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ALASKIAN Frontier photos and story by Pierre Bouchard and Janick Lemieux
The Grizzly Country Store’s coffee is hot and comforting on a morning where we’ve woken to find frost on the panniers. My bike is leaning against the Star-Spangled Banner flagpole driven deep into the parking lot, next to the Israeli flag. Pierre has found a sturdy sign with “Mining Rocks! Vote NO on #4” stenciled on it. Any place serving hot liquid and 800-calorie fritters is a welcome pit stop. 58
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The end of September is not a popular time to enter Alaska by bicycle. The few people we met touring in British Columbia and the Yukon for the past two months have all been heading south. As if our late arrival was planned — OMG! It’s September already? — we appreciate no mosquitoes, fewer recreational vehicles and drowsy bears since entering the 49th state on the Alaska Highway, then the Tok Cutoff and, now, the Glenn Highway. Riding on a vast plateau under an immense blue sky, ending at the Alaska Range to the north and the Chugach Mountains to the south, it is a pleasant surprise when a board announces our effortless arrival at the Eureka Summit — such a daunting name! A diner advertising itself as “Home of the 25¢ Coffee” lures us in again. The waitress serves us two slices of a disappointing fruit pie — it’s been nothing but pie-filling since leaving Canada — and a hot cuppa before asking in a rough tone: Waitress: So where are you two going? Us: Homer. Waitress: Where did you ride from? Us: Vancouver. Waitress: Vancouver, Canada?! Us: Yes, Vancouver, British Columbia. Waitress: Shut up! www.pedalmag.com
Meet the Alaskan waitress! Hard-working, tough as nails and an entertainer. On Kodiak Island in a few weeks, one will rip a new one into Canada’s socialist health system encouraged by her captive audience while we finish off a plate of eggs and reindeer sausages, hiding behind our unspecified foreign accents! It’s probably mandatory to be loud and tough to survive in the U.S. Final Frontier. Alaska is huge (586,412 square miles) and thinly populated (725,000 residents). Its mountains, sparkling lakes and glaciers are oversized and its wildlife is as threatening as it is bountiful. It is believed that the first Alaskans migrated from Asia between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago. The nomadic groups who crossed the land bridge from Siberia were following the animal herds that provided them with food and clothing. First came the Tlinglits, the Haidas and the Athabascans, followed by the Inupiaks (Inuits), the Yupiks and the Aleuts of the Aleutian Islands. The Native Alaskans developed a delicate relationship with nature and their harsh environment until non-Natives, particularly fur traders and whalers, brought guns, alcohol and diseases that wiped out entire villages. After being one of the last places in the world to be mapped by Europeans — thanks to the cold and stormy North Pacific — Alaska’s history has been a series of booms
(opposite) Tok Cutoff (above) Escale Ketchikan
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and busts. First with sea-otter skins, then fishing for the phenomenal salmon (with the first canneries built in 1878), then the gold rushes of 1890 and 1910. Since the early 1980s, oil and gas revenues account for the majority of the gross state product annually. Though the Trans-Alaska Pipeline doesn’t come within 300 miles of Anchorage on its 800-mile span from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez on Prince William Sound, the city gushes with oil money. The city’s 122-mile network of urban bicycle trails makes you clamour for drilling in anticipation of another juicy black-gold rush but, apparently, oil is not the answer to everything. Parked outside a Gambell Street supermarket and its adjoining liquor store, I’m playing babysitter to the bikes while Pierre is inside hunting for our dinner. The sidewalk is busy with drug deals, people under the influence talking to themselves or fighting amongst each other. Folks ask me for money or cigarettes. I have neither, so we chat. “You rode from Vancouver? I heard the weed is the bomb there,” and “Can a felon enter Canada?” Not your usual roadside platitudes. The figurative meaning of urban wildlife coexists with
A white pickup truck stops. “We never, never pick up hitchhikers, but something was telling us to come back and get you.” The “something” must have been quite sharp-tongued, I’m thinking, for them to turn around and lift a couple with 200-pound wheeled suitcases! Dale and Rea are from Utah, parents to eight children and many grandchildren — and a small chihuahua staring at us from between the front seats. Both keen fishermen, they moved to Wasila seven years ago, and Alaska now flows through their veins. The Final Frontier ignites the imagination, an irresistible force that draws people to stay. Back on two wheels on the Sterling Highway, the heavily glaciated volcanoes across Cook Inlet are larger than life. Volcanoes Iliamna (3,053 metres), Spurr (3,374 metres) and Redoubt (3,108 metres) are active members of the Aleutian Arc, the breathtaking result of the Pacific Plate sliding steadily under the North American Plate. Mr. Perry also fell under the spell of Alaska’s grandeur and resettled here from a southern state after retiring from the military. “Soldiers move me. I come from an army family. Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, you name it!” We
the literal in the largest city north of the 50th parallel. Looking for a place to pitch the tent for the night in Earthquake Park, at the west end of Northern Lights Boulevard, we come handlebar to muzzle with a male moose on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Another buck is metres away and buddy has been alertly protecting his two females from the newcomer. We don’t want a role in this tragic comedy and decide to turn around and settle into the last decent spot we saw on the Knik Arm. It’ll do just fine for tonight. On the Glenn Highway, just entering the city from Palmer, a billboard informed road users that, thus far this year, 39 moose had been killed by vehicles — no statistics regarding the drivers were displayed. With just three days to reach Homer in time to catch the last ferry of the year to the Aleutian Islands, there is no time for shopping at the brand-new Target or joining an “Into the Wild Limo Tour.” We hit the pedals due south on the Seward Highway to Girdwood, home of the luxurious Alyeska Ski Resort. An honest talk over a pint of Gold Rush sends us back on the road with our thumbs out. We’ll continue to Kenai with some motorized help.
have stopped in Ninilchik and are taking pictures of the Old Russian Church and the cemetery. “People need a police, and it only makes sense that the world’s strongest country would police against totalitarian states.” The historic building, topped with the spires and crosses of the Russian Orthodox faith, was built in 1901 by descendants of the Russian-American Company who settled parts of the Kenai Peninsula starting in 1791, years before the 1867 sell of Alaska to the U.S. for $7.2 million. “It’s a moral respon-
(left to right) Volcan Westdahl, êglise orthodoxe russe Kenai, Glenn HwySheep Mtn
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sibility. We great nations have to get rid of bad guys. People ask for us and we have to go!” That we have remounted the bikes and are heading south into a hailstorm hasn’t stopped Mr. Perry’s tirade. He’s quite happy to follow us in his pickup truck to continue the “conversation.” Arriving in Homer is an unexpected thrill. From the top of the bluffs overlooking Kachemak Bay, the road makes a final turn east and the charming, colourful fishing village unfolds completely. A panorama of white peaks, glaciers and the Homer Spit, a 4-1/2-mile-long sand bar that stretches into the bay. The “Spit” bustles throughout the summer with tourists and fishermen, but we arrive here decidedly off-season. The Salty Dawg Saloon is shaped like a lighthouse, visible for miles, and its walls are covered with dollars, life preservers and scrawled messages. The famous watering hole is the only thing open on the entire spit and serves our needs perfectly: it is located next door to the ferry terminal, has heating, a wireless connection and serves tall bottles of Broken Birch Bitter Ale! Next morning, we roll on the MV Tustumena for a return trip to Dutch Harbour in the Aleutian Islands. The mythical ferry crossing to the barren archipelago will turn into the Great Aleutian Pumpkin Run after the Kodiak Island stop. Thanks to the crew and Kodiak Safeway store, several pallets of pumpkins are loaded into the Halloween-
These Western Alaska twins share some things: the stormy environment and a dependence on fishing in the Bering Sea. Our “Trusty Tusty” docks here for five hours, and our arrival doesn’t go unnoticed. More than one burly fisherman asks how rough the crossing from Cold Bay has been and adds that the sea was too wild for THEM to sail! We’d been violently tossed about in our berths for the past 24 hours, too nauseous to be worried. During the stopover, the weather is clear enough and we unload our naked mounts to cycle up the unpaved steep and narrow Ulakta Drive to Mount Ballyhoo for some views of the Makushin Volcano (2,036 metres), a dome-like structure covered with an ice field. The setting feels very end-of-the-Earth, but we are hardly halfway to the end of the archipelago, a series of volcanic stepping stones stretching 2,000 kilometres from Alaska to Siberia. At Mount Ballyhoo, the concrete remains of the Aleutian World War II National Historic Area speak silently of a time of war. Nearly six months to the day after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese airraided Dutch Harbor, signaling the beginning of the Aleutian Campaign. A week later, they invaded Kiska and Attu Islands in the Western Aleutians. For 15 months, Allied airmen — including many Canadians — struggled to take the fight to the Japanese entrenched in
theme-decorated ship’s hold. At half-a-dozen ports of call of the Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands, children come aboard for some trick-or-treating and to select pumpkins to take to their classrooms and homes — no more than the elusive potato grows in the weather-beaten region. The crew and passengers dress up and laughter ensues on “The Love Boat” of the end of the Earth! Our bikes are secured close to the orange-and-black banners and we settle into our stateroom for the 10-day return trip. After Chignik and Sand Point, we stop in King Cove, a settlement of 600 founded on fish canneries, where I become acquainted with a fellow passenger stretching his legs on a walk along the muddy streets. “My father was part of the crew on Big Valley, the fishing boat that sank on the first season of ‘The Deadliest Catch.’ I’m heading to Dutch to find work on a crab boat.” It is not the first time that the reality-television series following life aboard crab-fishing boats and the real dangers to the crew on the decks of these boats is mentioned to me, but this makes it more . . . real. Unalaska, population 4,300, is on Unalaska Island. Dutch harbour — the largest fisheries port in the U.S. by volume caught — is the part of the city on Amaknak Island, which is tied to Unalaska by a bridge.
the remote islands. Authorities scrambled to get civilians out of the war zone. As a result, 900 Aleut people were suddenly uprooted and taken to internment camps in Southeast Alaska in a tragic and littleknown chapter of American history. Standing on the bridge of MV Tustumena, we are at the westernmost point that we’ll reach in the U.S.A. — even Hawaii, where we are heading next, is to the East — and in the cul of this cul-de-sac. After five more days on the Bering Sea, we arrive back in Homer to race toward Anchorage through hail and snow. After a few beers with friends in the city, we get on the 6:00 a.m. minibus to Whitehorse in the Yukon. At midnight, we are on the front porch of our friends Gilles and Manon. A few hours later, Gilles drives us to the top of snowy White Pass on the Klondike Highway, where we slalom down to Skagway, stopping long enough to show our passports at the Canada/U.S. border. From here, we return to the Alaska Marine Highway System and hop onto MV Malaspina. We can breathe a sigh of relief. We are sailing for four days around a multitude of islands and coves of the Inside Passage to Bellingham, a day’s ride south of Vancouver as biking season in the North is coming to a frozen close.
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