Yukon Ho!

July 5-11: Whitehorse to Dawson City

August 2, 2006 on 7:53 pm | In Uncategorized |

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.