A month later and I'm just finding time to relay the Alaskan adventures now.
The first few days on the road with the daughter (the boy having decided somewhere along the way that he'd prefer to hang with friends in Calgary) - old territory, Jasper, Burn's Lake, camp a couple of days to recover from all the driving, being devoured alive by Black Flies that leave painless bites that stream with blood. The girl is horribly bitten.
Then North, along the Stewart-Cassiers Highway.
This is beautiful, and I can feel it calling....
There are few cars, sometimes only one an hour, and fewer services, gas at $1.50 per liter, stations every 300 KM. The road is somewhat paved, sometimes just gravel, and the road is taking us due North.
We stop - for a break - at a rock shop by the road, nothing of interest, only kitsch souvenirs, we ask the obese lady behind the counter what rocks and where we might go looking, she looks confused - "I dunno...try down by the river..."
"....and what might we find?" I ask, never one to let things go.
"rocks. And driftwood" is her reply.
***
We continue. This landscape is wild, there are no signs of human presence apart from the road, the top half of British Columbia virtually unexplored. A reservation, new vinyl sided houses in yards overgrown with purple weeds, derelict cars, suspicious locals. Not a good place to stop.
And still we go on.
By 6:00 PM we're at the 2nd Jade Shop - Saws, samples, raw jade, pieces thrown away, cut open, a great shop in the middle of nowhere, ridiculous prices, tiny carved bears smaller than a dime for $20.00, somehow they're convinced that their jade, mined at 900 tons per year and shaped in China, is worth more than gold...We are probably they only visitors that day, by the traffic on the road, and seeing all this raw jade - white, uncut, convinces me that we must have found some in our rambles by the river, and not recognizing it for what it was threw it back. The salesgirl assures us it's unlikely, most of the jade here - in this shop - was quarried high up Cassiar's mountain, there is little if any to be found along the rivers and creeks....
I buy the girl a small bear and matching jade cave. "We'll only be here once" I tell her, and this will be her souvenir.
We go on, further north a couple more hours before finding a campsite along a lake.
There are a few campers, the sun is up late - by 11:30 I retire, sun still in the sky, and at night have that Farley Mowatt moment where I hear for the first time the cry of the Loon.
***
It's peaceful up here, in the morning we take down the tent, drink our coffee. We passed a creek back on the road that gave the history of the Cassiar's Gold Rush, we keep our eyes peeled on the road ahead, what few turn-offs there are on the creeks are staked with no-trespassing signs, and we decide to make Whitehorse our next stop.
***
The scenery, the landscape is fantastic. There are long stretches of nothing, then bare and smoothed mountains, it's a country that begs you to get out of the car and just walk. It's new, and it's been too long since I've seen anything new. And on and on the road continues...
We hit the Alaska highway around Noon, across the Yukon border, and begin heading West. 3 hours roughly until Whitehorse. We stop for lunch, a dismal diner off the road and hidden behind a modern-decrepit facade, once inside it's a properly 60's or 70's truckstop, complete with velvet paintings of Indians and wildlife, somehow perfect - not, as you see so often nowadays a mock-up or reproduction, this is the real deal, and somehow it has that homey-smell.
***
Bears, many bears upon the road, we take pictures, and now the highway - the view from the road, it begins to resemble that landscape in my dreams, there's a sense of Deja-vu, as if somehow I've been here before, as if I'm revisiting after a long absence someplace I once knew well in my childhood.
***
In Whitehorse we take a hotel, settle down for the night to explore, go for dinner and walk about the town, a main street or two with brightly painted facades, various gift shops and museums, an incredible amount of vehicles on the road (especially given how small the town is...), but here nobody walks.