Day 10 Even More Rain 498 Miles

Well, it was raining when we arrived at Tok, Alaska yesterday and it was raining when we left this morning.  It hadn’t rained all night and then just as we got the bikes packed up, down came the rain.  One thing we can be thankful for is that most places we gas up have a cover over the pumps.  Otherwise, it would be really miserable. 

It rained all the way to Fairbanks today.  That made the construction areas really interesting.  The way they do road repair on the highway is to lay down a thick layer of dirt (usually wet dirt that they grade smooth) and while they are doing that, it is a very fun ride for motorcycles to go through a construction area.  Then they lay down a thick layer of gravel and that makes for an even different but equally fun experience. 

Last year when I was up here, one of the construction areas was on a long downhill section of highway that was most unnerving to this motorcycle rider.  I just knew I was going to start sliding before I reached the bottom and end up in a ditch.  I made it down ok but ended up in the oncoming lane of traffic.  Fortunately, at that time, there were no cars coming up the hill.  Otherwise I would have been toast.  This year, that same hill is all nicely paved and we just cruised right down that hill without any problems. 

When we arrived at Fairbanks the first stop was a Wal-Mart so we could buy one gallon gas cans to take with us on the Dalton Highway to Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean.  On one portion of the Dalton, it is over 230 miles without a gas station.  After getting them we stopped for lunch at McDonalds and then headed for the Dalton Highway.  We encountered even more rain getting to the Dalton.  It’s about a fifty mile drive just to get to the start of the highway.  Today, the worker crews were working on a very early part of the highway (actually just a dirt road, not a highway as we know them) and Lyle got to experience some of the really bad side of the Dalton.  Mud!  The crews water down the road real heavy and then they grade the mud flat.  Not too much of a problem for cars but really tough to get through if you’re on a motorcycle.  We made it through that without any major problems though and headed on towards the Yukon River crossing, our first gas stop on the Dalton.  I felt so good when I got there that I had a dish of chocolate ice-cream and it was yummy. 

While there we met a guy on an older BMW R1100GS.  Like our bikes but a couple years older.   He told us that he had just been  to the Denali National Park and when we was cruising through the park, a caribou came out in the road.  He was going to miss the caribou easily but then saw that a car coming the other way didn’t see him on his motorcycle and was going to swerve around the caribou in his lane.  He had a choice to make.  Either hit the caribou or hit the car head on.  He chose the caribou. 

He cracked a couple of ribs and had to spend time in his hotel room for them to heal before he could get back on his motorcycle.  He was moving real slow.  He said he was only going to the Arctic Circle and back to Fairbanks as the Dalton was just too rough for him in his current condition.  I don’t blame him.  That’s exactly what I would do in his situation. 

After gassing up we headed on north towards Coldfoot, our intended stop for the night before going on the last 220 miles of dirt road to Deadhorse.  The road, at this point, was hard packed dirt and we were moving on!  We probably got up to sixty miles per hour in some sections.  Let’s just say, we were wasting no time.  When we got about forty miles north of the Yukon river and still over one hundred miles from Coldfoot, my front wheel started feeling like it was “wandering”.  It felt like the front axle was loose or something.  I pulled over and asked Lyle what my tires looked like, and he said it looked like the rear tire was going flat.  Well, it was. 

So there we were over 45 miles north of the last remnants of civilization and over 100 miles from the next outpost and we have a flat tire.

I have to tell you at this time that Lyle was introduced to the Alaska state bird.  The mosquito!  These things are relentless in their pursuit of blood from warm mammals.  Immediately when you stop moving, there are no, or very few, mosquitoes present.  But within two to three minutes there appears a swarm of them and they can drive a person absolutely insane if you aren’t dressed properly.  Usually when I stop anywhere I leave my helmet and coat on and some times I’ll even leave my gloves on.  But this time we have to work on the tire so that requires some exposed skin.  It is a real challenge to try to do anything when they are swarming around looking for skin to land on.  I was told last year when I was here that a caribou can lose up to 1/3 of its body weight to mosquitoes.  That is almost unbelievable. 

Thankfully, where we stopped just happened to be on the peak of a hill and the wind was blowing strongly and that kept the mosquitoes away a little. 

We looked the tire over and found a hole that looked like it had been made by a small sharp rock.  I got my tire plugging kit out and plugged the hole.  Then we tried to put air in the tire using a small cheap electric air pump from china. It looked like the pump wasn’t working as the tire would not air up. 

Just about that time, a guy on a 1200 GS stopped to see if he could help.  He had a very old bicycle air pump and we tried that to see if we could get the tire to air up.  It didn’t work either.  Now I decided it was time to take the tire off the bike and take a closer look to see if maybe there was more than one hole in it.  I found another small hole and plugged that one too.  Now we used the bicycle pump and put air in the tire and it looked like it was holding well.  Meanwhile, the wind has died down a little and the mosquitoes are really beginning to multiply. 

Now it is decision time.  We are over three hundred miles from Deadhorse and I have a tire with two plugs in it.  And we can’t be one hundred percent sure that the tire isn’t slowly losing air still.  Plugs are never considered safe to ride on for any length of time.  They are thought of as more of a temporary fix until you get to a place that can patch the time.  It’s late and if we leave right now, we won’t get back to Fairbanks until after midnight. 

We decided the best course of action is to load most of the weight on Lyle’s bike and we head back to Fairbanks.  We made it back to Fairbanks without any more problems and found a hotel room.  By the time we got checked in and in our rooms, it was after 4am.  That was a long day! 

That was the longest ride I can remember ever taking.  I was so tired coming back to Fairbanks, that I had problems concentrating.  And on a road like the Dalton Highway that is not a good thing. 

So, I can say that the Dalton Highway took two hostages today but we were eventually able to escape and return to civilization.  Free, but defeated in out attempt to conquer the road all the way to Deadhorse. 

Maybe next year

Tomorrow we head south to the Denali National Park and then on to the Anchorage area.  We will keep a sharp lookout for caribou along the way.