Good Bye, Alaska - Hello, Yukon!

The Richardson Highway would be the road that we would begin day four on. The section of the highway that would take us to Delta Junction, Alaska, where we would pick up the Alaska Highway, is designated a scenic byway and it did offer a very scenic ride for the beginning of the day. The whole 'scenic byway' moniker is a bit misleading up in Alaska. I don't think that we have ridden a mile that wasn't scenic. The air was a bit cool, so it was another full-leather day on the Richardson, which is another two-lane highway in Alaska's interior. On our right for the entire ride was the Alaska Range, and we were able to catch a few glimpses of the pipeline in the valley to our left (in one particular spot, the suspended pipeline crossed the Tanana River next to the bridge we crossed - very cool).

Our first stop was in Delta Junction, which is actually the terminus of the Alaska Highway (mile post 1422). Here, we were almost immediately delayed on our trip due to construction, and this was the begin of what would be some fairly hard riding for the rest of the day. There are about 202 miles of the Alaska Highway in Alaska (kind of makes you wonder why it is not the Canada Highway since the other 1220 miles of it our in that country). A mile or two outside of Delta Junction we had to wait for a pilot car to take us through a ten-mile construction zone of dirt and loose gravel. So much for a nice new, clean bike!

From there to Tok, Alaska, the Alaska Range was still on our right and about 30 miles out we approached these mountains closer. From Tok to the border, we followed the Tanana River immediately to our right. The last 14 miles of this section were also under construction, this time with a little clay and water thrown in. We had to follow the pilot car for 8 of those miles.

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10 miles of gravel road east of Tok

Once we crossed the border, we had to travel about 20 miles to the Canadian Customs stop. The agent took a fairly long time checking me in (I have no idea why), but Jeff sailed through. From this point and for the next 120 miles, we traverse through construction zones and/or had to try to avoid areas of road damage caused by frost heave. It was a miserable ride that could only get worse with the rain. Oh yeah, that happened along the way for about 1/2 hour....

We finally made it to Burwash Landing in the Yukon (ten miles short of where we had planned to stop). This was an excellent choice. We were treated to a nice campground at a reasonable price (free) and got to talk with some of the 70 residents of the town. First Nation natives who were really well spoken and loved to drink...