The Great California & Yukon Gold Rush of '17

What can I say. 130 miles of dirt ranging from packed mud to loose gravel. Not a lot of time to look at the views as we had to concentrate. Great to have done it though. Ending up in Talkeetna, an unfathomable tourist destination (there doesn't appear to be any reason to come here) with limited accommodation. So we rented this log cabin in the woods. Hansel and Gretel   would have felt at home.

We thought the day from Tok was going to be a transit day. Just do the miles and get there safely. Then "Harley Guy" in the hotel said. "Ya don't wanna go south from here man. The road's s**. Go north instead". So we did. Good decision. Not only did the road north go through Delta Junction, the end of the 1942 Alaska Highway (see above) but it also went through some fantastic scenery with views of Mount Hayes (see below). As a bonus we saw two moose by the road.  By the end of the day we were on the Denali Highway. 133 miles of unpaved roads connecting the Richardson and Parks Highways. Our stop for the night was Tangle River Lodge. A rustic hunting lodge by picturesque lakes and with a magnificent view. The sort of place where customers wear handguns to order apple pie, the walls are covered with hunting trophies and there is no internet. But there is beer, beavers swimming in the lake, Violet the landlady to look after us and our new friend...

The road into Dawson City from the south is the only tarmaced way in. The road out to the West and into Alaska is gravel. This is the Top Of The World Highway.  To reach the start you take a ferry across the Yukon River and then climb up to the top of the hills. The road winds along the ridge line through forest to the Canadian / US border at Poker Creek. Then a fantastic stretch of perfect tarmac for 20 miles before hitting roadworks into the town of Chicken (population 2) and then "sketchy pavement" until you reach the Alaska Highway again in Tok. So why the MotoGP quality stretch? It is the only part that is high enough for the ground to be permanently frozen. The absence of thaw/freeze means the road doesn't buckle and break up, making it worth building. The road works are going to put in a foundation with a foam layer so that it doesn't thaw in the summer allowing a better quality road through Chicken. Seems like every trip I do, I learn more a...

Dawson City was the heart of the Yukon Gold Rush. The first gold was found by three Prospectors in Bonanza Creek among the White Gravel of a tributary of the Yukon River. When news reached the "outside" men and women rushed to the area and within a year all of the streams around were staked into 500 ft claims.  Miners spent the winters digging shafts to reach the bed rock. Then excavating chambers to bring the gold bearing gravels to the surface. To do this they had to melt the permafrost with open fires, denuding the hillsides of timber. Once the thaw arrived and running water was available, it was used to wash the gravel to find the gold. Only then did they know if their claim contained "colour" or whether their winter had been wasted. After only three years all of the easily extracted gold was gone. Large scale miners bought up the small claims and used industrial methods; steam to unfreeze the ground and powered dredges to process the dirt. These have...

Chatting to a fellow motorcyclist in the Airforce Lodge (our hotel) a couple of nights ago, we discovered that there is a ferry from Skagway to Haines. We had planned to ride down to Skagway and back to see the route the Klondike Prospectors used to get to the goldfields. By using the ferry we could ride to Skagway over the White Pass, cross to Haines and ride back over the other Prospector route, the Chilkoot Pass, and so back to Whitehorse for the start of our own ride to the goldfields of the Yukon. For those of you unfamiliar with the political geography of this part of North America; Skagway and Haines are in Alaska (part of USA) but are not connected to the rest of the state by land except via Canada. A ferry system, called the Alaska Marine Highway ties all the disparate Alaskan ports together and that's what we will be using. So we started in Yukon (a Canadian Province), crossed the provincial border into British Columbia for 5 miles, then over the White Pass and th...

After a wet day yesterday the sun shone as we left Fort Nelson. The Highway here is wide and fast with the woods cut well back leaving a 20m wide strip of grass and scrub. Looking ahead you can see the road slicing through the forests for miles and miles as it snakes up the hills and then down to wide rivers crossed by steel girder bridges.   It wasn't long before we found our first wildlife. A black bear ambling through the grass. The first of four for the day.  Shortly afterwards a Caribou, then a Moose. As we climbed into the higher mountains: Big Horn Sheep and Mountain Goats. The Highway is being repaired  constantly . Stopping at the control point for a 20km resurfacing project we got chatting to one of the workers. They all live in the local towns and come out to work for the week before traveling home. It must be a big local employer. When you add in the service sector for travellers (restaurants, gas stations, bars etc.) and compare the total to...