North to Alaska

Saturday, June 23, 2007

FORT NELSON, BC — Tonight we are camped just east of Fort Nelson, situated at Mile 300 of the Alaska Highway. The mile count begins at Dawson Creek, where we were yesterday, and ends some 1500 miles later near Fairbanks, Alaska (there are conflicting claims for the "true" end of the highway). We learned that the Alaska Highway was built in 1942 by 11,000 US soldiers, supported by 16,000 more Canadian and US civilians, in the space of nine months, working from both ends toward the middle. The pressure was on to complete it so there would be a supply road to defend North America against the Japanese in the Second World War.
We had lots of company on the highway today, as a caravan of RVs from our campground, as well as others, are headed in the same direction. I said to Val we should get better acquainted with the group as we will probably be bumping into them at every campground between here and Alaska! The rarest type of vehicle in these parts is the ordinary sedan.
The scenery we passed was varied. We caught some marvelous sweeping vistas of rolling hills, valleys with rivers or creeks at the bottom of them, and, as we got further north, more views of the Rockies at quite a distance to our left. The vegetation included clumps of deciduous trees, but more and more we saw large tracts of land bristling with pine trees — very dense and spiky, like stalagmites, column-shaped instead of cone-shaped, and not very tall. I kept scanning the roadsides for wildlife and came up almost empty, until a lone deer made a brief appearance by the road.
We chuckled at the display some wag had made on the roadside, selecting two evergreens of a more traditional Christmas tree shape, and draping them with tinsel garlands and decorations that glittered in the sun! They stood out like Dolly Parton at a nunnery!
At one turn of the highway, as we descended into a valley, we could see the town of Taylor on the other side, with a suspension bridge between us and it over the mighty Peace River, and the whole community spread out before us, complete with its huge $40 million natural gas scrubbing plant that supplies western Canada and the state of Washington with what I suppose is really clean gas. Still haven’t quite figured out how you scrub a liquid, but that’s what the tourist brochure says. There’s gas and oil all over this part of the province, and lots of heavy machinery and services for them. It’s very manly environment, with muddy trucks, tattoo parlours, beer establishments and truck stops that serve plain, good food in large quantities. "10,000 truckers can’t be wrong!" boasted the gas station-restaurant we stopped at in Pink Mountain. They charged us $1.30 a litre for our diesel fuel, which caused Val’s jaw to drop. The man at the counter said we should fuel up next in Fort Nelson because there were some real gougers further up the way... we wondered what he was if he wasn’t one himself.
There’s no wi-fi connection at the Fort Nelson Fifth Wheel Truck Stop and RV Park, where we are camping tonight and tomorrow, but we learned, during our short jaunt through town after supper, that the tourist information centre and public library are both so equipped. So we’ll post this tomorrow and check our e-mails when we get within range. The most noteworthy thing we saw was the local arena and recreation centre, all barricaded and closed because heavy snow and ice this past spring caused the roof to cave in. Work equipment was on the site starting the repairs. The large arena looked like a giant foot had stomped on the corrugated metal roof. The student staff at the visitor centre told us that on the day of the cave-in, some kids were playing hockey inside when they noticed a crack developing. They went ahead and finished the last two minutes of the game before vacating the building. Fortunately, no one was hurt!