7:30. It was 57 degrees. We back-tracked westbound on the Alaska Highway about 15 miles to Hwy 37 south – an interesting road. As you can tell from the pictures there were no lane markings. The first 20 plus miles on this highway were through burned forest land. The road was every bit as rough as the Alaska Highway.
As we neared the mountains the road smoothed out some and after Dease Lake it was absolutely civilized – lane markings and all. We stopped along the highway for a snack lunch and a break. By pure chance we found out we were next to a gravel runway used by a tour service so we saw and airplane take off and a couple helicopters come and go.
Gas (petrol) was an adventure. We passed a sign that said no services would be available for 158 kilometers. We figured we’d have enough gas given that distance. After Larry obtained some information from some local native Canadians and Gary checked with his Garmin it became evident that the 158 kilometers was to Stewart, BC, which was on 37A, a dead-end highway off of 37. We did some backtracking (twice) before figuring this all out. We figured we’d run out of fuel unless we went a long distance out of our way to Stewart. We checked around at Miziadin Junction (where 37 and 37A split) and found a construction operation on the corner. There had once been fuel available here commercially. We found a pump that, if we jumped through the right hoops, would provide us fuel. Carl was able to read and interpret the instruction. So we go fuel and continued southbound.
At Hwy 16 we rode east, into the rain, to New Hazelton, BC. Along the way we saw a large female moose close to the road. We spent the night at the 28 Inn motel. As luck would have it, the electricity was out so there was no blogging.
The day started out beautiful and ended in rain. The temperatures ranged from 52 to the low 80’s. We rode 535 miles (511 according to Garmin).
For more pictures from today click on the following link: https://plus.google.com/photos/104542123131082631220/albums/5906607850604112929?authkey=CNWk4Zmv8t-REw
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