Alaska Trip 2011: May 16-17 - Start of the Alaska Highway

This is page 5 of our Alaska 2011 trip blog. Click here for the first page. We spent Tuesday in Dawson Creek, and then headed up the Alaska Highway on Wednesday.

Will the real mile 0 please stand up?

The first picture here is the mile zero marker most commonly used by tourists for the obligatory photo op, but there are at least two others.

The story is, that the original marker was knocked down in a traffic accident. The city of Dawson Creek decided to replace it, but thought it would be a good idea to put in the middle of an intersection in the business section, about a block away from the actual start of the highway. The next two shots show two views of that marker, which I call the "bogus mile 0 marker."

Later on, they put up the cairn shown in the first picture, to commemorate the orignal location of the mile 0 marker. Besides those two, there is also a small marker, one that looks more like an actual mile marker. It is close to the road, not far from the commemorative cairn.

Finding mile zero is not the only confusion with the mile markers. The road originally had mileposts, but when Canada went metric, the mileposts were replaced by kilometer posts. This pretty much ticked off the local residents and merchants, and some of them continued to advertise their location at the original mile marker. Then in the 1990's, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the highway, they put up "historical mileposts" in various locations. Of course in the meantime, the highway had undergone some changes and improvements in the previous 50 years, so the historical markers no longer reflect the actual driving distance.

There is a traffic circle at the intersection where the highway begins. This statue at the middle of the circle represents a surveyor looking in the direction of the highway. You can see the Mile 0 cairn near the right side of the picture, but you might have to expand it to full size to see it very well. The small marker is near the center of the picture, by the light pole at the corner.

We spent some time at the historical museum near here - it was in the old railroad depot, and had a lot of railroad memorabilia as well as other historical artifacts. The grain elevator housed an art museum.

More Dawson Creek

There was a pioneer village nearby, at historical mile 1, depicting some of the buildings from when the area was first settled. It was not open when we were there, so we were not able to go inside, but you could see some of the buildings from outside the fence. One thing that made me go hmmm..... When I think pioneer village, I think log cabins. These buildings were made from sawed lumber. Since this area was settled much later than, for example, Illinois, they used more modern building methods. You do see historical log cabins around here, but apparently when it came time to build a village, they brought the sawmill with them.

Some of the historical mile markers had informational signs like this one, at historical mile 2, identifying a telephone relay station.

Here is another thing that made me go hmmm..... they called this Rotary Lake. It's more like a pond than a lake. Apparently this is where they go swimming in the summer. It was all locked up, since it's way too early to swim around here, but I did take a picture through the chain link fence.

The Smoke Returns

By mid-afternoon, the wind had picked up again, still out of the southeast, and the smoke had returned. We decided the best thing for me was to spend the rest of the afternoon in the air conditioning. We took the opportunity to catch up on laundry, get some groceries and make some progress on catching up the journal.

Heading up the highway

Tuesday morning, we woke up to clouds and intermittent rain. This obscured the vision part of the time, but at least the air was clear of smoke. The haze you see in this picture is from the rain.

First Peek at the mountains

We don't actually start across the Rocky Mountains until after Fort Nelson, but today we got just a little peek at what is to come.

What's next

We stopped for the night at Fort Nelson, British Columbia, at a campground that was right at historical mile 300. Tomorrow we will explore the museum that is there, and then continue our journey on the Alaska Highway.

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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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