North from Jasper

July 12, 2023

July 12 Day 12

When you head north from Jasper on Hwy 40, you come down from the mountains, literally and figurately. You leave behind the rugged snowy peaks and rapidly flowing rivers and fall into rolling green hills, alternating between heavy forest and open grassland. The road is bordered by purple fireweed and white Queen Anne's Lace. There are large fields of bright yellow canola, bigger and brighter than we saw in North Dakota. This is logging country, and logging trucks are common on the road. There are several huge piles of hewn logs along the way, waiting for Weyerhauser to turn them into lumber for shipment around the world. Due to the open grassland and vibrant forest understory following logging or fires, this is also moose and caribou country. We drove 200 miles through this stuff yesterday and saw many signs warning us of moose and caribou on the road. We didn't see either. As expected, I mentioned that fact once or twice (or 300 times) until Peach was tired of it. Actually, well past the time Peach was tired of it.

As we approached Grande Prairie the smoke from the wildfires was hanging heavy and pungent. Any hope of recharging our battery with our rooftop solar panel was lost. The smoke continued all the way to our destination at Charlie Lake, another hundred miles away. Between Grande Praire and Charlie Lake, you come upon historic Dawson Creek, British Columbia. This is the start of the Alaska Highway. It was here in March of 1942, that a massive military operation was undertaken to build a road from Dawson Creek to Fairbanks. Eleven thousand soldiers and sixteen thousand civilians endured seven days a week of hard labor, poor living conditions, mosquitos, black flies, and cold weather surveying, blasting, cutting, plowing and shoveling their way through 2500 miles of dense wilderness. They struggled to build a rough gravel road with many wooden bridges to allow supplies and troops to connect from the U.S. mainland to Alaska on what was then called the ALCAN (Alaska Canada) Highway. Their efforts were ramped up even more in June when the Japanese attacked Attu Island in the Alaskan Aleutians. This amazing effort: 2500 miles of new road was completed in nine months! We can't even get our neighborhood street repaved in that amount of time! Most of the original ALCAN Highway is gone, having been straightened, leveled, widened, and paved, but several small remnant sections remain along the way with many historical markers.

There is an iconic sign at the visitor center in Dawson Creek recognizing the start of the Alaskan Highway with a nearby cairn in the middle of the road marking milepost "zero." It's a classic photo op for those travelling to Alaska, signifying that the journey is finally getting real. We were no different, and decided to stop just like everyone else. But first, since we were about to head into far less traveled roads, we stopped for essential supplies; gas, groceries, and beer. You can't buy beer in grocery stores here, only in liquor stores. There was a liquor store conveniently located a couple of blocks from the ALCAN sign. I bought some local BC beer and decided to open the camper to check the battery charge and the fridge. I locked the camper door and drove the two blocks around a roundabout and a hard right turn into the visitor center. As I pulled up another car drove up beside us and the woman inside called out, "Your camper stairs are dragging!" Crap! When I closed the camper door I somehow forgot to lift up the metal stairs into the doorway before closing the door. I had dragged them on the ground from the liquor store to the visitor center! I got out of the truck, and before I got to the back of the camper, another person who was taking their picture with the sign called out to say my stairs were down. The stairs apparently made a lot of noise bouncing and dragging behind the camper. Maybe I was subconsciously punishing them for making so much noise a couple of days before at 4:30 in the morning when I dropped my metal thermos lid onto them while Peach was sleeping. Fortunately, the stairs were only scratched up, not broken. Thank God I didn't do that before heading out on the highway! It was just a minor embarrassment, especially when after we took our picture and were leaving, somebody else from the crowd called out and said, "Have a nice trip, and remember to put your stairs up!"