Note: Well, because of limited internet in remote places, it looks like our blog is going to be a good bit behind our travels for the foreseeable future.
At this point in our trip, we had made it to the arctic ocean in both Canada and Alaska via the only two roads in North America that cross the Arctic Circle. It’s pretty cool to have gotten up this far north. It’s quite a neat environment. The Canadian and Alaskan arctic environments have some similarities but they have quite a few differences, too. Yvonne really wanted to see some caribou and musk ox, and we were able to spend time with several of both. The Brooks mountain range was really impressive and a lot prettier than we expected.
The weather was quite nice on our drive north. The daily highs varied between the 50s-60s during the day and the lows hovered around the mid 40s at night. It was bright and sunny, cloudy, foggy, rainy, and everything in between. A lot of the time it was vert windy. The winds are actually way nicer than no wind. As soon as the wind drops down, about a million mosquitoes converge on you. With higher winds, it is quite nice to walk around outside.
The road conditions along the Dalton Highway are pretty much what we expected. Nothing too terrible, but generally fairly rough and lots of mud. At this point we’ve done over 2,000 miles on dirt/mud roads and the truck is starting to show it.
We did spend a few hours working on some German tourist’s van in the middle of nowhere between the Brooks Range and the Arctic Ocean. The sidewall of their passenger rear tire got split by a rock. All ended well, but we were all soaking wet, muddy, and cold by the end of the tire change. It took about 2 hours and we used a bunch of our tools including the onboard compressed air system on the truck. For a variety of reasons, we had to cut their spare tire mount system off with a hacksaw. Once the tire change was complete, their van wouldn’t start. After some troubleshooting, we discovered that their battery terminals had been shaken loose by the rough road. This place is pretty hard on vehicles; we’ve had to help 3 different vehicles so far on the arctic roads.
The truck is still very comfortable and doing well. We’ve had numerous little fixes and fluid leaks, but we are still feeling confident. We are starting to plan our route south and we think we are going to pretty much be on our original schedule. It’s still light 24 hours a day up here, so we are hoping that we might be able to catch some aurora in a month or so when we are further south.
Wabi-sabi Overland 