We are now north of Dawson Creek and officially on the Alaska Highway. We have come about a thousand miles into Canada and tonight we are staying in Pink Mountain, British Columbia. Pink Mountain is a small outpost in a sea of trees. We are thinking it is probably named for its most famous home town band, Pink Flyod. They were a popular band in the early 40’s. Consisted of a rhythm guitar a kazoo and a wash tub bass. We saw a movie at Dawson Creek about building this road. The truck route was finished in 1943; at least to the point that trucks could be drug through the worst spots with cats. The best travel was in the winter but -70 temperatures meant that the Diesel fuel turned to jelly and you left the engines running all the time or you would never get them started again. The permafrost under the roads turned to loblolly mud three foot deep. My imagination just won’t stretch far enough to encompass the incredible hardship involved. Roads were often built over a corrugated log base. That is six to eight inch logs laid side by side across the road and then covered with a foot of gravel. We picked up a fair sized chunk of gravel ourselves today; in our right windshield. It made a star pattern about the size of a baseball.

The weather is holding nice for us. A couple of rainy evenings, but mostly sunny or overcast for our driving. The roads are incredibly good. Even the spot where we were hit by flying gravel had to be the only rock on the pavement and it came across two lanes of traffic to nail us. We are being told of frost heaves above Whitehorse, so we will see how much it slows us down when we get there.

Wednesday, June 13th

We have arrived in Fort Nelson, and we are very close to Yukon Territory, so we are getting into the Great White North Country. We have Wi-Fi at the visitor center, so I will send this off. We are all having a great time and the weather is perfect.

Love from Gary, Judy, Sonja and Jack.