Alaska Trip 2011: May 10-15 - On the Road Again

This is page 4 of our Alaska 2011 trip. The first page is here. After lollygagging in North Dakota for a couple days, it was time to get back on the road and continue our journey northwest.

Montana



We spent two days getting across Montana, spending Tuesday night at Glasgow, and Wednesday night at Shelby, about 15 miles south of the Canadian border. It was still raining on Tuesday, but Wednesday cleared up, and might have been one of our nicest travel days so far.

We spotted these pronghorn in the field behind the campground, not too far from the highway. Thursday, we took a day to refuel, restock, and regroup before heading into Canada.

Canada

We headed for Alberta on Friday the 13th. We must have picked the right day to cross - we heard of delays of 3 hours or more a couple weeks before that. Apparently they were inspecting all of the RVs that crossed the border that day. But today, we had less than 10 minutes in line, and just a few questions when we got to the gate, so it was a pretty quick crossing. So far we have been lucky, but I suppose one of these days it will be our turn. The luck of the draw, so to speak.

Heading north, we ended up at Calgary right at rush hour (bad idea), and the highway pretty much turned into a parking lot at times. Live and learn. When we got to the north side of town, we were ready to stop for the night. The wind was starting to pick up too, but it was a tail wind, so it was not too bad (yet).

No problems with rain here - the humidity was about 13%. That's dry.

We had the same tailwind on Saturday, though it was getting a lot stronger. We managed to find a bypass around Edmonton to avoid most of the city traffic, but at that point the highway was going to go west for a while, which would have made it a cross wind instead of tail wind. Once again, time to stop for the night. We planned an early start for Sunday, as the winds seemed to be getting heavier as the day progressed. They said it was unusual for the wind to be out of the south like that.

We found this interesting sundial along the highway somewhere north of Edmonton. It was a scale model of a grain elevator at the center, with big rocks to mark the hours. (Oh, and a geocache nearby.)

Continuing northward, we saw what looked like clouds at first. As we got closer, we could see that it was actually smoke, quite a bit of it. We were guessing forest fire, and a large one at that. At one point, we coud even see the orange glow from the flames. Thankfully, we were upwind, so the smoke was not bad on the road (yet). Later that day, we learned that there were indeed massive forest fires in the area, fueled and spread by the strong south and southeast winds we were experiencing. We also learned that the fire we saw was not the worst. The worst one was at Slave Lake, farther north from where we were. That one managed to engulf a small town.

As we got father west, the smoke from the fire started to catch up with us. When it got to be time to stop for the night, it was pretty thick. So this time, instead of cutting our day short, we extended it, in hopes we could get past it. We decided to go ahead and try to make it to Dawson Creek. Even though we would be late getting there, we would still have at least a couple hours of daylight.

We did drive out of the smoke as we got farther west, as you can see in these shots at a town called Beaverlodge. But the flags still give you a pretty idea how much wind there was. At this location, we were not in the path of the smoke cloud.

We crossed into British Columbia for the first time, and continued up the road toward Dawson Creek. Unfortunately, the cloud caught up with us again when we got close to Dawson Creek. It was much more dissipated though, so we crossed our fingers and hoped for the best.

Next: The Alaska highway

Tomorrow we explore Dawson City, and Tuesday we start up the Alaska Highway, which goes for about 1500 miles across British Columbia, Yukon Territory, and finally Alaska.

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