June 24, 25

Denali was made a park in 1917; in 1921 seven people visited the park.  Today there are about 575,000 visitors each year.  If you have ever been to Yosemite in the summer it seems like there are that many people every day.

The vast expanse of this 6 million acre park are hard to describe.  My apologies for not posting more photos but it is hard to do in camp.  I intend to sum this whole trip up in photos afterward.  I expect you all to hold me to that.

We were able to book three seats on the park bus for Sunday so Saturday we took a five mile hike near the front of the park.  At the midpoint  we watched a demonstration of the sled dogs that are used in the park in the winter.  They are not the sleek racing teams that get attention but strong working teams of real Alaskan Huskies.  These dogs overheat when it is 10 degrees above zero.  In the summer they have short coats and sleep in the warm days.  The dog lovers had a great time walking around and petting the dogs.  When the dogs knew it was time to work they got very excited but only five of the 33 got the call.  They ran around a short loop pulling a wheeled training cart and loved every minute.

The hike in the boreal forest was very nice.  There are basically three trees, spruce, aspens and willows.  There are a lot of different flowers with the most predominant being the wild rose.  There are blue, purple, pink, red, white and yellow; most of which I cannot identify right now.  It is very green here and the contrast with the gray, red and gold rocks is awesome.  There are also numerous lichen varieties and a few mushrooms that we saw.  The only wildlife we saw were squirrels and birds.

On Sunday we boarded our bus to ride to Eilson visitor center at mile 66.  The road goes back to mile 85.  The start of the ride was a bit boring because we did not see any animals the first hour.  things changed.  The views were spectacular though.  At one point we could glimpse the base of the large paeks but that was all.  Only 30% of visitors get to see the peaks and this June has been unusually poor with only two days were the peak has been seen.

At about the midpoint of the trip in things got better, we saw Dall sheep up on the steep mountain sides.  First there were two and then there were four more.  I had binoculars so I could see them fairly well and verified that they were yews and their babies, the males were not around as is normal in the spring and summer.  The sheep sure can move fast up steep terrain.  I remarked to Justin that these sheep are the hardest animal to hunt with a bow and that sparked a conversation with a man from Wisconsin who is a bowhunter.  We traded tales for a while.

That is one of the cool things about the bus, you meet people from different places and share a bit of your life with them.  There was a young lady at the start that said she was from Cleveland and I shared that i grew up there and I learned that she went to Holy Cross High School which was a few miles from my childhood home.  We used to say that is where all of the ‘fun’ girls went but I have no firsthand knowledge of that.

after the Dall sheep we came to a point where we saw caribou.  There was a male sitting on a snow patch and nearby was a small herd.  It turns out that the caribou lay on the snow patches to drive the insects off of them.  A bit later we saw a larger group of caribou moving up a mountain to the snow.  They kept coming and there were at least a hundred.  On the other side of the road a grizzly was snoozing in the brush.  He raised his head a bit now and then but he was not that entertaining.  Our driver, on the other hand, was very entertaining.  Sandy B. loved her job and the whole vibe of conservation and Denali and had a great narration of the trip.

After a few minutes the grizzly alerted, he was smelling something to our left.  Shortly a sow and two cubs from last year appeared and he made a hasty retreat to the road and it turns out he blocked traffic behind us for a while.  We watched the mom and cubs for a few minutes and moved on.  They bears were a bi far away so any photos will have to be manipulated to zoom them in. I will do that after this trip.

Meanwhile, the scenery was still spectacular as we neared our turnaround point.  We spent a half hour there and enjoyed the views, some lunch and the visitor center.  Back on the bus we all got to see the view from the other side and it never disappointed.  We came back to the grizzly area and they were still there. The mom and cubs were napping in the brush and the male was snoozing next to the road.  We stopped to wait for other buses in the opposite direction and when our turn to pass the bear came he was up and grazing right next to the road so I got some good video of him. He did not give a shit that we were there; or he is paid to pretend that.

We came back by the large caribou herd and watched some of them go over the mountain to the other side.  After that the ride got a bit unexciting and some people were dozing, me included.  After my head bounced against the window enough I was awake again and scanning for animals.  About ten miles from the end the hunter from Wisconsin cried wolf and sure enough, there was a black wolf on our left.  We stopped and watched it cross behind us and into the brush and gone.  In the whole park there are about 350 grizzlies and we saw four; there are 49 wolves and we saw one, a rare treat for a bus load of people.  It was a great, scenic, ride a worth all of the $44 cost.  It had rained where we parked our bikes but we had no rain all day but never saw the peaks.  A local told us the best month is March to see the mountain.

After our day in the park we went north a few miles to Healy and had dinner at the 49th State Brewery.  There Green Horn IPA is pretty good and we had one of the better meals we have had.  When traveling one’s eating habits can deteriorate.  I try and get salad or vegetables often but in Alaska salads have been overpriced disappointments until today.  The house salad was finally more than a few roadside weeds and a tomato and had great greens and other vegetables.  I also had caribou sausage (I hope I was not eating wang) and it was very good.  I got a taste of Yak meat and it was amazing; lean and tasty and better than any beef I have had.

Since we have been here three nights it is striking how that late afternoon has been the best part of the day.  The sun burns through the clouds and it is warm and sunny.

Just as I m about to close this a rider we met, Aaron, popped in.  He is from New Zealand and shipped his KTM500 to the tip of South America last August and has ridden all the way up to the Arctic Ocean and is now here at Denali.  Aaron is hardcore and travels light, a true adventure biker.

Tomorrow we head to Anchorage.  I will change my oil and head to the Seward Peninsula.  The weather forecast is not that great but we signed up for this.  Are we men or mice?

June 23

Friday morning we woke to a cloudy day in the high 50s.  After packing the bikes we went to the lodge for coffee and found the lone waitress busy because the cook did not show up so she had to do everything.  Reliable help can be hard to find in Alaska.  We served ourselves and then hit the road.

We were riding west to Denali and into the clouds that looked like rain.  The road had evidence of rain and for a while we were riding just behind it.  The gravel road was good and the rain held the dust down so we were riding about 45mph.  After an hour we hit several areas of road work and had to stop and wait for the pilot car.  Once past that we hit more rain and wetter roads.  After about 60 miles we stopped at a little lodge and had coffee and their modest food offering – a Jimmy Dean’s breakfast sandwich.

We were riding through the middle of nowhere.  The feeling of remoteness was very high even though people were around.  If something happened it could be awhile before anyone could help.  The scenery was amazing with the mountain ranges in the distance and the numerous streams running in the valleys.  There were still very few trees and mostly shrubs.  There is no place to hide in this country if the weather soured.

After we left the lodge the road conditions became a bit muddy and I had a few moments of concern with my tires sliding.  My riding partner had it much worse because Justin had street oriented tires.  At one point he and Alla disappeared from my mirror so I stopped.  About the time I was going to turn back there was Justin, Alla had to get off and walk so that he could manage the slippery mud.  The poorest conditions did not last long and they were able to ride two up but we were crawling about 15 mph.  After half an hour the road began to improve and we could ride at 40 mph.  Then, the last 20 miles to paved road things got really good and we could ride at the 50mph speed limit.  We got to Cantwell and sped north to a campground just outside Denali.  It felt good to be on smooth pavement at 70 and in no time we arrived.

The camping options at 4pm around Denali are few so we settled for a site that we had to walk down a hill to reach.  There is no place flat enough for two tents but there is a raised pavilion that we set our tents on.  The cool thing is that we have a roof above us and the chance of rain is high.  we will be here a few days to explore Denali.

We spent all day riding the 110 miles of gravel on the  Denali Highway and at times it was a bit stressful but the experience of crossing this desolate place and viewing the amazing scenery was well worth it.  My dirt riding experience has grown some more and through it all the marvelous BMW GS just flat performs its duty.

The mileage was short today, about 140 miles but the challenging dirt road makes it seem like three times that distance.  We are hoping to be able to see the peak of Denali but the weather forecast is not in our favor for the next few days – stay tuned.

The day dawned clear and warm in Chena Hot Springs.  We went to bed about 1am so we slept in and got a later start than usual, 11am.  The ride back to Fairbanks was very scenic and going the other way let us see things we had not seen going in.

Justin needed a new rear tire and we went to Adventure Cycle Works and Dan Armstrong got right to it.  He operates out of his house and has a reputation for helping riders in need and he speaks his mind so he can be a little hard on some people.  We had lunch and went to Trail’s End BMW to see the place before we headed south to Delta Junction and the Richardson Highway.

It is a dull ride to Delta but once on the Richardson things get a lot more interesting; you are headed straight for the Alaska Range of mountains and they are an impressive wall of peaks.  The road winds toward them and offers up some fun whoop dee dos and corners.  We spotted several moose on the way.  The road winds through a split in the range and as we headed there the weather looked like it could get ugly at any time.  The big storm to the west stayed over that way and a smaller one to the east we edged around.

At Paxson we turned west onto the Denali Highway headed for the park.  My GPS displayed a knife and fork at Paxson but it is wrong.  The place is deserted.  By now I had the feeling of really being in the boonies.  From Paxson we followed the Tangle river valley which is nearly treeless, mostly shrubs and had an ominous feeling with storms in the distance that looked like we were riding into them.  If it gets rough there is no place to shelter.  The mountains all around are very rugged.  We planned to camp about 20 miles in until we got to the Tangle River Inn and inquired about a room.  It is a bit pricey but with the weather looking iffy we decided to stay there.  This place has been here 53 years and feels very isolated, but beautiful.

Dinner we walked down to the lake to look at flowers and whatever, in broad daylight at 10:30pm.  We watched several beavers swim in the lake and wheN I made a little squeaky sound on turned and swam toward us.  We coaxed him into about 20 yards away and got some photos, then he slapped his tail on the water and dove under, very cool.

Today we rode about 270 miles.  Tomorrow we ride the Denali Highway for about 100 dirt miles and then about 30 miles to the park.

Tuesday we I awoke to rain in Coldfoot.  At the next camp there were five other people riding four bikes that came form the D2D.  Three of them were set on riding to Deadhorse so they were going to wait the day and see how the weather panned out.  I was on the fence since the road reports were a bit concerning.  One of the riders, Aaron was on a KTM500 he shipped to the tip of South America and has been riding since last August up to here.  Nothing is going to stop him from getting to Deadhorse, he is hard core.  The other two are Canadians, Andrew on a new BMW F850 that is a replacement of his F800 from when he hit a moose.  John is on an F650.

Justin and Alla are from Portland on a water cooled R1200GSA and are not going to chance the rest of the Dalton Highway on there street oriented tires.

It rained on and off most of the day Tuesday but started to break around 4pm so we all went ten miles north to Weiseman.  There is a lodge there that is not ever very busy and an old sourdough that has mined in the area since the late 40s.  He was willed the land by the man he mined with and now keeps a bit of a museum that has cool old mining equipment and memorabilia from his years up there.  He has a pile of pay dirt and free panning so a few of us tried and I found a few flakes.  He said that the pile had been gone through with a metal detector so there was nothing big left.

Wednesday dawned clear as a bell.  I was game for the rest of the Dalton but the report on the last 50 miles with construction and softball to helmet sized rocks was not my idea of the way to end a 250 mile day.  The temperature in Deadhorse was also 20F; I don’t think if I wore all of my gear I could manage 20 degrees.  I decided not to go.  Aaron, Andrew and John headed north at 7am.  Justin, Alla and I head back to Fairbanks about 9am.  The ride was one of the best ever.  There are paved sections of the Dalton that range from good road to not so good.  There are dips and heaves and portions where half of the lane is breaking off and trying to fall back into the muskeg.  The dirt sections are gravel to packed clay and offer every kind of surface you can imagine.  It was a blast.  The gravel still makes me a bit nervous when the bike skates around.  The packed clay is almost like pavement but a bit more unpredictable.  For 200 miles the road forced total concentration to watch the surface and scan the edges for animals.  At times i was ripping up to 70 mph on the dirt exploring what the GS could do.  I had the suspension set on ‘large mountains’ (preload all the way up both ends) the suspension and tires soaked up everything and we were setting a great brisk pace.  The day was beautiful with scattered puffy clouds and mid 60s temperatures.  An epic ride.

South of Livengood the paved road offered up about 40 miles of high speed sweepers that were punctuated with some pavement irregularities.  We had a blast.  Back to Fairbanks we stopped for groceries and some IPA and headed to Chena Hot Springs.

The 60 miles there was not a challenging road but it sure is scenic.  We arrived at about 5:30 and set camp in a nice forested area.

I set up my fly rod for the first time and went down to the creek to fish.  At first I was trying to use a dry fly to imitate some of the local insects I saw but there was no surface action at all.  I switched to a Prince nymph and the first drift, bang, a nice 12 inch Grayling.  Another fifteen minutes and I caught two more, the last about 16 inches.  I stopped fishing to go have a soak in the hot spring pool.  Man was that good.  After the hard ride we had of about 350 miles today it was great to relax in the hot water.  There was a hot water jet that was a great back massage.

On the way here I passed the 5000 mile mark.  My new riding friends need to get a rear tire and then we are going to Paxton and ride the Denali Highway into Cantwell and then the park.  The weather looks to be in our favor for the next week of going to Denali.

I awoke in the comfortable bed at the U of AK.  It never got dark and I am glad I bought an eye shade.  You must force yourself to go to sleep.  I got the bike packed and got on the road about 9am and had breakfast about 20 miles outside Fairbanks.  The day was mostly sunny and the mornign was in the mid 50s.  My destination is Coldfoot which is a bit over half way to Deadhorse at Prudhoe Bay.

The weather and road conditions could not have been better.  The Dalton Highway begins about 45 miles north of Fairbanks.  It starts out paved and then becomes dirt.  The dirt road is in very good condition and eventually it changes to pavement again.  The pavement can have areas that are in retty poor condition.  There is no time which you cannot be concentrating on the road surface and scanning the sides for animals.  I saw a  moose in the road that I had to stop for.  About 20 miles from Coldfoot there is road construction so the conditioins where a bit iffy at times.  I had the crap scared out of me only once when I hit a long stretch of deep gravel and the bike wallowed around in it. Lesson learned.

The vast expanses seen on this ride are almost indescribable.  The elevations are not that high and change constantly from a few hundered feet above sea level to about 2200 feet.  At the Yukon River crossing the elevation is about 330 feet and the river has another thousand miles to flow.  The road is another corridor of trees but often times the spruce trees are very stunded and no taller then me.  The are also aspen trees mixed in.  There are a number of different wildflowers; fireweed, lupin, yellow flowers and some white ones I don’t know.  I rode 259 miles today but it seems like a lot more on dirt.

I am camped at Marioin Creek BLM campground amongst the spruce and aspen, which are larger here. The elevation is about 800 feet and we are at the foot of the Brooks Range.  The sun is shinning brightly and has been very warm all afternoon, it is about 7:30 now.

One of the things I have noticed is that there must be some kind of state sport here: shooting road signs.  It is frequent in different areas the are less populated.  I have not figured out the scoring system yet but i think that warning signs are off limits but speed limit and information signs are not.  I don’t know if a nice shotgun pattern scores higher than holes from high caliber rounds.  Maybe the internet can help here.

I have ridden just under 4700 miles so far and the bike has been flawless the whole way.  The Mitas E-07 tires I chose are doing very well.  When new the rear tire had 12mm of tread depth and at 4000 miles the depth has 9-9.5mm, excellent wear.  On the dirt roads these tires do very well.  For road use I have the pressures at 36-37psi front and 42psi rear.  Dropping to 32/36 for the dirt really improves the traction and instills more confidence in this dirt rookie.

June 18

The photo is of the Tanana River and the Alaska Range beyond.  The camera did not capture the lighting as I saw it and I have not altered the exposure, maybe when I return I will try.  The channel in the foreground is a smaller arm of the main channel seen towards the top.  The river is very wide.

During the night there was a good thunderstorm and it rained very hard.  In the morning there was no rain and it was cloudy with some sun poking out.  I had turned in early and slept late, it felt good.  I got on the road at about 8:30 to Delta Junction, 100 miles away.  There I had a nice breakfast that lasted the rest of the day.

The night before I had gotten my IPA fix by buying some Twister Creek IPA from Denali Brewing Co.  At the liquor store (that is where you get alcohol in AK) they had to see my ID and they recorded my birth date.  I went next door to the gun store and they asked how many I wanted and if I needed help carrying them out of the store. JK. But, guns are big here because many people need then for protection from big animals.

The ride to Fairbanks was another 100 miles.  The whole trip was another day of riding through a hallway of trees with a few openings for views.  Around Tok the Wrangell mountains are off to the south but as you head northwest the Alaska Range takes over.  This is the valley of the Tanana River with many other rivers feeding into it and the elevation is about 1500 feet.  Most of the rivers are very wide sand/gravel channels that have a main water course and many little ones.  They are flat and not moving that fast but there can be a lot of water in them.  I mentioned that the Yukon River started at about 2100 feet but it loses almost half that elevation by the time it gets to Dawson.  When I cross it again tomorrow it should be pretty slow.

I expected to see some large animals today but there were absolutely none.  Many squirrels and rabbits but nothing else.  The ride into Fairbanks took me past Eielson Air Force Base where the Alaska Air National Guard operates.  There were four-engine cargo-type jets, I imagine some are tankers, F-16s and A-10s.  I understand the cargo and F-16s but the A-10 is a ground attack aircraft.  I guess if the Ruskies ever launch an amphibious assault up here we can use them for that.

I am staying in a dorm room at the Univ. of Alaska, Fairbanks.  Many riders do this so you can meet others going your way, which is what I hope to do.  The room is $41 with tax and has free laundry facilities, it is a good deal for those on a budget.  I am sitting here eating spicy tuna roll that I bought at the local market and will have a quiet evening.

Tomorrow I am heading up the Dalton Highway to Prudhoe Bay.  I will go about halfway of the 500 miles and stay the night at a campground.  Once I leave there the next day I will be in the most serious desolation until I get to Deadhorse.  I will get a room at Deadhorse because it is not recommended to camp there, too many polar bears around.  The next morning I will take a tour bus to the Arctic Ocean before turning back south again.  You have to take the tour bus because Prudhoe Bay is an oil town and not open to the public.  The tour is reserved in advance so that they can do a background check on the passengers, otherwise you cannot go.

It will be several days before I am back in civilization.  See you then.

The Dust to Dawson activities happened on Friday.  They consisted of a Poker Run through the gold country, a banquet and biker games.  The poker run has a set number of stops and at each stop the rider draws a card from the deck that has been split up for each stop.  The winner of the $500 prize had four queens.

I skipped the poker run to go to the free mining claim to pan for gold. The signs were hard to find and I may have been on the wrong claim, too bad.  I found a few flakes and a little nugget about the size of two sesame seeds.  I also found an interesting tiny silver-gray cube that is probably platinum.  After panning a while I then went and walked through some of the endless tailings from the bucket dredges.  Large nuggets that were washed out with the tailings are regularly found in these piles, which go on for miles.  I had no luck.  A metal detector would be good for this endeavor.  It is amazing how much ground was processed by these giant dredges from about 1920 to the 50s.  The tailings are pretty barren and there is not that much that grows on them.

The banquet was a nice steak dinner with baked spud and five different kinds of salad; I ate lots of salad.

The biker games had about three dozen participants and consisted of: a slow race; blindfold event where you had to stop on a paper plate, the crowd helped direct; and a slalom.  Then there was competition with a passenger.  The first test was to have the passenger throw two water balloons over a bar and catch them on the other side.  The grand finale had the passenger try and take a bite from a hotdog suspended above.  The passengers were female, so use your imagination.  The crowd thought it great fun; I am not so sure.  The favorite was a woman who has won it several times before by biting off the longest length of hotdog.  After 31 other contestants were eliminated a local girl was the challenger; in all of her twenty-something tattoos and piercings, and she won.  You might say that girl could inhale some weiner.

At midnight the official Dust to Dawson stickers were handed out.  If my bike is ever clean again I will put it on.  After that I went back to my tent cabin and went to bed at about 12:30; it was still broad daylight.  The midnight sun is nuts, the photo at the top is looking across the Yukon River at 12:15AM.

I got up the next morning about 7am and made ready to ride to Alaska.  The day was sunny with high clouds and was just perfect.  There is a ferry across the Yukon River from Dawson to the Top of the World Highway into Alaska.  I got some cool GoPro footage of the ferry ride; ther were about 20 bikes on it.  We hit the other side and rode the dirt rode about 100 miles to the border.  It really is on top of the world.

The road undulates up and down the low mountains that the lead to Chicken Alaska.  The spruce trees are small and are more like fuzzy sticks than trees and they peter out as the higher peaks get to about 4000 feet.  We rode between 1500 and 4200 feet above sea level on this route.  It was very scenic and I could ride at over 50mph in some places.  That is pretty amazing considering my scant dirt experience.  At the border crossing we waited over an hour, everyone is a suspect entering the U.S.  The cars and RVs were getting more scrutiny but the motorcycles were processed quickly.  The guard said ‘Welcome home’.

After the border we hit some rain and hail but it didn’t last long.  We skirted rain clouds on and off for a while into Chicken.  I stopped for lunch to have the famous chicken pot pie.  There is the ‘original’ chicken with the great pot pie, a little store with great stickers for one’s panniers and a bar/liquor store.  They had Lagunitas IPA, Elysian Space Dust and others.  I knew I was home when I saw real IPA.  I have been going through IPA withdrawal.  Sorry Canada, your beer sucks, it is fizzy yellow water.  Chicken exists only because there is gold being mined mined, it is a pretty rich area. In the winter the road closes and no one is there.  They did tell me that three people stayed the winter in the bush.  The pie was very good and I moved on toward Tok Alaska and am camped about 15 miles north at Moon Lake.  The dirt road in the U.S. is not nearly as good as in Canada, go figure.  Well, at least we have several thousand M1 Abrams tanks we will never use.

The lake is very scenic and my neighbor said there have been moose swimming across it.  I have not seen any.  There are a couple of families at the recreation area and they are very loud.  I sense that they are the types of families that are ‘wards of the state’.  I saw one kid that was maybe 12 smoking his pot pipe, great.

Tomorrow I head to Fairbanks and then to Prudhoe Bay.  I rode exactly 200 miles today.

June 15

Besides my interest in the gold rush history of the Klondike I planned this trip to be here for the annual motorcycle gathering shortened to D2D.  This is the 25th year commemorating the journey of two life long motorcycle friends.  One rode here with the ashes of the other.  They made a pact to do this after their epic journey to the north some years ago.  Look it up and read their story.

It is almost 10pm and all day more motorcycles have trickled into town.  This gathering is intentionally loosely organized and there will be over 300 when all is said and done.  I am in the midst of some real hard core motorcycle travelers.  My occasional week of ten day trips are nothing compared to a lot of the riders here.  many have been coming for years and it is their annual meeting place.  Coming from San Diego is pretty far but there are several from Florida and even a couple from Germany that started in Nova Scotia.  The starter on their 1995 R100GS failed a thousand miles ago and they had one shipped here and the bike is repaired.

We awoke this morning in our tent cabin and it was about 40F.  I turned on the heater and in o time we were more than warm.  We spent a lazy morning with our neighbors in the other tents and cabins drinking coffee and were treated to some guitar from my new friend Moe.  He is a good musician.  The guys in the next tent are hard core motorcycle travelers from Alberta.  They did not know they had a heater because one of them piled all of his riding gear on it.  We had a fun morning and then walked into town for a late breakfast.

About a stone’s throw from the cabins is the place where Tony Beets is readying his barge to go 100 miles upstream and retrieve another gold dredge to bring back to life.  There were some workmen there and I asked if Tony was around and they said ‘you never know’.  We poked around town after breakfast and I browsed around some of the shops before making my way back to camp.  I took care of a few things like sealing my leaking boot with the silicon gasket sealer I got in Whitehorse.  I have been taking a different street most times I go to or from the main part of town so to see the different parts.  It is about 8 by 10 streets in size.

Later in the day I was returning to town and stopped at the barge and chatted with Shamus, who works for Tony.  He had a lot of great information.  His family has mined up here since the 80s and he is not in it to get rich but because he loves the lifestyle.  He told me I just missed Tony but he would be back.  I went into the area where the motorcycle event is centered and met Peter once again and he introduced me to his friends that met him there and we visited for a while.

I made my way back to the camp to see what were the plans for the evening and I was struck by something that mesmerized me with Dawson.  It was around 7pm and the the sun was high in the sky filled with broken clouds.  Yesterday a fire started in the gold country from a lightning strike and it had cast a slight haze over the area the did something to the sunlight that made the surrounding forested peaks dazzling.  The colors were amazing and the incessant flow of the Yukon River was surreal.  I took a number of pictures but i doubt if they captured the moment.  I passed the barge area again and Shamus told me I just missed Tony.

Back in town I met Peter again at the Aurora Hotel and he said I just missed Tony by two minutes.  He was there having a beer and his wife came in a got him.  Dang me misfortune.  After that I was wondering what to do next and decided to go to Diamond Tooth Gertie’s and see the show.  It was an old fashioned can can show and I suppose worth the $12 Canadian.

Tomorrow the motorcycles events will happen topped off with the group photo at midnight.  I have to find some 5 hour energy.  I will make one more trek into the gold country to pan for gold.  it is also recommended to walk around in the tailings piles that are everywhere and look for nuggets.  A local told me that a few years ago someone found a fist sized nugget in the tailings.  I think I will get up early.

Today’s mileage: zero.

June 13

What a cool place is Dawson.  A lot of old buildings that are in use, or not.  I have poked around the town a bit and will do more later.  I now comprehend that I really am in a remote area.  There are a lot of people around here but if you go out of town it is wilderness, big time.

I went to bed last night at 10:30 and there was a beam of sunlight coming in under the rain  fly.  If you have never been this far north in the summer it is eery.  I puton my eye shade and fell asleep.  I stayed in my bag until 8am, it was great.  I spent a lazy morning making coffee and having a shower and then into town for lunch.  I went to the coin operated shower and at first it would not start, it kept rejecting my coin.  If you have ever used one you know that you get all nekid and hop in as soon as it starts.  I wasa thinking I would have to move to another one but it finally accepted my twony (slang for $2 Canadian coin).  It felt good in the hot water, it was 37F outside.

I went to the Yukon mining office and got a map of the gold fields and talked with some mine inspectors about how to get back to see Parker Schnabel’s and Tony Beets’ operations.  I plan to make a day of going into the gold country tomorrow.  It has been dry here and the dirt roads are in great shape so it should be great fun to see those operations as well as the other attractions like the first strike on Bonanza Creek.  You are allowed to pan at Bonanza #6 so that is part of my tour tomorrow.  We are camped on Bonanza Creek just before is enters the Klondike River and I tryed a few pans today but got no gold.  The rocks sure are pretty.

Right now I am just taking it easy and doing a load of laundry.  It feels good to have a break from up at the crack of dawn, pack the bike and ride all day.  By now my body is adjusting to the routine.  The first week my ass was not happy at the end of the day but now it seems that my Saddlemen seat has broken in and I am much better.  At the end of the day it is still a bit uncomfortable but not nearly what it had been.  My main discomfort is my shoulder muscles after a few hours of riding.  My throttle lock helps a lot so that I can move both arms to help with the stiffness as I ride.  Without it my right arm would never get a chance to relax.  It is not nearly as good as the real cruise control on my newest bike because you have to keep correcting for up and down hills but it a welcome relief non the less.

I just got back from a nice dinner and stolling around the town.  I had a nice salad with a fillet of salmon.  During traveling I always try to eat vegetables regularly but it is not easy when you camp.  It is the warmest part of the day at 9pm, crazy.  It is now 10pm and the sun is still as bright as can be.  The day was sunny and crisp, it was 56 degrees at 3pm and 62 degrees at 8pm.  It is supposed to get slightly below freezing tonight so it will be the coldest night yet.  I am off to bed so I can ride around the gold country tomorrow.