June 12, 2016. Beaver Creek, Yukon
Hello everyone! The phone and internet connections have been quite sparse. I am in Beaver Creek, Yukon now, just 20 miles from the Alaskan border. What an adventure getting here! The days have sort of blurred into each other, so I think I will just make some general observations and show some of the better pictures from the last 6 days.
I gave a talk in Whitehorse to a very enthusiastic crowd of about 20 people.
JWST Talk at Public Library in Whitehorse
Afterward, a nice fellow named Ryan offered to put us up at the Mount Logan Lodge, just past Haines Junction. How could I turn that down?!!
What a FANTASTIC place! If you are traveling near Haines Junction, be sure to check this place out. They can set you up with an airplane tour (including a landing) of the largest fresh-water glacier outside of the poles, fishing trips, and just general fun in the area. Here is the view from the deck at this lodge:
Mount Logan Lodge
Now for some more details. As I am sure you know, every blog has the occasional “rant.” Well, this is mine. I would call the last 7 days as the “Week when everything broke.”
Where do I begin? I’ll start with when the Ravens attacked our food stash and destroyed about 1/2 of what we had to eat. Then, when cooking dinner, I noticed a hole in my cooking pot.
I need to backtrack a bit and point out that I have the most hi-tech cooking pot known to human kind. It has a metal bottom, but rubber sides so it can collapse. Imagine the miracle of making this pot work. Combining rubber with metal, and temperatures around 400 degrees F. How can the makers do this so it doesn’t come apart in the heat? Rubber and metal combined, at high temperatures.
When cooking some pasta, I noticed the water squirting out of the side of the pot, down onto the stove… through the hole in the side of the pot. What? A hole in the side of the pot? But how? And why? Wait–I know: because it’s made out of RUBBER! Rubber! But now, what do I cook in? Not having that pot means almost nothing can be prepared–no Ramen noodle, no pasta. Nothing. I tried experimenting with a coffee can, but instead tried patching the hole with duct tape. Why not? If you can make a cooking pot out of RUBBER, then why not use duct tape? You know, it did the trick.
In partial defense of the manufacturers of the pot, it seems that the Ravens might have chewed through the rubber:
Ravens eating my pot
So, perhaps it was the bird’s fault.
Then, the zipper in my tent broke. I am no longer able to zip it shut. Can you imagine the implications of a tent that you cannot seal in the freakin YUKON? They set steel traps here for mosquitoes. I used to have a T-shirt that said, “I gave blood in the Yukon.” Whew. I ended up using some wire to seal the tent, and eventually added some Velcro, which is OK. But I have a lot of bites.
Then, the strap on my bike shoe broke off. Without those shoes, the ride is over. I thought about trying to wire the strap back on, but then remembered what Doug Leviton told me about super glue, and its effect on rubber. It turns out that it can create a near-perfect bond between rubber parts. I used an alcohol wipe from my first aid kit to clean the parts up, and used a generous amount of super-glue. So far it has held.
Then–and I get choked up just thinking about this (sob)–my bike computer reset, all on its own. The distance that I bike is a big part of the ride. I need the odometer to work, and to be accurate. Fortunately, I know what number it had when it reset. So, I just subtracted that number from 3000, and I will bike that distance and reset the odometer again. Then, from now on, I just have to add 3000 to the reading to get the actual distance, insead of some random number. But it was a real kick in the head to lose this important metric for the ride.
Well, enough ranting. Now for some pictures. Here are a couple taken on the way to Destruction Bay:
Near Destruction Bay
We have cycled about 30 miles recently on dirt roads. Most of them have been OK, but about 10 of them were really bad wash-board. The result is minimal for the ride–a little slower and a bit more fatigue at the end of the day. But the RV’ers have a much harder time of things than the cyclists do:
30 miles of dirt roads
Frost heaves have become an issue, as I was warned:
Frost heaves
What a beautiful place!
After a heavy rain storm, I saw this post-card vista:
A humbling experience to see this gandeur.
I will close with the picture of Kluane Lake, taken by Elizabeth:
Best Picture ever
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Duct tape, super glue, and math (subtraction)…the tools required to build a dream!
Stuff breaks. Dreams live. Keep rolling.