The Rise Up Ride: Day 115, Powered by Hamburgers Down the War Road
Date: August 15 2021
Start Location: Tok, Alaska
End Location: Lakeview, Alaska
Distance: 95 km
Time: 5:42
Total elapsed: 8:31
Elevation: 747 m
There are hamburgers and then there are HAMBURGERS. If you are traveling the Alcan Highway through Tok, do not pass up the Alaska Burger at Fast Eddy's. Not only will it be the best hamburger you will ever find, but it will also be the only food you will find for a distance equal to driving from New York to Philly. If a town is only going to have one restaurant, you'd be lucky to have one good one like this one. Same thing at John Sloan's Buffalo Center Drive-in in Delta Junction, a town just a tad smaller than Tok but both major urban hubs in an area the size of the states of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, and Connecticut. That hamburger at Fast Eddy's and one yesterday at John's drive-in were the two finest hamburgers ever, particularly considering we are in the middle of freaking nowhere one of the most sparsely populated parts of the United States.
Having learned a lesson in my ride into Delta Junction, I had two breakfasts. One cellophane wrapped non-athlete fare at the B&B and then the Alaska Burger (two huge Angus beef patties, side-by-side on a sourdough hoagie bun with double Swiss Cheese, bacon and some damn fine curly fries, plus fixins.) I was fueled before starting down the Alcan Highway for the two-day journey to the Canada border. With 48 hours remaining until my COVID test would expire, I was about as fueled as I could be, as there were exactly zero services ahead for the effort it would take to get 176 km down a beautifully difficult road to the Beaver Creek Canadian Border Services outpost, and Ida's Motel at the wide spot in the road called Beaver Creek, Yukon, Canada.
Today's elevation profile resembles a jagged pane of broken glass with endless rollers. This road. Oh, the scenery is spectacular. I took a lot of pictures, none of which can put into mere pixels the splendor that is this slice of nice across Eastern Alaska. But the road is the thing. Let me be clear that I absolutely appreciate the thousands of workers who pushed through the construction of this marvel of road building. However, I'd like to have a word with the Governor of Alaska about maintaining it with some infrastructure funding.
Although the construction of the Alcan was called for in New York by FDR in August 1936 as a way to reinforce American military positions in the event of conflict, Canada balked at the idea as it might compromise their neutrality in the event of a war. Events happened to force its necessity and the hasty construction began just three months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and accelerated following the Japanese invasion with 500 troops of Kiska Island in Western Alaska on 6 June 1942. The route was chosen to be sufficiently inland to protect it from Japanese bombers, so it doesn't serve any of the Alaskan coastal communities. Crews working from both the northern and southern ends met around the BC-YK border in September 1942, with the road passable for military vehicles in 1943, except for a portion north of Destruction Bay that melted in May and June when the permafrost gave way as the cleared ground thawed, becoming an Arctic wetland. This section was repaired by building a "corduroy" road surface made by laying perpendicular deforested logs across the road and covering it with rough gravel and chip seal. And, one of the most interesting facts is that much of this work was done by African-Americans, as more than one third of the 10,000 workers were American soldiers from the three newly formed "Negro regiments".
The stretch of road that I covered today is a patchwork of repaired stretches and some tarmac that they seem to have just given up on, like rural roads often found out near the county lines in Texas, where no voters live and the county never gets around to maintaining them. I'd rejoice to see the infrequent painted centerline coming up since it meant pavement, but the surface was mostly bad hard-packed gravel with some worse sections of loose-packed gravel and dust.
I arrived In the late afternoon at the Lakeview Campground, fetched and filtered water for dinner and pitched my tent to the chorus of Trumpeter Swans and Loons in the Tetlin Wildlife Refuge.
After months of planning, plotting, and ploddingly pedaling all around her, there was a damn perfect chance that tomorrow afternoon I might finally enter Canada. Only 89 km of more desolately bad road and the discretion of a border officer lay between here and my reservation for two nights at Ida's Motel in Beaver Creek, YT, the furthest western town in the Yukon. I have two destinations at the end of this stretch of glorious but nasty road tomorrow, a smiling Canadian Border Officer waving me through and a shower and bed at Ida's Motel.
