7-26-08 Day 29 Whitehorse to Iskut via the Cassiar Highway

On the road at 7:30 after gassing up and breakfast. As usual it’s wet and misty with showers off and on, temps in the mid 40‘s. We head east on the Alcan (this is the only road in and out of Alaska) heading to the junction of 37 which is the Cassiar highway that winds south through the Cassiar & Skeena mountains. As I’ve said before the roads here have a clearing from 20’ to 75’ wide off each side with a gully on each side to supposedly allow the drivers a chance to see animals coming out of the woods and onto the road and make it a little more difficult for the animals to dart out. The problem is that much of the time these clearings are not maintained and have overgrown defeating there purpose. Also sometimes the road is elevated so that you can’t see down into the gully. About 15 minutes out of Whitehorse we’re going along about 65 mph riding in staggered formation. I’m leading in the left track and Tom is second in the right track and Mark is behind me. All of a sudden I see a black bear come bounding onto the highway from the westbound lane running diagonally across the road about 50 feet in front of me headed right at me. I swerve to the right track in front of Tom and both Tom and I miss him by about 5 feet and Mark goes left around him. It was over in seconds and we are thankful it was only a close call. The bear was slightly bigger then the bikes and much wider. He must of been 1000 -1200 pounds. That would of left a mark! We had just talked about keeping an eye out for wildlife as this is the section that we had seen the most on our trip up. We continue on our way as the rain keeps toying with us by stopping and starting and we can always see clear sky ahead of us but never seem to catch it. We stop for gas and lunch at the Cassiar turnoff and there‘s one of those big portable billboard construction signs flashing rough road next 20 km. From the Milepost book we knew there were 2 gravel sections between 15 & 25 miles long but this section posted had fell apart this past winter. This section was 12 miles long with about a 100 individual sections of gravel between 50 feet long up to a quarter mile where they had repaired all the frost heaves/road breakups. They evidently do this all summer long as we never saw any new pavement and must do all the paving just before cold weather. Of course it’s still lightly raining so the gravel is greasy. After we get through this section we are keeping a close eye out for wildlife as this road has not had the clearing cut back in a long time and there’s no chance to see anything coming into the road. We keep seeing clear sky out in front of us and we finally catch it. It’s warmed up to the mid/upper 50’s so we pull over to regear into lighter jackets and gloves but as we’ve learned you leave your rain gear on. About 20 minutes later it starts raining again! Yes we have a complex about a cloud following us. Of course the rain started as we reached the first long gravel section to add to the fun. The good thing is that the road had been recently graded and the gravel was pretty smooth but was pretty soupy by the time we got through. By now you can hardly tell what color our bikes are. We continue on and the sky clears for the rest of the day and made the next gravel section a breeze. We get to our cabin have dinner and Mark & I laugh about if we can ever get our bikes clean again while Tom says don‘t bother, it adds character! Today's pics are one from the Cassiar highway gravel section and one of Mark's bike to give you an idea of how dirty the bikes are getting. Cleaning them doesn't make sense until we get back to lower BC where the roads remain good.