Tuesday, July 19 1983; Fort Yukon, Alaska

The last few days have been hectic and tiring.  I need to catch up in my writing.  

Sunday morning we woke up at Watson Lake and drove to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory by mid-afternoon.  Whitehorse is the first town of any size in several hundred miles.  At 17,000 people, Whitehorse has 2/3 of the population of the whole Yukon Territory.  We mailed some postcards and had a beer at a bar called The Office under a hotel.  We called Jack in Denver and found out he was taking a flight into Fairbanks that would arrive at 12:30 a.m. on Monday.  Mike and I decided we should drive straight on in to Fairbanks.  The highway through the Yukon Territory was ver good:  asphalt without too many potholes.  We had been driving 50-60 MPH without a great deal of difficulty.  Actually, the whole highway had not been so bad, only a few hundred miles unpaved.  The worst sections were where construction to improve the road was underway.  

The Alaska Highway in the Yukon Territory

We reached the Alaska border at 10:30 PDT and we got out and took a picture and congratulated ourselves and the car for getting here without "busting."  At customs, we were scrutinized almost as closely as when we entered Canada.  The first 20 miles of the Alaska Highway in Alaska was the worst stretch of the whole road.  It was terribly wet, muddy and slippery.  The whole 300 miles from the border to Fairbanks was cold and rainy.  The car has no heater, and by the time we arrived in Fairbanks at 3:15 a.m., I was nearly frozen.

Alaska Border

About 50 miles from Fairbanks, the car started behaving strange again and we limped on into town at 40 MPH.  That poor Volkwagen, after serving us faithfully for 2400 miles from Davidson [Saskatchewan] to Fairbanks, may be ready to call it quits.

We went to the Pioneer Motel and got Jack out of bed at 3:30 and the three of us went out and had a couple of beer at the Fairbanks Bar and the Savoy Bar.  The motel would not allow visitors into the rooms until after 7:00 a.m., so we walked around town and tried to plan out the rest of the day.  We finally slept from 7:30 to 11:00 a.m. and then Mike and I each took our first showers since leaving Davidson.   We spent the afternoon visiting the offices of the Arctic Wildlife Range, speaking to people who had been in the Okpilak River Basin and reading a preliminary report from the Grampian School, a Scottish group which spent 3 weeks in the Okpilak in 1982 and who were back in the same area this year.  We also rounded up fuel, a few extra groceries, and a few other items before setting up camp last night at the Tanana Campground on the north side of town.  Last evening was spent packing, eating spaghetti and drinking wine.

Tanana Campground

Ticket counter at Fairbanks airport

Our plane to Barter Island was to leave at 8:00 a.m.  It was a small plane, loaded down with our gear.  There were two other passengers besides us:  two women who were doing research for the wildlife refuge.  The flight was going pretty smoothly.  Jack and I had some comic relief when Mike had to relieve his bladder in a bee seal can.  

Aboard our first flight north

We were probably an hour and a half out of Fairbanks when the pilot suddenly turned the plane around and started descending from 12,000 feet.  I had no idea what the problem was, bus as I had not seen anything but trees and marsh ever since Fairbanks, I was a bit worried.  When we got below 2,000 feet I starting looking for sandbars on the rivers; there seemed to be no other possibility in sight for a landing.  I knew that both Arctic Village and Fort Yukon had an airstrip, but we were already at a low altitude and there was no sign of a town.  At the last minute we turned and I could see the runway.  It was quite a relief, actually.  So here we are in Fort Yukon.  

As it turned out, the weather in Barter Island was too bad for a landing.  We spent an hour in Fort Yukon waiting for the. next weather report from Kaktovik:  heavy fog and 37 degrees.  We decided to stay in Fort Yukon rather than return to Fairbanks and we arranged for the plan tomorrow to stop here and pick us up. 

Fort Yukon sits on the south shore of the Yukon River.  It has about 700 people - mostly Indians, it seems.  It has one hotel and restaurant, the Sourdough Inn, where we had lunch.  The rest of the town consists of 2 or 3 churches, one store, a school, and a log of log cabins, a few mobile homes, and a few frame houses.  We are spending the day relaxing and catching up on our sleep.