Jeff's Alaskan Bike Trip 2010

You need to check the prior two blogs as I had to update them. The wifi we had was not good. I still don't have cell service. This plan isn't working out too good for me.

On to the good stuff. We put up the Hidden Valley Lake license in the Watson Lake Sign Forest. It's quite an amazing site. It forms a circle with numerous posts. Looking at the varied amount of signs was quite amazing. We proudly placed the HVL license in a prominent place up front. John and I are very proud we got to place the sign there. Big hats off to Bruce for the free sign.
Off to the Hot springs!!!!!

OH MAN!!!!!!! As we are leaving the gas station in Watson Lake and going down an access road, a lady pulled out in front of John. He locked them up, but he still made contact with her driver side rear door. The lady was a nurse from London who had moved to Watson Lake many years ago. I'm going into any details, but the damage to John's bike is in his left rear saddle bag. He was really mad. I would be too. A three day old bike now has it's first damage. Not good. It's still drivable so we are off. Don't text or call John until Sunday when we get to the lower 48.

We stopped at the Liard Springs hot springs. The water temperature ranged from 126 to 106 degrees. The naturally fed pool cooled from the top to the bottom of the three sections you could wade in. We tried the hot side, but it was really hot. The hot feeling is only in the first 6 inches of the water. The bottom levels are like normal water temperature. You can only stay in about 20 minutes then they recommend you get out. For $10 for the both of us, I thought it was worth it.
The ride to Fort Nelson turned into a bunch curves. You don't really feel like you are riding up the mountains like the previous climbs. I didn't realize we rode up to 4200 feet of elevation. The turns were tight as rode around the mountains. The lakes ran right up to the road. Muncho Park Lake is at the bottom of the mountains. Summit Lake was at the top of the mountains. There were giant swales of rocks coming out of the gorges toward the lakes. I'm sure when the snow melts these swales are filled with water. The sides of the road have no guard rails. The speeds got as low 30 mph to manage them. The temperature dropped significantly depending what side of the mountain you were on. Ask John if not wearing his leather jacket was a mistake.

We had our 100 miles intervals planned again. This time they had electricity, but no gas. We asked about the next city and they didn't have gas either. Now I'm getting nervous. Everyone was pretty sure that the third city had gas. We took off like everyone else racing for gas. Because the road was so bad all day, I went to reserve at 148 miles. We made it to gas before I ran out. Surprise! Gas was $1.59 a liter. $.50 higher than anywhere else we had bought gas. You had to walk inside and tell them the amount of gas you took. They hand calculated your total and the remaining amount of gas they had. John decided not to get any gas due to the price. By the time we got to Fort Nelson, I swear I saw fumes coming from his bike. I'm sure he was gliding to a stop at the gas station. He crowed that he had 1 gallon left despite what his bike told him he had. He knew the grief would have been unbearable if he had run out of gas.

We saw many different animals. The bison along the side of the rode is breath taking. We got to see a mountain goat which is rare in the summer. We also saw a female mule deer or elk depending on who you ask in our group. We saw the blood spot from where someone hit a moose early in the day.

Lets review driving conditions. It was sunny or partly sunny most of the day. We saw some haze from the forest fire which is taking place up here. The roads were chip and tar or just plain rocks. The chip in the tar was very rocky too. I thought I felt vibration yesterday. Hah!!! It's even worse today.

In the last two days we have ridden by some acreage of forest devastated by fires. The damage is amazing. After seeing the destruction from a forest fire, I'm totally on Smokie's side now.