hope this isn't too long, if so I'll do a part 2a & 2b
Alcan
It is estimated that only 20% of the existing Alcan Highway follows the original route and grades, and the original 1,700 miles has been cut to less than 1,400 by realignment of the road over the years.
Today the Alcan Highway is promoted as a scenic drive that offers a way to enjoy the Yukon’s beauty, culture, and history including the role of gold in the growth of the territory.
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Thirty-one years after the Alcan Highway was opened to the public in 1948…
It’s the late spring of 1979 and I’m pulled over to the side of the Alcan Highway, about a half mile past the border post, inside Canada’s Yukon Territory. I’m driving a 1971 Ford F-100 pickup truck with a three-on-the-tree manual transmission that I had bought in Anchorage. The advantage of having a pickup truck with a manual three-on-the-tree transmission, meaning the shift lever is on the steering column with three forward gears and reverse, is that there is no shift stick coming out of the middle of the floor, so three people can comfortably ride in the cab.
I had taken a year off between graduating from Drew College Preparatory School in San Francisco in June 1978 and the start of my freshman year at Humboldt State University in Northern California in 1979. My original plan for the year off was to become a paramedic, because I was a fan of the TV show Emergency! and I had obtained my CPR certification. But then I discovered one had to be at least eighteen to become a paramedic and I wasn’t going to turn eighteen until January of 1979. My mother knew a family in Anchorage, they agreed that I could live with them for a couple of months until I found my own housing, and that’s how I ended up in Alaska. I had many interesting experiences during my time there, but that’s another story.
I must say that memory is a quirky thing; certain events can be permanently seared into the mind’s eye with amazing vividness and are easy to recall long after the event occurred, while other memories are much fuzzier. Some memories at first seem to be entirely accurate, but end up being completely off base, because impartial facts present themselves, often at the strangest of times.
As an example, for many years I couldn’t remember the exact time frame of my trip home from Alaska. At first my memory averred that I travelled in mid to late summer of 1979, July or August, but an event occurred as I was writing this story (in mid-2014) that gave me the ability to pin down, to some degree, the actual timeline of my homeward journey. What triggered that event? It was a random Facebook post asking “What was the first concert you ever attended?” I posted about the first really big multi-band concert I went to as that was the memory which I immediately recalled. Vivid images and sounds started drifting into my consciousness, as it was one hell of a Rock-n-Roll concert. I consulted Wikipedia and the concert was listed there.
The concert was Day on the Green #3 at the Oakland Coliseum on July 21, 1979, featuring Ted Nugent, Aerosmith, AC/DC, Frank Marino & Mahogany Rush (Marino has often been compared to Jimi Hendrix), and St. Paradise (Bass guitarist Rob Grange is best known for his work with Ted Nugent). Ted Nugent entered the stage for his set by swinging in on a "vine" and dressed only in a loin cloth, which was one of those images I will never forget. So was Angus Young of AC/DC who ran all over the stadium with his wireless electric guitar shredding strings, and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith greeted the crowd by yelling “you guys got some mighty fine (illegal drug) around here!” So I was able to determine through impartial facts that I had arrived home in San Francisco sometime in early summer-late spring, at least a few weeks before I attended Day on the Green #3, and not in late summer. Does it really matter? To me, yes it does. It helps me grasp the context of the flow of time and events in my life.
The year 1979 had its share of pivotal world events: the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania nearly had a catastrophic melt-down; 52 Americans were taken hostage in Iran, starting a political firestorm for American-Arab relations; "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" was the popular quote from Apocalypse Now; the Sony Walkman made its debut; and the Ford Pinto had a tendency to explode when hit in rear-end collisions. I remember driving my truck in Anchorage listening to the radio when the Three Mile Island incident came over the news, it was gut wrenching.
I had dropped off my two female passengers, Pam and Chris, about a half mile before the border post, officially called the “Border Crossing at Port Alcan Station”. Chris was not yet 18 and did not have papers allowing her to legally cross the border into Canada. So my passengers evaded the border post by getting out and skirting through the woods behind the post, which back then, as I recall, was little more than a hut. I had no problem crossing the border, and was basically waved through after a cursory check of my license and insurance.
The border crossings back then between the US and Canada were pretty much mere formalities; in today’s high security environment it’s difficult to imagine “the old days” of relatively unimpeded travel between the two countries. Certainly, evading a border crossing these days post 9/11 would be severely penalized, and even back in 1979 I and/or my passengers could undoubtedly have been arrested.
But tossing all risks aside, Pam & Chris made it through the woods and we rendezvoused past the border post without any problem. We had been driving all day from Anchorage and the northern summer sun gave some light throughout the night. Our route from Anchorage had been via the small towns of Glennallen (north of Valdez) and Tok, where we had officially set rubber on the Alcan Highway; if we turned left, we would have gone to Delta Junction, the northern terminus of the Alcan Highway. Several miles down the road inside the Yukon Territory we found a make-shift camping area just off the road where we pulled over and got some shut-eye. Of course, we had given no thought to re-entering the United States with an undocumented minor, or what would happen if Chris was found to be in Canada illegally. We had a very “teen” mentality: no worries and no common sense. I do seem to recall that Chris’ mother was OK with her going on the trip to the “Lower 48” and considered me to be a good kid but I don’t remember exactly how that all played out before we left, and why Chris did not have legal papers from her mother. Maybe Chris’ parents were divorced and her father refused to sign the papers requiring both parents approval, I really don’t recall.
I had befriended, among others, Pam, Chris, and another girl named Kim during my stay in Anchorage. Here is another note regarding memory- I do not recall if Chris was her real name, but I do know that Pam and Kim were their names and I remember their last names too. In the early spring of 1979 Kim’s parents had sent her down to her grandparents’ home in Montana, to get her away from bad influences, and the plan was for Pam and Chris to ride down with me to see Kim on my way home to San Francisco.
I don’t recall the exact plan, but whatever plan we did have ended up coming to naught; events along our journey through the Yukon played out quite differently than I could have possibly imagined. What was supposed to be just a few days’ drive to Montana instead became a very long and arduous ordeal.
We arose fairly early in the morning and had a simple breakfast before hitting the road again. Although the Alaska portion of the Alcan Highway was paved in the 1960s, and the entire highway is paved today, the Canadian portion was just a dirt and gravel road back in 1979. We were driving through the Kluane National Park & Reserve and the St. Elias Mountains, but at the time I had no clue about that- I just wanted to get the hell down to Montana as fast as possible. However speed was not an option on that section of the Alcan Highway.
After loading our sleeping gear back into the truck we pulled out of our make-shift camp. The St. Elias Mountains are extremely rugged and steep, and the Alcan Highway has innumerable switchbacks and hairpin turns. The mountains are densely forested with Spruce, Pine, Fir and other species, so thick it was nearly impossible to see anything other than the road. On one side there was a towering dirt and rock wall, on the other what seemed an abysmal drop. We went up to high ridges and down into glacier-cut valleys, and about the only times we saw farther than 50 feet was while going over bridges, then it was back up, up, up on the switchbacks into the forest. Some anonymous poetic soul left their musing on the craziness of the Alcan Highway’s snaking through the Yukon Mountains with this ditty:
“Winding in and winding out,
leaves my mind in serious doubt,
as to whether the lout who built this route,
was going to Hell or coming out."
At the time, I had no idea exactly where we were, even though I had a map. Once you are on the Alcan in that region of the Yukon, you pretty much have only two opposing choices of direction. On top of that, the Alcan in 1979 was not exactly teeming with vehicles, even in the spring and summer. We only saw other vehicles maybe once every hour if that. Cell phones were only in their early development- the first automatic analog cellular systems were NTT's system first used in Tokyo in 1979. So if something bad happened out there in the wilderness there would be very little hope of assistance anytime soon.
We had crossed another bridge, over the Donjek River, and were heading back uphill when, suddenly, out of nowhere, the most horrendous clamor came from the front of the truck- BAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAM, and I could keep that string of BAMs going solid for several pages but I think one gets the point. Pam & Chris were looking at me with saucer eyes, and I’m sure my eyes were bugging out too. I know my heart rate skyrocketed and any moisture there was in my mouth dried up instantly, not even giving me the courtesy of being able to swallow. I went numb.
I immediately thought a bolt or nut had come loose from the flywheel inside the manual transmission bell housing and was ricocheting around impelled by the spinning clutch assembly. I was trying to not freak out and I knew I had to keep the gas pedal pushed down to keep going as far as we could possibly go before the truck completely crapped out. The road only went uphill, uphill, uphill. I just hoped that we would keep going forward because if the truck died going uphill we were totally screwed, given the nearly nonexistent traffic on the Alcan at the time. It’s difficult after all these years to say exactly how long we were going uphill with that horrible banging noise, but I’d say it was at least a half hour. That is one of those fuzzier memories.
My mother was an Episcopalian when I was little, growing up in Center City Philadelphia until I was 11 years old. When I was 9 or 10 my mother left the church after a drug treatment program asked to use the church’s basement and the church refused. My mother was outraged by this and took a donation she was going to give to the church and instead gave it to the drug treatment program. I have always loved exploring basements, tunnels and catacombs, and I had been in the church basement and knew that it was almost entirely empty, so there seemed to be no physical reason for refusing the treatment program to be able to use the space. That was a defining moment in my life that deeply moved me and after that I was very anti-religion for many years. Later in life I found my spirituality, but climbing that remote mountain in a truck that might die at any moment caused me to start praying to whatever god there might be.
Well, my praying seemed to work and I had to thank God and the Heavens for the miracle that happened next.
Unexpectedly, the uphill grade actually leveled out for a very short distance, and just then, RIGHT THEN, the truck’s engine quit. No kidding, as soon as we got on that short flat section of the Alcan Highway, way up on a mountain with not another soul in sight, the truck died. But that’s not all of it. Not only were we on a short level section of road, but the flat section ended with the road starting to go DOWNHILL. The truck still had a little momentum going forward but if the momentum was lost the truck would have started rolling backward and that was something I did NOT want to happen. It was right on the cusp and a few feet one way or the other could have meant rolling backward instead of rolling forward, and whether one believes in a god or not, the truck had just enough momentum to make it across that level section and begin coasting downhill, going FORWARD.
We were definitely going in the right direction, forward and downhill, but we had no idea if there was another uphill section ahead or what the hell was coming to greet us. All that mattered was we were coasting forward and downhill. The switchbacks and hairpin curves and dense forest and rocks and sheer cliffs looked the same as before, but the ride was now nearly silent except for the sound of tires rolling on gravel. There was no conversation in the truck’s cab, only tightly held breaths.
We continued this way for some time, waiting for the ball to drop and the road to start going back uphill and bring us to a stop, but the road kept winding downhill. Then, the road curved again to the right, and I beheld an image that burned itself into my mind’s eye and is as vibrant now in my memory as it was in 1979. Far below and in front of us I saw a massive, ice-blue, crystal smooth lake, surrounded by green sky-high mountains, their peaks covered in pure white snow under an azure sky and blazing yellow sun. We had just entered the Kluane River valley which opens into Kluane Lake. At the time I did not have any idea what the lake was called.
I felt again as if a higher power was watching over me. I have no idea if Pam and Chris were as much in awe at the sight as I was, because we were still silent in our thoughts of what was going to happen next. We just kept coasting down, down, down around the seemingly endless curves. Eventually I could tell that the Alcan Highway was descending toward the lake, but what happened next was even more miraculous than anything else so far.
As we came around one more turn, the huge lake came back into view, but now there was an unbelievable addition to the picture. The Alcan straightened out and there was one last long downward slope, at the bottom of which was… a GAS STATION! And it was OPEN! I could not believe my eyes! I coasted my truck right into the dirt parking lot, braked to a stop, and we got out of the truck for the first time in hours. I think it was about 40 or 50 miles since the BAMBAMBAM had started, then gone silent on the Alcan Highway. At the time we did not know it, but we were at Burwash Landing on the shores of Kluane Lake. Another miracle had happened!
An attendant came out of the gas station to see what was up. I explained the BAMBAMBAM noise and that I thought it was a nut or bolt being kicked around inside the bell housing. He said “pop the hood” and on lifting the hood the inside of the engine compartment revealed it was completely coated in engine oil. Then he pointed to the left, or driver’s side, of the engine, where there was a ragged two inch diameter hole punched through from the inside. Instead of a bolt in the bell housing bouncing around, a piston rod had come loose off the crankshaft, which accounted for what sounded to me like a bolt or nut bouncing around the transmission bell housing. The loose piston rod had been bouncing off the spinning crankshaft and I don’t know for the life of me how the truck had kept going as long as it did.
Two of the elements created by basic run-of-the-mill stars, iron and carbon, now come back into the narrative, as iron interspersed with some carbon becomes steel. Steel is an alloy, or mixture, of iron and carbon and the concentration of carbon must be consistent throughout, usually 0.2 to 1.5 percent depending on the type of steel. The advantage of steel over ordinary iron is greatly improved strength.
Steel is an amazing material. By mixing in different elements besides carbon and heating and cooling it in different ways, one can create surprisingly different properties. Some steels are easily bent, while others are so brittle that they shatter. Some rust and others don't. The huge variety of steels means that they work in many different situations. Everything from a surgical scalpel to a skyscraper's massive metal frame can be made of steel. So thanks to the stars for creating these two elements which have helped build human civilization. At the time I was unaware that iron and carbon come from the forges of everyday, run-of-the-mill stars like our sun, and that gold comes from the much rarer collisions of neutron stars.
My 1971 Ford F-100 was mostly made of steel, and the engine was one big, heavy chunk of various steel components, many of which moved, endured major stresses, and got really hot. Engine pistons, even though they may seem to be fairly simple, are one of the most complex and most stressed mechanisms among all automotive components. The job of the pistons and the piston connecting rods is to change the up-and-down motion of the pistons into the rotating motion of the crankshaft which ultimately makes the vehicle move. The engine can be called the heart of a car and the piston may be considered the heart of an engine, although there are typically four to eight pistons in a standard vehicle engine.
A piston must be designed so that it can withstand the extreme heat and pressure of combustion, which is a series of controlled explosions inside the piston cylinders. Mechanical fatigue and cracks are a major source of piston damage. The bottom of the piston rod is clamped around the crankshaft and held in place with two bolts. In the case of my truck, the bottom of one piston rod came apart, because metal fatigue caused the bolts that held the piston rod onto the crankshaft to break. A simple example of metal fatigue is when you take a soda can and bend the tab back and forth until the tab breaks off. One piston stopped moving but the bottom end of that piston rod kept getting whacked by the crankshaft which ultimately punched the hole in the side of the engine block allowing engine oil to spew all over the engine compartment.
Although we had been incredibly fortunate coming over and through the St Elias Mountains, and rolling into a gas station that appeared seemingly out of nowhere, the gas station at Burwash Landing was not a repair facility- it was only a gas station and nothing more. I learned that the nearest repair garage was in Haines Junction, over seventy miles further down the Alcan Highway. The gas station guy got on the phone and called the garage, and the reply was that it would be at least a couple of hours before the tow truck could get to Burwash Landing. It was early afternoon so we poked around, relaxed, and generally enjoyed our good luck of making it across the St. Elias Mountains safe and sound. Burwash Landing is on the south shore of Kluane Lake, which stunned me so powerfully when we came around that one curve up in the mountains. Kluane Lake and the surrounding mountains were just as beautiful from the lake’s shore as they were from up in the mountains.
Burwash Landing is a very small community even today with less than 100 residents, who are mostly First Nations Aboriginal people. It was originally used as a summer camp by the Southern Tutchone Athabascans. There is a resort, fire department, Natural History museum, post office, Laundromat, church, airstrip, and the gas station. Burwash Landing does have at least one “claim to fame”: the world’s largest gold pan. However, Nome, Alaska also claims to have the world’s largest gold pan, but more websites today cite Burwash Landing, so who knows? Nome definitely takes credit for being the Iditarod sled dog race finish line. But I digress.
We wandered about waiting for the tow truck to arrive, anxious to get back on the road. Finally we saw it coming, trailing a cloud of dust. Did I mention the Alcan Highway was very dusty back then? It was almost as if one took a leisurely stroll down any road, a dust trail would follow, much like Pig Pen in the Peanuts comic. The tow truck pulled in and I went to meet the driver, and learned his name was Lorne Smith.
Lorne got my truck hooked up, and the three of us somehow managed to cram into the tow truck cab along with Lorne. It was a tight fit but we were glad to be heading down the Alcan again.
It was a two-plus hour drive to Haines Junction from Burwash Landing, with my truck in tow. Finally we pulled into the repair station, named the Star Dust Motel and Texaco, on the left side of the Alcan Highway just coming into Haynes Junction from the North West.
The Haines Junction area was a crossroads long before highways and vehicles arrived. It’s located on an early trade route used by the Coastal Tlingit and Chilkat peoples. Haines Junction was born without that name in 1942 as a direct result of the Alcan Highway’s construction as a military supply route to Alaska, although the area had been populated for thousands of years by the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, Southern Tutchone people, who also lived in Burwash Landing. In 1943 another road heading south was pushed through to the city of Haines, in the Alaska Panhandle, which officially created the community of Haines Junction in the Yukon Territory. Haines Junction’s official location on the Alcan Highway is Milepost 1016.The population has varied between 500 and 800 residents over the years.
We were relieved to finally be someplace where there was a glimmer of hope about the grim state of affairs. Lorne assessed the situation with my truck and concluded that a new short-block engine was needed, as there was no way to repair the engine with all the internal damage it had endured, not to mention the two inch hole punched through the side of the engine.
A short-block engine is an engine block with the cylinder liners, pistons, rods, and crankshaft preinstalled, but without the cylinder heads, oil pan, alternator, oil pump, water pump and other accessories. Basically a short-block is everything above the oil pan and below the cylinder head gaskets, without the external accessories. Everything needed to be removed that could be re-used from the damaged engine.
My truck, being a 1971 Ford, had a 240 cubic inch straight six engine with 150 horsepower. That was the standard engine for Ford trucks and vans produced from 1963 to 1977 and that line of engines had a reputation for extremely long life; many of those engines ran for 300,000 to 600,000 miles without any more service than standard oil changes. Obviously my truck engine’s life span was on the lower end of the bell curve, but I have no recollection of how many miles the truck had on it at the time.
After arriving at the Star Dust Motel and Texaco and assessing the situation the first thing I did was call my mother to give her a report of what happened. Lorne and his wife Mary were very nice people and let me use their phone. Lorne had gotten the cost of the short block and shipping to Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon Territory; I believe the cost was around $1,000. My mother was not too happy about that but she agreed to wire the money. The shipping time was said to be around a week, and Lorne and I were to pick up the new engine in Whitehorse, about 100 miles farther down the Alcan from Haines Junction.
Well, the week came and went, and there was no short-block engine delivered in Whitehorse. Lorne looked into it and discovered that the engine had been shipped to Montreal, Quebec, over 2,600 miles away on the east side of the continent. How the hell that happened no one could explain. But the situation required my mother to get a refund and then re-wire the money in order to get another short-block shipped to Whitehorse. It was a real mess that delayed things by more than a week, and I was starting to get pretty frantic at that point.
During all this confusion I had been sleeping in the cab of my truck, which was in Lorne’s Texaco repair shop next to the Star Dust Motel. Pam and Chris had been living out of a tent they pitched in the woods behind the motel. Lorne and Mary were kind enough to allow us to use the bathroom and shower in one of the six rooms of the motel; they lived in an attached residence. We had been marooned for something like two weeks at that point.
It was around that time when Constable Cecil B. Brandt of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police took a keen interest in our situation. It did not take him long to discover that Chris was in Canada illegally, and forthwith the RCMP took steps to deport Chris from the country and returned her to the Border Crossing at Port Alcan Station where her mother collected her; Pam also chose to return to Anchorage with Chris rather than continue down to see Kim in Montana. That was fine by me as the whole state of affairs had come unraveled. So much for a three or four day journey through Canada down to the Lower 48! But Constable Brandt now had reason to be suspicious of me.
Constable Brandt clearly did not like me, but he had nothing to pin on me. I was a nice kid, Lorne and Mary liked me (they even invited me to dinner several times), and I wasn’t a trouble maker. Lorne let me do most of the work on my truck, which at that point had been the stripping down and removal of the broken engine. I also did tire repair for him, as my last job in Anchorage was for a car rental company at the airport, where I learned to use a tire machine and balancer. In Lorne’s shop I also learned to repair split rims. The Alcan in 1979 was not paved so there was a lot of work to keep me busy repairing tires. In addition, Lorne had a large piece of equipment next to his shop, I think it was a road grader or something along those lines, that needed work and he put me on that as well. All of this work he was giving me helped offset the cost of the repairs to my truck. Unfortunately I did not keep that fact to myself.
Finally the re-shipped short-block engine arrived in Whitehorse, about 3 weeks after my arrival in Haines Junction. Lorne and I drove down in his pickup to get it, but I had other business in Whitehorse besides the engine. Canadian Immigration had been alerted that there was an eighteen year old male in Haines Junction who had overstayed his welcome in Canada. Lorne dropped me off at the Immigration office while he went to get the engine and tend to other affairs in Whitehorse.
I went into the immigration office and sat for quite a while in the waiting area. Finally a stern-looking man came and led me into a windowless room with off-white acoustical tiles on the walls and ceiling along with a large wall map, and very uncomfortable chairs. He proceeded to interrogate me as to why I had been in Canada so long and what my intentions were. I explained about my situation and the guy tried every which way to find something nefarious about what I was up to. Then he went out of the room and left me alone for 10 or 15 minutes, although it seemed like an eternity. I distinctly remember sitting there in the room shaking my head over the entire stupid circumstances, incredulous that they thought I was trying to engage in some kind of criminal activity or something. Geez, my truck broke down and the new engine was at first sent to the wrong side of the continent! What could I do?
At last he re-entered the room and sat down. That’s when he asked if I had earned any money during my stay in Canada. I said no, but I was being credited for the work I was doing on my own truck, as well as the other odd jobs around Lorne’s shop. I can picture him even now as his face screwed up trying to find some way of pinning a major immigration crime on me. He asked how I was getting money to live on and I explained my mother was sending me money. Finally he came to his senses and realized I was just a teenager with a broken truck who wanted nothing more than to get the hell home ASAP. I think the whole asinine ordeal took about an hour, and at last he let me go.
Lorne was waiting for me when I left the building, with the new short-block engine firmly secured in its crate in the back of his pickup. I couldn’t wait to get to work putting my truck back together. By the time we got back to Haines Junction it was growing dark and I resolved to get a good night’s sleep so I could start getting the new engine in first thing in the morning. I had already removed the old engine and stripped all the usable parts for use on the new engine. I actually saved the piston that caused the whole miserable affair and have kept the rusty thing to this day; it’s my testimony to youthful adventures and persevering in the face of adversity.
The whole ordeal up to that point had taken a huge emotional toll on me, and I wound up doing something I never would have done under normal circumstances. I hated it that my mother smoked, which she had done all my life, and I despised the very thought of smoking cigarettes. But I couldn’t take the stress any longer and broke down, walked to the convenience store in Haines Junction, bought a pack of Canadian cigarettes and immediately started smoking a pack a day. That began an on-again/off-again habit for most of my life, until I actually quit for good in 2011. I remember getting home and telling my mother I started smoking, she was not happy but given her own habit she had nothing to hold over me.
I worked feverishly for several days to get the truck back together, and at last it was time to turn the ignition key. I thanked God again when the engine roared to life and I drove the truck out of Lorne’s shop. I was itching to get going and drove to the convenience store to buy more cigarettes and some food for the road. Then I carelessly gave Constable Cecil B. Brandt of the RCMP what he had been waiting for. As I was exiting the gravel parking lot of the store, I was a bit too quick on pushing the accelerator pedal, and I spun out; it wasn’t a rooster tail of flying gravel or anything, just a slight spin. Of course, Constable Brandt was watching everything I did and he saw me spin out, and that was all he needed to write me a ticket. To this day I remember the gist of what he said- “you had better pay this ticket or it could be embarrassing”. Constable Brandt’s tone and his use of the word “embarrassing” has stuck in my head ever since. It wasn’t much of a fine, maybe $20 or $30, and I had my checkbook, so I put the ticket with fine into the mail right away. I didn’t need any more grief, even if I would have been out of Canada well before any of the RCMP might have tracked me down.
I went back to the Star Dust Motel and Texaco, made sure I had everything securely in the truck, and bid my farewell to Lorne and Mary. I had been an unintended visitor to Haines Junction for almost exactly four weeks, and it was great to be back on the road.
I drove almost uninterrupted, only pausing to fill my tank, take occasional rest stops, eat a bit, and sleep in the cab whenever I could find a safe place to pull off the road. There were quite a few moose along the way. I often drove with bare feet, and I was later told by one of my freshman college roommates, a Canadian, that driving with bare feet was a crime in Canada. Damn good thing I didn’t get pulled over. Once I had passed through Dawson Creek in British Columbia, the southern terminus of the Alcan, Mile 0, I was officially off the Alcan Highway, just west of the border with Alberta.
I wound my way down to the United States, going through Calgary, where the terrain had quickly gone from rugged mountains to wide-open prairies stretching as far as the eye could see; then through Lethbridge, and finally, arriving at the Canada - United States border at Coutts, Alberta and Sweet Grass, Montana. I breathed a huge sigh of relief passing the border post (actually many huge sighs of relief!), and was mesmerized by a massive thunderstorm system to the south.
Although Pam and Chris had gone back to Anchorage, I still wanted to see Kim, and it was a straight shot south to Shelby, Montana. Kim’s grandparents were very nice and as I recall I slept on the couch in their modest home for a few nights. It was a relief after weeks of sleeping in my truck. I spent a few days there before heading back home, winding my way west through Idaho, into eastern Washington, then south through Oregon, and then into California, where I visited with my friend Dave who had completed his freshman year at Chico State University. After a couple of days visiting with Dave, I finally hit the I-5 highway and headed home to San Francisco. It was really good to be back after all the trials I went through. My total travel on my journey was well over 3,600 miles.
I never saw Pam or Chris again, but I tried looking up Pam online, and was saddened to see her death notice in the Social Security database. Regrettably there was no obituary and nothing on Find-A-Grave. She died in her early 40s, and I can’t help but wonder if her life went down a bad path. She was a good person when I knew her. After leaving Shelby, Montana I never saw Kim again either, but I did see that she’s on social media and apparently living in Anchorage. It has been over three and a half decades, and I don’t want to intrude on her privacy, but maybe we’ll connect again sometime or perhaps not; I leave that to fate.
With the advent of online tools such as Google Maps and Google Earth, it’s great to be able to look back and see my path through the Yukon on the Alcan Highway while sitting in my family’s home in Upstate New York. There are also online topographic maps that make it easy to get a fairly accurate fix on where we started uphill when the BANGBANGBANG started (just past the Donjek River bridge), where the uphill climb ended then leveled out when the engine quit, where the curve was that revealed the spectacular view of Kluane Lake, and where the Alcan dropped down to the gas station in Burwash Landing. On Google Street View I can look at photos of the Star Dust Motel, which is still in business, but the repair garage now appears to be a separate entity. I tried emailing the Star Dust Motel in the summer of 2014 as it does have a website, but I didn’t get a reply. I still have a business card for Lorne and Mary’s Star Dust Motel and Texaco, it is unique in that it has a shiny gold pattern on the front. One trivial thing I do regret is that I never got an “I Survived the Alcan Highway” bumper sticker. But the fact is that I did survive the Alcan Highway, in a way that few if any other travelers have. Now that it’s paved it must be a far cry from the Alcan I remember.
This story began with a contemplation of values, and what might happen to values when circumstances change. The story also put a focus on gold as it played a role in the development of north western Canada, where much of the Alcan Highway was built; and the Alcan was built directly as a result of World War II.