Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Day 5 Whitehorse YT to Tok, AK


Well loaded up our bikes this morning and headed out in the rain. The traffic leaving Whitehorse was heavy and because of the rain it was a little slower than normal. We line up behind 3 or 4 cars and right after we reached the top of a small hill all I saw was brake lights and Big Dave heading left around a car. I went right and watch as a mounted wheel when shouting across the road and through the grass and weeds to my right. My first thought was what kind of accident did we have in front of us. Then when we continue to travel I was looking for a vehicle with on three wheels and sparks flying from under it, but no I didn't see anything no car or truck pulling over just normal traffic moving. I have no idea where the wheel came from and when I asked Dave he didn't know it was a wheel.
We continued on our way and in about a half hour I realized that I had made a poor choice of gloves and if I had water proofed them I did a poor job. Having heated grips helped keep me on the road another hour but then I had to stop at a rest area for a nature break and change gloves, make sure my jacket was drawn up properly. I put on my heated gloves and they two lasted about an hour before they were soaked to through, but the gloves were heated so I was at least comfortable. We drove on until we reached Destruction Bay for fuel and rain continued. Besides having to deal with the rain the temp was hovering around 46, the wind was blowing 15 to 25 miles and hour and the road had several areas of gravel. About a half hour out of Destruction Bay the weather lifted and the temp climbed 55 degrees. This was only short lived and it started raining again. Destruction Bay was the end of the good road. We started running into longer patches of gravel the road was in terrible shape due to damage from frost heave's. The worst patches on the road were the troughs left that by the cracks. Finally the rain let up and the skies started to clear. We reached our stopping spot for night at Beaver Creek. Our room was ready so we went to Buckshot Betty for lunch. Unfortunately Betty wasn't there but the bread she had baked was. Big Dave had a Large Club made with 3/4 thick homemade bread and I had a hamburger on a homemade bun. It was well worth the stop. After our meal we head back to the motel and checked in it was around 4:00pm. Our room was in old barracks and after one look at the room we opted to ride to Tok which was only 110 miles. Beaver Creek is about 20 miles from the US/Canadian Border but the border stations are about 15 miles apart. The wait at the border was about 35 minutes and then there was a long section of gravel road that we had a pilot truck for. The weather stayed good and we reached Took around 7:00pm found a place to rest and spit a couple of beers.
Day 5 turned out to be the worst yet. We had 5 hours of rain and terrible roadsand I am glad it is over with.
Total mileage for today was 377 miles in 9 hours.

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