Watson Lake, YT to Fort Nelson, BC
It has been raining off and on most of the time and it was still drizzling when I left Watson Lake but it has been warm, so that helps.
Not long after leaving Watson Lake, the rain stopped and the sun came out and I actually had a tailwind...a real, honest to goodness tailwind, my first of the whole trip. It was a nice change and made climbing the hills a little easier.
The section of road I’m traveling, between Watson Lake and Fort Nelson, has more hills than any other section of the Alaska Highway. I have a nice little old lady to thank for this information that I wish I did not know.
I stopped in Contact Creek, which is nothing more than a tiny little gas station with a home on the property where the owners live. They have lived here and run this gas station for 31 years and the only thing keeping them in business are their repeat customers.
They are only 43 miles from Watson Lake but they deliberately keep their gas prices lower than Watson Lake to try to keep from shutting down and I have finally learned a little bit about the Canadian economic situation many of these people are faced with.
Generators are the only reason the people and businesses outside of major towns have electricity and I’m told they cost anywhere between $4,000-$5,000 per month to keep them running. Many businesses don’t generate enough revenue to afford that cost and that’s the reason the majority of these businesses are closed. The Alaska Highway was once a popular tourist highway but the majority of today’s tourists typically don’t drive anywhere. Remote businesses along the Alaska Highway now rely on truckers, and the occasional tourist, for their business.
After leaving Watson Lake I crossed into British Columbia. The trees in British Columbia look exactly the same as the trees in the Yukon.
I have reached a few threshold points on this trip and if you’ve been reading closely, you can figure out where they are. One of them was when I climbed the Continental Divide in the middle of the night while it was raining and was so tired coming down the other side I started falling asleep. At that point, I didn’t care if someone threatened to have me arrested for trespassing, I was pitching my tent wherever I wanted and going to sleep.
Another one was up on the Dalton when I camped near a grizzly. I didn’t know about him or I would have stopped cycling much earlier than I did. By the time I found out about him from a passing motorist, I had already cycled too far for the day and I was too tired to care about the bear
The threshold I reached at the hot springs was after cycling more miles than is even fun on a seat I can hardly stand to sit on anymore. I had been looking forward to the hot springs since everyone has told me they were not to be missed and they were without a doubt the highlight of this entire last section.
Despite signs indicating only swimsuit attire was allowed, I went in with nothing but a t-shirt and cycling shorts. No sign, no matter how stern it was meant to sound, was going to keep me out of the hot springs. I was the only person wearing non-swimsuit attire but I didn’t care and nobody said anything to me but if they had, I was prepared to pretend I didn’t speak english and pull out a selection of phrases I know in other languages...just to be on the safe side. I can order breakfast in Farsi, use a wrestling expression in French and say something not very nice but extremely funny in Polish. And I know the words to Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer in Spanish…all very helpful stuff.
I finally saw a herd of bison. They hang out on the side of the road and there isn’t much that will motivate a bison to move. It seemed as if they could have cared less that a lot of people had stopped to take photos of them so I have some great shots of them. I also saw two caribou but they were moving considerably faster than the bison so the photos are not as clear.
I have met a lot of touring cyclists on this trip and almost without exception they were self-supported, however, I ran into a guy in Watson Lake who is cycling from Seattle to Anchorage who was lucky enough to have his wife driving SAG (Support & Gear) for him. As we talked about our respective tours, he seemed as fascinated with my self-supported style as I was with his SAG-style and I’ve spent the last several days daydreaming about a SAG tour.
Did I mention I’ve been climbing hills? On the downhill sections (and there are a lot of them since it seems I spend most of the day climbing) I have to shift out of the saddle and onto one of the pedals to give myself a little break. Every time I shift out of the seat, I verbalize my discomfort. This seat is not going to make the cut for the next leg of this adventure.
Besides changing out the seat, I’m going to change the handlebars. The butterfly bars give a lot of hand-hold choices but don’t offer the option to lean on them on the downhill sections the way I would with aero bars. I had aero bars last year and, while I didn’t use them as often as I had envisioned, not having them when I need them is a huge inconvenience. Straight bars are too restrictive, so that leaves the drop-down style. The slight dilemma here is that I have a Rohloff shifter that doesn’t work well with the drop-down style, a dilemma I hope I can resolve. Or maybe I’ll design a new handlebar that suits me and the entire world will discover it’s the best touring handlebar option in the world.
Fort Nelson seems a logical place to stop as I need a few extra days to get some things done in Salt Lake City before I fly back to work and quite honestly, I don’t want to have to cycle 75+ miles each day to make my goal of Dawson Creek. It’s just not comfortable or fun, so this is a good time for everyone who is following along to hit the PAUSE button...I’ll be back in November to pick up where I left off in Fort Nelson.
