The end of the road
Fairbanks, Alaska. Deadhorse is a 21st century version of a wild west town and it strikes me as a place where just about anything could happen. Well, almost anything: there'll be no shoot out at the OK corral saloon bar because there ain't no saloon bar in town. In...
The Dalton beckons — you may not hear from me for a while
June 28th 2023, Livengood, nr Fairbanks, Alaska. Well, this is it, I guess. I've reached Fairbanks and the last road calls. Would Jack London have felt "the call of the road" I wonder? Movement, the road, going west are all core themes of American literature and...
‘You are not working as a freelance journalist and riding a motorcycle to Prudhoe Bay,’ said the Alaska US border guard. Oh yes I am, I replied
June 26th 2023 in Tok, Alaska. The fastest and easiest way to get to Alaska from Dawson City in The Yukon is to go to the north end of Front Street and there, hop on the free ferry that will take you across the Yukon River and you're on your way. The ferry isn't a...
In an abandoned hamlet in The Yukon, the Tricolour flies . . . but why?
June 23rd 2023, McQuesten, Yukon. After Whitehorse, I took Highway 2 -- the Klondike Highway -- straight north towards Dawson City. The Yukon is just over 480,000 square kilometers in size. To give that some perspective, France is 551,000 square kilometers, so The...
The manic madness of Dawson’s demented Gold Rush summer and the great white silence of Yukon
June 25th 2023, Dawson City. Dawson City is a real ramshackle place -- half falling down, half done up, but for all that, fantastically attractive, for me at any rate. Bits of it are like every western movie you've ever seen. The roads are unpaved, just compacted...
I can’t actually quite believe that I am in The Yukon
June 21st 2023, Whitehorse, The Yukon. There are times riding Highway 37 deep into British Columbia and nearing the crossing into The Yukon when everything you see all around you, and I mean for miles and miles and miles, appears to be utterly devoid of people, or any...
‘I told ’em there was people buried there but they didn’t listen’
June 19th 2023, Moricetown, British Columbia. The morning I left Jasper in Alberta, the day didn't seem to know what to do with itself. One minute the sun was beating down on the mountains, picking out all the interesting visual details; the next minute, gloomy clouds...
Inside British Columbia’s burgeoning cannabis industry
June 16th 2023, Nelson, British Columbia. Behind the forest trees that line the road and cover the mountains south of Nelson in Canada's British Columbia, a cannabis production facility is expanding by about 40 per cent. Large earth movers are carving a new road...
The Rockies!
June 16th 2023, Jasper, Alberta. When I left Nelson, I had a choice: go directly north west and re-join my original, if somewhat notional, route north from Vancouver -- which was pretty much direct to the Yukon, to Whitehorse, then Dawson City and then left, as it...
Psst! Wanna see inside Nelson’s secret, maybe not so secret, nuclear bunker?
14th June 2023, Nelson. Nelson's old post office, a solid three storey granite and red brick building with a turret, stands on the corner of Vernon and Ward streets, bang in the middle of the small town/city in British Columbia. Most of the 1902 building is given over...