Yukon Ho!

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.