Sunburn at 9:00pm?

Mile 4759. “C” Lazy Moose RV Park 65 miles SE of Fairbanks, AK. Sunrise 3:25am, sunset 12:24am.

Don’t be fooled by the sunrise, sunset times. The sun never really sets here. The photo above was taken at 9:00pm, at Midnight Dome (Dawson City) where the summer solstice has been celebrated since 1899. I wonder, can you get a sunburn at 9:00pm?

Mark made a cardboard window shade for his side of the bed out of a Coors 15-pack box. Even with all the shades drawn the light is more like napping in the afternoon than sleeping in the middle of the night. Mark grumbles about it, but he falls asleep quickly, faster than he realizes. For someone like me who’s an occasional insomniac, fitful sleeper, and night person, it’s tough. Sleep medications help, as does reading in bed, but sometimes even that gets boring. Limited cell reception and wifi reduces online activities. You can only take so many photos of trees. The unmounted TV we carry with us has yet to be used because it’s a pain to set up and take down every day and we’re not always under enough power to run it and only have the box set of Six Feet Under to watch. If we don’t watch it together one person is always behind in the series. Perhaps I’ve carried the simple life strategy too far. Those art supplies I left at home for fear of having too many entertainment options would be really nice right now.

I don’t know if the halfway point of this grand adventure is 4500 miles, arriving in Fairbanks or Anchorage, or the number of days we’ve been on the road, but I find myself at what seems like the halfway point feeling homesick. I suspect this is not uncommon for this type of trip. Five weeks is a long time to be away from home. I’ve traveled most of my life, but never for longer than 3 weeks at a time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s beautiful here and an adventure of a lifetime. I’m glad to be here, but I miss my friends and family and my life at home and the comforts of home. Yesterday’s earthquakes make it even harder to be away. I feel I should be there to weather the quakes with everyone else. Okay. I’m walking away from this pity party now.

Yesterday was another long day of driving – another push through day. I left a lovely campground in Chicken, AK thinking we’d have a short drive to Tok and here we are 150 miles further, almost in Fairbanks.

I’m not sure what happened to leisurely driving days. But I understand the need – this time a GMC dealer because while hooking up the trailer in Dawson City we discovered the power cable between the truck and trailer had all but severed.

Amongst other things the cable runs the trailer taillights. Despite what Mark said on Facebook the problem was never completely fixed. He wired everything back together, but the right taillight hasn’t worked since. After a process of elimination Mark determined it was a problem with the truck. It’s not the end of the world, but still, it’s best to be fully functional pulling a trailer. We’re not quite sure what happened to the cable. Perhaps one of the grizzlies reported in the area got to it. Mark’s in Fairbanks with the truck right now. With any luck it’ll be repaired by the end of today, and the truck will have an oil change and its tires rotated.

Where have we been. I lose track after awhile. The Klondike Highway (between Whitehorse and Dawson City) turned into the Top of the World Highway (between Dawson City and Chicken, AK), which turned into the Taylor Highway (Chicken to Tok), which is now the scenic Richardson Highway in AK and the highway we will be on for awhile. Wow.

Dawson City used to be the capital of the Yukon. Canada made it a National Historic site after moving the capital to Whitehorse, so it has a different feel than the other places we’ve visited. It shines. There are a few abandoned buildings in the historic downtown area and in surrounding residences, but for the most part everything is well maintained and restored to the Gold Rush era.

Facades are in better shape than buildings at home. This is what I mean by shiny. How can a building look this nice after having survived a harsh Yukon winter. Do they repaint everything at the first sign of Spring?

Rabbit Creek, the site of the big gold discovery that launched gold fever in the area, is only a few miles from town and now called Bonanza Creek. Here we toured a Dredge. Mining dredges were used at the turn-of-the-century to 1950s. They were landlocked floating machines, digging ponds that allowed them to float across the areas to be mined. It used a continuous line of buckets to scrape the bottom and edge of the pond. The buckets carried the mud and rock to a screening area, where the heavier metal particles were separated from the rest of the material.

After the metal was captured, the waste rock – “tailings” – would be deposited out the back. Piles of tailings line the Alaska Highway approaching Dawson City and all down Bonanza Creek road.

Plant life has grown around and from within the piles making them blend into the landscape. But at the time I imagine the landscape looked pretty damaged. There was another much smaller dredge at the  campground we stayed at in Chicken and what I loved about both was the many active Swallow nests tucked into all the crevices.

Though dredges are no longer used, there are still active claims in this area that are being mined and many of the campgrounds in the area offer gold mining and panning as a side activity.

A friend commented on the research I was doing for the blog. I should share that there is a bible that accompanies the Alaska Highway and surrounding highways. It’s called The Milepost. It literally tells you mile by mile what to expect regarding road conditions, wildlife, gas and rest stops, camping and other lodging options, history of the towns, etc. The book is open at all times. And even though ours is from 2016 (the year Mark started planning), it’s still fairly accurate. So I’ve not had to wander too far for information.

I mentioned early on that we would encounter a poor section of road and “Chicken Dust”. Well this is the Top of the World Highway, which we picked up after crossing the Yukon on the ferry. We followed all the suggestions and covered our ceiling and stove vents, wired what cabinets we could shut, put breakable items under the bed, and covered the bed. The trailer, though filthy on the outside from such fine dust, came through splendidly. The truck bed, especially on the inside of the tailgate, is another story. I think Mark will be cleaning that out for weeks.

This highway isn’t even open in the winter time, the weather is so bad. And because this road is built over permafrost it’s full of potholes (most, but not all, filled in), dips, and ripples. The road is narrow with no or soft shoulders and you pray not to meet a land yacht coming from the other direction. Some of the road is paved and some not, though neither seems to make a difference on the condition. This is what we’ve been driving on the past two days.

The road is worse than Mark expected, but he’s been a trooper navigating us safely and in good spirits. Ironically, the best road ever (even compared to back home), is the 11-mile stretch after crossing the isolated border into the states. The customs job here is apparently a summertime only position much coveted by immigration officials, a nice change of pace from our southern borders.

We had no animal sighting yesterday, our first animal-free day in quite some time. But the day before, a Caribou crossed the road in front of us.