Yukon Ho!

Epilogue

So. This is the end.
Bones broken: 0
Innards eaten by wild animals: 0
Spokes busted: 2
Items lost: 2 towels
Number of times the gas can came close to being lost: 2
For those of you who care to come back even though the riveting storytelling has ended, we’ll soon post the pictures from Whitehorse to Dawson and back down to Sayward. For those of you who can’t be bothered, come visit us and we’ll show you the prints.
Thanks for reading!
Amy & Sean

August 4 – August 6: Prince Rupert to Sayward

We biked out to the ferry terminal the next day with an older couple named Doug and Gayle -teachers from Nelson, BC, who were cycling around the province on a Tandem. We ferried over to the tiny island airport, waited around in the super-70’s terminal, didn’t get searched at all, and boarded the plane potentially carrying all sorts of weapons and poison for all the airport security knew. I guess -perhaps taking a cue from Dawson City’s lax building maintenance laws?- charters are exempt from ordinary security measures in BC.
We landed in Port Hardy mid-afternoon and biked 40km to Port McNeill. Since the Nelson-ers were going the same way, we stuck together for the ride and shared a dinner of Subway and Corona by the waterfront before riding up to our favorite campsite -the Girl Guide lodge. We built a small fire, had some tea and popcorn and went to bed.
The next morning we had breakfast at Bo-Banee’s where I think we blew Doug and Gayle’s minds a little. They were huge gearheads, and firm believers that you need the appropriate tools and rules to tour. They couldn’t believe we didn’t wear bike shorts with chamois’, tried to convince us to buy a stainless steel platform with adjustable legs for our stove (so you can set it up on any surface!), woke up early every day, dressed in head-to-toe spandex, and ate light breakfasts of fat-free lattes and simple breakfast bagels. Sean and I woke up later than them, packed in ten minutes, rolled into the restaurant -minutes behind them- wearing shorts and hoodies, and each ordered The Breakfast Classic: two eggs, sausages, homefries, and toast smeared with peanut butter and (for me anyway) maple syrup. With coffee. And refills. They laughed that so much food would slow us waaaay down and I think it may have cracked the foundation of their belief structure when we passed them 20 minutes later.
We spent the night at a rest area on the south side of Woss (worst town name ever). Sean and I swam in the frigid water of Nimpkish Lake, then we sat around and shared some beer, brie and crackers. When it came time for dinner, there was an outback food-off: each couple cooked their favorite side-of-the-road meal. Doug and Gayle made quinoa with green onions and salmon, and sure, that got some style points, especially since they served it in collapsible bowls avec stainless steel utensils, but I don’t think anyone’s going to argue with the taste combination Burak and Kenny created -falafals and stovetop stuffing mixed with minute rice and..? Salt. Boo-ya.
It was an early night to bed for all of us since the day had been pretty hot and we were sunburned. We said our good-bye’s before heading into our respective tents because Doug and Gayle were leaving early the next morning in order to make the 140km to Campbell River. I heard them up and packing at 6am so when we woke at 8am and rolled out 25 minutes later I was sure they were long gone.
That day was only a 60km day, the last 10 of which we knew would be downhill (remember that deadly hill we climbed on our first day out of Sayward? Time to reign supreme). After three hours we ran into Doug and Gayle again -pulled over and talking to a Swiss couple on a tandem who were heading from Victoria up to Alaska. The Swiss assured us we were about to hit our downhill and indeed we did -the four of us sailed into Sayward whooping and waving. Doug and Gayle turned right and continued down the North Island Highway. Sean and I pulled into the parking lot of The Cedar Tree Restaurant and bought ourselves lunch, then rode our last 4km back to Lyle and Lorraine’s farm where the van was waiting.
The first order of business was to crank the stereo and play all the music we’d missed during the ride. Second was to try and figure out how mice had gotten into the van -that’s right. Little mouse poo’s were all over everything and what’s more -I have reason to believe that my Margaret Laurence House coffee mug was the hospital that saw a litter of mice into the world.
Anywhooooo we’re in Victoria now. We spent two frustrating weeks looking for an apartment, which is harder than finding a job here, came 12 hours from abandoning the island for Vancouver, and finally got a cal from our number one choice. On September first we’re moving into the “basement” (none of the basements here are more than half-sunk) of a nice house on Richmond Ave. The walls are all awesome 70’s wood panelling. The place has an old-school fireplace we’re allowed to use, and a wicked 1950’s fridge -in style, not condition.

July 30 – August 4: Ketchikan to Prince Rupert

The ferry docked in Ketchikan at 330am the next night and Sean and I rode off into the mist and the rain in search of a good place to camp. Luck was finally with us as we rode right past a high school that had covered, outdoor, end-to-end basketball courts. The inverted wooden “V” of roof came right down to the ground around the courts, sheltering the inside from both rain and view. We didn’t even set our tent up -just threw the mats on the concrete and laid our sleeping bags on top of them.
In the morning it was sunny, so we packed up and rode downtown which was rammed with people. Ketchikan is a huge port for the Alaskan cruises. We talked to a teenage crossing guard who told us Thursdays are the worst -on Thursdays, the massive, white luxury liners unleash 10, 000 tourists on the town.
We asked about breakfast at the tourist info centre and they told us the Pioneer Diner was the cheapest place to go. The Pioneer was a little off the main street, away from all the tacky gold stores, so it was full of smoking locals (I know -weird) scarfing greasy breakfasts. We slid into a red vinyl booth and scanned the menu. I’m no scientist, but I’ll hazard a guess as to why America has an obesity problem: all their omelettes contain four eggs, and the standard breakfast comes with three eggs on top of buttered toast, bacon and hash browns. If you want an egg less, you have to pay extra. Sean and I also realized that the price of veggies in Alaska is through the roof, while chocolate bars and candy are dirt cheap. You do the math America.
While we were waiting for our food, a tall guy with a huge grin and brown rubber boots came over and  asked if we were the bikers cause he’d seen bikes out front and no one else in the place looked like they could’ve been riding them.
His name was Rhett, he was into biking, and within five minutes he was sitting with us, chatting while he waited for his daughter, Colleen, who was visiting from Texas. By the time she showed up the restaurant was at capacity and there was nowhere for them to sit so we invited them to eat with us. Rhett was friendly and outgoing, and Colleen was this super-smart, polite 12-year-old so they were a pleasure to eat with. By the end of the meal Rhett wanted to know where we were staying and offered us his condo when we said we were considering the basketball court again. He had a condo right behind the diner that Colleen and her friends had stayed in the last couple days but they were all flying home to Texas at 4pm. He didn’t live there anymore because he was staying in a house he’d recently bought and was fixing up so the condo was just sitting there. We jumped on the offer and paid for their breakfast as a thank-you. After that the four of us walked up to the condo, Rhett gave us his keys, then showed us to the building’s garage where we locked up our gear and bikes.
He went off to hang out with his daughter and we went to explore the village. Ketchikan is funny because the whole place seems to live to service the ferries. There’s an awesome little arts community there, but other than that -the place is full of gift, gold and pawn shops and one lumberjack show that takes place in the middle of town a couple times a day (log-rolling, log-climbing, log-chopping). When the ferries dock the stores open up. When the ferries pull out the stores shut down. The store hours depend on the ferry hours. It’s weird but kind of neat because what’s the point to being at work when there’s no work? Exactly. The houses in Ketchikan are built right into the sides of the mountains, and any that aren’t are built on stilts, boardwalks and gangplanks along the water.
So we wandered and toured and checked out some shops, then called BC Ferries again. This time they told us they had a deal going with a charter airline and we could get a flight to Port Hardy for the cost of a ferry ticket so, problem solved, we booked and went back to investigate the condo. It was quite nice, had a sweet view of the forest and creek, and there was unlimited free internet that Rhett had insisted we use. We geeked out for a few hours to make up the serious internet time we missed out on all summer. After that we watched “The Money Pit” and passed out.
We spent most of the next day doing the same thing we’d done the day before and just killing time until we had to check in with the ferry docks at 9pm. We had dinner at a place called the New York Hotel Diner, which had a comfortably low-brow and laid-back staff even thought it was stylishly decorated and only served from a tapas menu. Tapas is frou-frou for “appetizer” so we had to order five or six of them…plus two bottles of wine (that kind of happened by accident). We were a little tipsy by 845 (well maybe just me) but we packed up all our things and rode down to the ferry where we made our boat even though there was absolutely no announcement for it and as far as any terminal staff were concerned, the boat wasn’t even there yet.
We boarded and ended up on the empty diner level where a cashier struck up a conversation with us and, with very minimal prodding, opened the bar “but just for us guys.” She was very nice and fun to talk to so the three of us spent about an hour in the dark, cozy bar together.
After that we went to bed.
When we woke up at 6am to disembark I wasn’t feeling so hot. We moved through customs pretty quickly because the guard who inspected us was a biker himself and in awe of our sweet rides. We biked all over Prince Rupert looking for the Black Rooster Inn. Again, the plan had been to camp but I was feeling like crap so I sprung for a private room at a hostel. The Black Rooster was sooooooo much better than the Pioneer Hostel where we stayed the first time we were in P.R. First off the staff were pleasant and smiley and secondly, they didn’t give us any attitude or grief. They had a little cafe that made delicious Nutella/strawberry crepes, and the rooms were awesome. The private room we had there was $50 -same as any other hostel’s private room- but there were two beds, extra pillows, shampoo, soap and conditioner, towels, an alarm clock and a TV with cable, including (BA BA BA!) The Movie Network. We rode around town a bit but were back at the hostel by mid-afternoon to spend the rest of the day and night watching movies. 

July 26 – July 30: Whitehorse to Skagway

The massive candy-cane striped DCMF tent and all it’s steel supports and stakes came from Whitehorse via two huge flatbed-hauling pick-up’s. Tytus, the guy in charge of the tents, drove one down, while the makeshift crew of six French travellers he’d assembled the day before coming to Dawson, drove the other. On the return trip however, their numbers were fewer. One Frenchman drove himself and a stranded festival-goer back in truck #1, while Sean, Tytus and I drove truck #2.
The trip might have gone without incident had we left Dawson a little earlier in the day. As it was, take-down finished at seven, was followed by pizza, and then everyone decided to head to The Pit for one last drink on DCMF’s volunteer dollars. The Pit is the seedy mainfloor bar of a ghastly pink hotel near The Midnight Sun. It’s rumoured the owners have to shovel dirt around in the basement every morning to keep the place from sinking completely into the ground. Word is the way they keep from having the place condemned is by staying open 365 days a year. Now I didn’t look this up in any lawbook but apparently in Dawson, if you operate year-round, you don’t have to submit to any sort of building inspections. Ever. Dangerous but fair…or…something.
By the time we’d had a drink it was 10pm and Whitehorse would have been five hours away in a nice, fast, small car. Both trucks had full tanks though and Tytus was sure he’d only run out of gas once in the three years he’d been tent guy so we were probably safe.
Probably.
There are only a handful of places that could possibly be open along the Klondike Highway during the day. At 3am, there’s nothing. 45 minutes from Whitehorse, truck #1 died. In the middle of the highway, in the middle of a hill.
We maneuvered it off the road, took most of the luggage out and piled into truck #2.
By the time we got to Whitehorse it was 5am. Sean and I pitched our tent in Tytus’ front yard and slept until 930, when he and Tytus climbed back into the truck and went off to fill a jerry can for the stranded truck #1.
When they got back at noon we all went for breakfast. Sean and I spent most of the rest of that rainy day in the tent, sleeping and wondering what we should do. Tytus lived in a huge, awesome house, but he lived there with his whole family and we felt kind of weird about camping out on their lawn. Eventually we biked through the rain to Tim Horton’s for some food and ended up calling Miranda -the only other female Bull Ganger- who’d given us her phone number and told us to call her if we needed a place to stay in Whitehorse.
She gave us directions and we biked up the awful, awful two-mile hill out of the city, to the incredible little cottage she and her roommate share up near the airport.
They have a third, fully finished bedroom in their basement and we stayed with them for two days while we waited for the rain to let up (Sidenote: Miranda and her roommate both work for the Yukon campus of the  National Outdoor Leadership School and I am very jealous. If I ever win the lottery or come across a few thousand dollars, I’m taking one of their intense month-long out-in-the-wilderness courses).
We spent the next three days biking to Skagway. The first day kind of sucked because we didn’t start till about 5pm, and I am no good if we start biking any later than 1pm.
The second day was short and awesome and we camped at a little day rest area on its own lake, with a beautiful view of its own mountain.
The third day was probably the worst biking of our lives but the best scenery we saw all summer. The last 60km of the highway from Whitehorse to Skagway is unbelievable. There were places where we  were surrounded by mountains on all sides -more peaks in that one spot than we saw on the whole trip. There were dozens of small turquoise lakes alongside the road, vast, cratered landscapes that looked like the surface of the Moon, creeks and rivers and I don’t even know how to explain it so that it sounds any different than the rest of the countryside but it was.
I wish I could have enjoyed it more thoroughly. We were pretty lucky with wind the whole way out, and only had a handful of really tough days. This last one though was nuts. The wind was consistently 30km/h, sometimes gusting even higher, directly in our faces no matter how many corners we turned. Where we usually did 40km in 1.5 – 2 hours, the first 40km of that last day to Skagway took five hours. This was doubly terrible because we were out of food. We’d had a lame breakfast, and packed no lunch because we figured we’d make 40km in a couple hours. At that point we’d hit 1200 metres -the White Pass Summit- followed by 20km of downhill that’d drop us to sea level, and Skagway.
A nice break at the halfway-ish point was The Yukon Suspension Bridge (even though it was surrounded by BC on all sides). Well half a nice break. There was a huge glass, wood and metal building on the roadside of the suspension bridge. It appeared to be empty except for the four employees sitting in a glassed-in cafe doing nothing. As we got closer to the price list we understood why they were the only ones there. Admission to the 500m bridge was $18 a person. That bought you a look at the very same river you would see for free a little farther up the highway. We opted to spend our $10 on coffee, cinnamon buns and oranges instead, and were enjoying our food on the cafe patio when one of the staff asked, timidly, if we had purchased our bridge passes yet. When we told her we weren’t planning on crossing the bridge she told us we weren’t allowed to be on the patio looking at the river if we didn’t have tickets.
“But we’re eating the food that we bought at the cafe on the cafe patio,” I pointed out. “Perhaps if you didn’t want common coffee-drinkers looking at the river, you should have put the cafe patio on the other side of the building.” Sean told her we were almost done and we’d be going soon. This scared her even more and she told us, quietly, that her boss would freak out if he saw us. We told her we’d move and continued eating. A second employee came out and told us -equally timidly- that we would have to move because the boss wouldn’t like it. “Well, send him out to talk to me if he has a problem then,” Sean told the kid. In a sudden moment of manly manliness he announced that he didn’t think that would be necessary. We waved him off, finished eating and then went to the parking lot to finish our coffee before all the staff wet themsleves with worry. While we stood in the lot we watched no less than three cars pull in, look at the admission sign, laugh, get back in their cars and drive away. I think this wins the Summer Stupid Award for the trip. Stupidest place we went, stupidest thing we saw, stupidest rules ever, stupidest idea for a business, and stupidest way to run it. Not to mention, stupidest name. Good luck Yukon Suspension Bridge. I suspect you will need it. Especially in BC, and especially after I start an “I Hate the Yukon Suspension Bridge” website.
Anyway, at 3pm, we defeated White Pass. At the top we took some pictures, pulled on pants and sweaters (it was freeeeeezing), and prepared for coast mode. Ahhhh but that cursed wind had other plans, like forcing us to pedal even on the downhill. Yes the wind was that insane, we had to try to drop 1200 metres dammit! It wasn’t so bad though. The highway hugs the edges of a whole lot of mountains and gives an excellent view of ravines, gorges and waterfalls so that was a plus to the slowed-down speed..
The border crossing was without incident, and Skagway was a lot like Dawson only colder, mistier, and rainy. We found a pizzeria and ordered some sort of focaccia appetizer, split a whole pizza, then went across the street to drink at The Red Onion. It was loud and full of obnoxious people so we biked around a bit and had fries and more drinks at some other bar I forget the name of.
After that we rode to the ferry terminal and waited for our ferry. While I read Rolling Stone’s riveting article about how Nick Lachey is dealing with he and Jessica’s break-up (poorly -he cries a lot in the company of supposedly hard-edged rock writers), Sean got on the phone and tried to book the final leg of our ferry journey. At the time we were booked from Skagway to Ketchikan, Alaska. After a couple days in Ketchikan we were to ferry to Prince Rupert. All that was left was to book the final segment of the trip -from Prince Rupert to Port Hardy.
Little did we know how quickly ferries fill up when the captains have sunk one of the biggest ships. Due to last year’s capsizing (I hear BC just came up out of nowhere!), and this year’s lack of hustling to buy a new boat, the ferries from the mainland to the island were full for the rest of the summer. This left us the following options:
1) Show up and wait for stand-by at 4am every morning until there was space. The cost of this was ferry ticket ($125) plus whatever it cost to live in P.R. until we got lucky.
2) Rent a car, drive to Vancouver, ferry to the island from there, bike up the island to the van, and drive back to Victoria. The cost of this was $1700 for the car, plus $8.50 each for the ferry.
3) Bus to Vancouver, repeat last two steps of previous option. The cost of this was only $400 but the bikes would only go as far as Prince George, where they would have to be boxed and shipped via the super-expensive Greyhound Express service.
4) Train to Prince George. Be stranded because the train doesn’t go anywhere from there. The cost was irrelevant because the service was useless (but thanks for the recommendation ViaRail!)   
We decided to forget about it until we got to Ketchikan and happily spent the night and entire next day watching little Alaskan fishing villages go by, eating, and sleeping on the heat-lamperiffic sun deck.

July 6 – July 26: Whitehorse to Dawson and DCMF

The ride into Dawson was quick and painless -no hills anywhere. I kept waiting for a mountain to rise above us and make us climb it before dumping us into the city. Fortunately it was nothing but a slight downhill the whole lovely way.
I’m not doing a day-by-day account of our time in the city because we were there for over two weeks’ worth of long days and even longer nights, but here’s the not-so-condensed condensed version…
First off, Dawson is a bizarre city. It’s super small and the population dwindles to 800 in the winter. The streets are all dirt roads and the sidewalks are all wooden boardwalks. A lot of storefronts and buildings are freshly painted to advertise what was sold in them a hundred years ago, but sit locked and empty. Others are abandoned and sinking in on themselves due to the melting permafrost that will eventually claim all the city’s buildings. The rest hawk tourist gifts and gold.
There’s a tiny ferry (holds about eight regular sized cars or three RV’s) that crosses the Yukon River 24 hours a day from May to September. It mostly ferries RV’s on their way to the Top of the World Highway to Alaska and hippie kids who work in Dawson but live camped out at the hostel on the other side of the river.
We planned to camp out in different free places every night and then move into the private hostel cabin we’d reserved for Music Fest weekend, but we were tired of packing up gear and lugging it along with us every day so we ended up paying the weekly rate at the hostel and camping out with Matt
(*Sidenote about the hostel: it is very cool and very rustic. The cabins are sturdy, but made of rough, unfinished wood. I have a cut on my knee from where it touched the wall one night. There’s no electricity and the “kitchen” is an outdoor woodstove you stoke a fire in. The “bathroom” is a wooden room with a skylight and a lock. It has a faucet that pipes cold creek water into a huge steel drum. Beside that steel drum is another steel drum. If you want to shower, you bail water from the cold water drum into the second drum, go chop some wood, build a fire in the stove beneath the second drum, wait 30 minutes for the water to heat up, then mix hot and cold water in a small bucket and dump it on yourself. As long as you’re low-maintenance it’s pretty cool there, even if Dieter -the German former cycle tourist who owns the place- is a money-grubbing hotelier who re-sells the junk campers leave behind. Pack of oatmeal? There are two different packets, each .50 cents. Bar of soap? One, slightly used, .75 cents. Tin cup? You can have it for a dollar. What do you mean you left it here last summer? He also sells bear-proof food caches for $130, even though MEC sells the same ones for $75. Since Dieter paid $130 for his eight years ago, he’s not budging on the price this year. While he waits for someone to pay full price he rents them out. When he heard Sean and I were looking for a ride to Whitehorse he was desperate to get us on his “shuttle” for $150 each. He’s a bit of a weirdo, talks about himself a lot and has pictures of himself, 30 years ago, wearing denim short-shorts astride his bike. End sidenote*).   
Matt was originally only hanging out in Dawson a couple days (until July 12th) so he could be near a phone on his brother’s birthday. Unfortunately for his plans, by the time the 12th rolled around he’d fallen in love with three or four different girls on our side of the river. Every night for a week he said good-bye to us and every morning for a week he failed to leave.
I ended up working in the mornings for the week Matt stayed behind. On our first night we ended up in the liquor store in the lobby of the Midnight Sun Hotel to buy beer and wine with which to celebrate our triumphant entry into Dawson. While there I noticed a sign that the hotel was looking for housekeepers. No sooner had I mentioned “I saw the sign out front…” than the manager rocketed out of her office and told me to show up at 930 the next morning. Since a start time like that meant I could still drink the whole bottle of wine I’d just bought I told her I’d be there, but that I could only work for a week. She said a week was OK so just like that, I was employed.
I spent the next seven mornings cleaning the four buildings that make up the Midnight Sun -usually from 930 till noon. It was there that I got my first lesson in “Yukon Time.” The small housekeeping staff was made up of a rotating group of six people including me -head housekeeper Vera, a French woman named Chantal, an older native woman named Shelia, and two quiet, 20-something boys whose names I can’t remember because they rarely spoke…when they showed up. The schedule on the wall of the housekeeping office in no way reflected the staff that would choose to show up that day, and none of those who did show up seemed to care that we were short-staffed. Sometimes people showed up late; sometimes not at all. Even though I only worked for a week I felt like employee of the year for showing up on time every day. We started each morning with a coffee break, broke again around 1030/11am, and could usually squeeze one more in before quitting time at noon.   
At noon Sean would meet me and we’d bike to Minto Park -the site of the Dawson City Music Festival- where we volunteered with the “Bull Gang.” This started the Saturday before the festival and it was what made the whole trip so wicked. The Bull Gang was a small group of maybe eight hardcore volunteers who showed up all day every day, and maybe twelve part-time volunteers who showed up when their real jobs allowed -not that real jobs are taken too seriously. In Dawson, most people quit their jobs when Music Fest rolls around because otherwise, they wouldn’t get the time off to attend Music Fest. After Music Fest,  no one has trouble finding jobs again because all the employers are suffering from a serious employee deficit.
Anyway, our job was to plot and build the fences around the park, tent and beer garden, construct the stage, three tents, the info booth and volunteer tent, set up bleachers inside the main tent (which a crew from Whitehorse had set up the week before), build the wooden dancefloor inside the tent, set up the beer garden, port-a-potty’s, etc. We also did a massive DCMF storage shed clean-up (the first in roughly 25 years) so there was a lot of riding around the dusty streets in the back of pick-up’s and on flat beds en route to the dump. The days were long but the breaks were many and the treatment was awesome. Three guys were in charge of set-up -Jon, John, and Sandy- and they must have had a hefty budget for the volunteers because there was always a fridge full of beer, fresh meat, cheese, veggies and bread, and a cupboard overflowing with snacks. If we ran out of anything, all work halted while we had an impromptu meeting about what needed to be picked up on a grocery run and who could do it fastest. Sean and I didn’t buy a single meal the whole week before the festival, and were even given some beer to take back to the hostel with us at the end of the day.
Also, because we showed up all day and stuck around until the work was done, Sandy pulled us aside one day and told us we were going to be “button-holders.” What this meant was we got photo ID that gave us access to the festival at mainstage, all the workshops and shows at venues around town, and (this was the best part) to the hospitality lounge (a Thai-decorated concession stand/some sort of meeting space inside the long wooden building that served as some kind of clubhouse for the unused Minto Park baseball diamond) where the performers get fed and boozed. This might sound like just a pretty good bonus but it was the biggest bonus ever. DCMF is known for the hospitality it shows performers -the festival pays for all the performers’ flights to Dawson, billets them in houses around town, and feeds them about a billion delicious, themed meals over the course of the weekend. They also pump them full of beer and wine. Because we had those sweet-ass passes, we got in on all of it. There was Indian food, Ethiopian, Mexican, pastry, breakfast, gourmet pizza, and late-night sushi served by the kimono-clad mayor of Dawson (who looks a lot like Stephen King). Ahhhhhhh and the Sake-tini’s. Those were free (on top of the drinks our drink cards allowed us), served the first night of the festival to go with the Japanese theme of the midnight sushi snack. I was doubtful that I’d enjoy any sort of tini but those things tasted like water. As a result, I downed a lot of them, which led to an unsuccessful end-of-the-night attempt at hitchhiking the half km from Minto Park to the ferry…yeah…I took it relatively easy the rest of the festival, but not too easy. I mean, the drinks were free!
Anywhooooo we saw a lot of wicked music (The Done Gone String Band, Hungry Hill, Hank & Lily and Fishead Stew ranked among the faves) and we missed a lot in favour of the comfort of the hospitality lounge, but since we were easily able to re-sell the tickets we’d paid for back in March, we didn’t feel so bad about not seeing every single band. Also, we met a lot of awesome people working bull gang, and it was more fun to hang out with them in the lounge than it was to get rammed around in the tent.
Plus, we saw the best music during the day anyway -at the workshops set up in various bars and venues around town. The workshops were short little concerts given by either solo performers, a couple similar bands, or different people from a bunch of bands who had things in common. Most of the workshops we saw took place at the Palace Grand -a beautiful old building that used to be one of the gold rush hangouts where the Klondike girls would sing and dance while all the drunk, foolish miners threw hunks of gold at them
Sunday night, when the final show ended, performers and all-access pass holders (that’s us) were herded onto shuttle buses that drove up into the mountain for the after-party. The party was held on the awesome property of a local bar-owner and it was even better than the hospitality lounge. An outdoor shed was set up with lamps and lights, hammocks and couches, a huge roaring firepit blazed all night, there were cases of beer and bottles of wine everywhere, spicy, cheesy nachos kept showing up from somewhere, and some dude manned the BBQ all night and passed out sausages to all the hungry drunks.
We took the 5am shuttle back down to the ferry and were in bed by 6am when, we later heard, the last of the party-goers headed home.
So. We checked out of the hostel on Monday morning and rode our reloaded bikes over to Minto Park to help take down. Taking down was obviously more depressing than putting up, but it was also took a lot less time. Sean and I slept in the hospitality lounge Monday night, and then on Tuesday, got a ride home with the tent crew.
That’s a whole other story…

July 5-11: Whitehorse to Dawson City

We spent our last night camped out on a hiking trail near the hostel and started getting ready to leave early the next morning but Whitehorse had other plans in store for the day such as sucking.

We had breakfast at Tim Horton’s, then rode to the library to do some last-minute e-mail checking. I got yelled at by some denim-clad idiot who was angry at my non-signalling on a carless street and then there was nowhere safe to leave our bikes outside the library. We’d heard there was intense bike theft in Whitehorse so we were nervous about leaving our bikes on the lightweight, rusted, non-bolted-down rack around the corner from the library. Instead we left our bikes leaned against the wheelchair railing and I sat beside them while Sean checked e-mail. Some old biddy librarian came out and made a stink about our 15-minute clogging of her precious wheelchair ramp so we had a bit of a chat about the idiocy of their bike safety system and Sean picked the bike rack up and carried it around to the front of the library before we rode off. This was a triumph because it illustrated how useless her bike rack was and how easy it would have been to move the rack to a safer and more visible location. Go us!

Anyway we bought a bunch of last-minute things like batteries for the GPS and gas for the stove before we drove to Wal-Mart for McFlurries, where we realized the gas can was missing. We rode back to the Petro-Can, luckily found the stove and finally pedalled out of Whitehorse at 3pm. As a result, we only made it 49km to Lake LaBerge where we camped out in the cookhouse. Sometime after dinner Matthias rolled in on his bike and the three of us spent about an hour talking.

We ended up biking with Matt for the next week -all the way to Dawson. He always had huge plans for the hundreds of kilometres he was going to bike the next day but he always ended up at the same campsite as us, and ended up staying in Dawson with us a week longer than he’d planned even though Dawson was far from his final destination. Matt had started biking four years earlier -he’d started in Germany and rode down the east coast to South Africa, then flew back to Germany to make a bit more money. After that he biked southeast through Asia, flew to Australia, biked there and through New Zealand, flew to the tip of South America and then came up the west coast to the Yukon where we met him. He was headed to the top of Alaska where he was going to fly to Siberia and bike back to Germany. He did push-up’s every morning, and was obsessive about symmetry on his bike. As a result, his bags were packed according to weight instead of content and he always left campsites a few hours later than us in the morning because he had to repack all the bags he’d unpacked the night before. He only ate breakfast and dinner as far as I could tell, and ate chocolate bars and cookies instead of lunch every day. He always carried a bottle of the liquor that came from the country he was riding in and did intense bike cleaning and maintenance every night when we stopped.

Anyway, we camped at Yukon campgrounds all the way up the Klondike highway because they always had a cookhouse to camp in in case it rained and no one ever came around to collect money. Well…we ran into a ranger once at the Tatchun Creek Campground. He saw the three of us making dinner in the cookhouse and came over to ask if we were planning on camping there that night but then he just started asking about the bike trip, gave us a map of all the Yukon campgrounds and drove off.

Some of the highlights of the Klondike ride included Braeburn Lodge, where the two teenage employees who were working boss-less became obsessed with our trip and gave us free coffee and made us a free grilled cheese and ham sandwich the size of a TV. Also at Braeburn, we ran into an older couple that had been eating at Rancheria the same night as us. They remembered us, we chatted a bit, and when they couldn’t finish the cinnamon bun they’d bought (Braeburn is famous for these huge buns that serve four people), they gave it to us. We cleaned up huge there.

In Pelly Crossing we met and camped with a guy named Dominic. He was from England and was riding from Alaska to South America. This alone may not have been impressive since (yawn) we’d run into a dozen people doing the same thing already, but Dominic was doing it on a loaded 190-lb tandem, picking randoms up along the way, and filming a documentary about it. All four of us took over the cookhouse at the free Pelly campground, traded food and stories all night and exchanged e-mail addresses before we left the next morning.

Some of the lowlights included 25 uphill kilometres of loose gravel and construction the day before we got to Dawson. What would have taken us two hours on pavement, took four hours on soft, sandy gravel, plus there were insane drivers to contend with. We almost got hit a couple times, flipped off a lot of idiots, and told off some stupid teenager who tried to rip by us on the shoulder.

All in all though -the Klondike was mine and Sean’s favorite highway. The scenery was beautiful and we only had one really bad day of wind.

June. 28-31: Teslin to Whitehorse

Woke up and snarfed the all-you-can-eat breakfast at Mukluk Annie’s kitchen. The morning food and service were both much better than the evening and we stuffed ourselves with blueberry pancakes and coffee.

The ride that day was pretty rainy but not too bad and we met a lone Alaskan cyclist named Brian, who was on his way to South America. He was miserable because his whole trip to that point had been cold, wet and lonely, so we all stood around and talked for about an hour, exchanged e-mail addresses and kept biking in our respective directions. Sadly, a couple weeks later we heard he’d had to head back to Anchorage due to knee problems.

We had lunch at Johnson’s Crossing -an RV park on the north side of a bridge. It was a weird place because the RV Park and restaurant were the only things there, but the gift shop was stocked to the rafters with clothes and accessories plastered with JOHNSON’S CROSSING logos in our faces. It’s crazy how every little nowhere town we pass through always seems to have an entire line of “RANDOM PLACE” emblazoned clothing.

Anywhoooo we spent the night at Squanga Lake -a Yukon campground. We were the only ones there so we set up our tent in the cookhouse and stoked a fire to dry our wet clothes and selves.

The next day we  ran into a whole huge crew of American bikers. Seven of them had met on adventurecycle.com because of a common desire to ride from Prudhoe Bay to the southern tip of South America. They were all moving at slightly different speeds but wihin 15 minutes all of us were standing on the side of the road together, glutting up the highway and giving each other tips about what lay in each direction. Four of them were retired old guys (one of whom couldn’t even walk but kept a steady pace on his bike) and then there was a young couple about our age. The seventh had been Paul, a cyclist we’d met a few days earlier, but he’d taken off on his own because he was waaaaaay faster than all of them.

Three of them had the same bike as Sean so there was a big Surly lovefest that I got left out of.

We stopped for the night at a rest area on the Yukon River. It was only 40km from Whitehorse but since we were in no hurry we laid out the tent and made a pot of fake mac and cheese. That was the first night a parks employee came by a rest area while we were camped out. Our bright yellow tent was in full view of the highway and area parking lot when we heard a truck pull up at 8pm to empty the bear bins of garbage. Fortunately for us, said employee didn’t care or bother us so we spent the night in relatively peaceful quiet…except for a group of three middle-aged Whitehorsians who appeared to have driven their pickup’s out to the rest area 40km from town to drink beer in the gravel parking lot for two hours before driving back to town.

The ride into Whitehorse the next day was gloriously sunny and downhill and the first thing we did when we got there was find a Tim Horton’s. After that we headed to Phillippe’s Bike Shop -a place that had been recommended to us by the huge group of US cyclists. The bike shop is awesome for two reasons. 1) Phillippe is a little nutty and obsessed with bikes. The entire house that is his shop is full of bikes and parts for sale. Even the bathtub. 2) There is a woman in a bus in his driveway who makes the most incredible burrito’s in the history of sandwich-related foods. They are huge and cheap and delicious.

Anywhooooo, on our way out of the bike shop, we heard a voice behind us ask “Are you from Ontario?” At first we didn’t think this was directed at us but as we are from Ontario we turned around and said yes. The guy who’d asked turned out to be Devin -the husband of a friend of Sean’s friend Gen. Devin had heard that a couple of Gen’s friends might be biking through the city and need a place to camp and it just so happened that he was buying a burrito during the ten minutes we were looking at bike gear.

He gave us his address and phone number and we spent the next three nights and days with Devin at his awesome house, with his awesome dog and awesome cats. Devin took us out to a couple Whitehorse bars that first night, including The Roadhouse and Paddy’s Place, then led us around the city during the Canada Day festivities, and took us to a tacky dress party his friend threw that night. We spent Sunday watching every episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” ever recorded, eating pizza, and just being generally sloppy.

Devin flew to Halifax Monday morning but Sean and I had reservations at the Beez Kneez Backpackers so we packed up our stuff and rode ten minutes to the hostel. For anyone who’s planning on visiting Whitehorse (and doesn’t expect to run into a friend of a friend within an hour of arrival), the Beez Kneez is awesome. It’s a house with about 20 beds I think. The staff is small and they’re all super-friendly, the house is cozy and full of books and CD’s to listen to, laundry is cheap, the backyard is cool, they rent bikes and the prices are not bad.

While we were at the hostel we met a German biker named Matthias, who ended up being the same German biker we’d heard about from a couple other bikers on the road -who had worked at Rancheria for a couple weeks mid-trip to make some cash before continuing on his way to Siberia.