Down the Alaska Highway

Written Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Normally you start driving the Alaska Highway at Mile 0 in Dawson Creek and you head north. Because I’d come up to the Yukon by the Cassiar Highway, my trip took me down the highway from Haines Junction in the opposite direction.

Haines Junction is at Kilometre 1,632 by today’s count, or at historic Mile 1,016.

When the Alaska Highway was built in 1942 during World War II, the U.S. Army engineers and surveyors were in a rush to get it completed in order to supply Alaska and prevent a Japanese invasion. Sometimes the bulldozers were nipping at their ankles as they surveyed, so the routes chosen weren’t always the best or most direct.

Over the years, since Canada took over the highway after the war in 1946, it has been continually upgraded and in places the route has been shortened. So today’s measurement in kilometres isn’t an exact conversion of the original mileage markers. Still, the old mileage designations persist to identify places.

The community of Wonowon, for example, was built at the original Mile 101. It was never renamed to Kilometre 160.

My first trip up and down the Alaska Highway was hitchhiking as a teenager in 1971. In those days most of the highway beyond Fort St. John was gravel. When it was dry, there was constant thick dust from any vehicles ahead. When it rained for several days at a time, as it did when I travelled it, the highway was covered in puddles, holes and mud at the edges.

These days it’s mostly a good two-lane highway, and many parts have narrow shoulders. Because of the shifting frost, there are frequent bumps, and many parts are under repair, sometimes with large areas scraped down to the gravel, recreating the feeling of the old days.

In the Yukon, there were often orange flags placed beside bad spots, but you saw these flags all the time and never knew if it was just a minor bump or a big one that would scrape the undercarriage of your car. I had a couple scrapes when I didn’t take the flags seriously enough.

I left the lodge at Haines Junction early in the morning Tuesday, planning to get a good start on the day and cover a lot of ground. Driving in the early morning, you also tend to see a lot more animals by the road.

Not far out of Haines Junction, I spotted a young grizzly bear eating vegetation on the other side of the highway. I stopped and pulled over, remaining in my car of course, and moving slowly. It saw me, but kept on eating and didn’t seem perturbed as I shot several photos with a long lens. Only when some tourists in an RV pulled up a few feet away from it and called to it did it scramble off into the bush.

I always tried to keep a respectful distance from any wildlife and never to approach them except along the road in my vehicle. I also moved slowly and stayed quiet, just observing from my vehicle with the long lens.

Not so for all tourists. I actually saw a whole group of vehicles stopped next to a full-grown grizzly that was eating by the highway. One woman was out of her car taking photos of it with her iPad. Aside from the silliness of taking photos with an iPad, what was this woman thinking??? If that grizzly suddenly felt threatened and charged her, she could have been in a life-threatening situation.

I’d driven portions of the Alaska Highway on my trip from the top of the Cassiar Highway to Haines Junction on the way up, but after I passed the top of the Cassiar again on the return, I was covering all new ground. The next stop was Watson Lake.

Watson Lake is just under 1,500 people, but that still makes it one of the largest communities on the Yukon portion of the Alaska Highway after Whitehorse, with just under 30,000, which is where more than three quarters of the people in the territory live.

Watson Lake’s claim to fame is the Sign Post Forest. This started in 1942 when a homesick GI working on the highway posted a mileage sign to his home in Danville, IL, giving its distance as 2,835 miles. Soon more signs were added, and they continue to be put up on posts every day so that now there are more than 100,000 city signs, distance signs, license plates, and personal message signs. It truly is a forest of them, and more expansive than I expected.

There are signs from all over the world. I looked for obscure places I’ve lived and visited, but was surprised by what I saw and didn’t see. Of course I may have missed some places in the forest, but I never saw Osoyoos, or larger cities where I’ve lived or visited such as Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal or Edmonton. I did, however, see a lot of suburbs of those big cities as well as smaller communities.

From my Ottawa days, I spotted Almonte, Ontario, named for Mexican General Juan Almonte, but pronounced AL-mont.

Even more surprising, I spotted the Ottawa Valley village of Ompah, that few would know, because it’s on a back road and you miss it if you blink. (I used to annoy Victoria by calling it Oom-pah-pah).

The Alaska Highway certainly has many beautiful parts with lakes, rivers and snowcapped mountains. But it also has many parts of nondescript boreal forest with mile after mile of spruce and aspen trees lining the highway.

It got particularly beautiful though as the highway crossed into B.C. and followed the Liard River, then entered the Northern Rocky Mountains. I also had more black bear sightings, and even some wood bison, that have been reintroduced to the area after they were previously extirpated. Unfortunately I couldn’t stop when I passed a whole group of wood bison with their small youngsters because it was in the middle of a construction zone.

Tuesday had the best weather of my trip so far with only a few brief periods of rain. So I decided to camp at Muncho Lake Provincial Park in the Northern Rockies. The site beside the lake was spectacular. I got up at 4 a.m. to catch the early morning light, get a good start on the day and see more animals along the roadside.

Bison, bears, moose, deer, a porcupine and dall sheep were among the animals I spotted Wednesday morning.

There were several major thunderstorms with the sky opening up and with visibility and road conditions so bad that I had to pull off and wait for it to clear up. At last, in soaking rain, I arrived at Dawson Creek and Mile 0 of the Alaska Highway.