The Rise Up Ride: Day 66-70, No Way, Nope, You're Not Getting Into Canada
Date: 1 July 2021
Start Location: Haines, AK
End Location: Haines, AK
It hasn't been this difficult to get into Canada since the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s, when around 100,000 prospectors trudged over the mountains. At least we didn't have to drag our gear up the snowy pass, like in some Jack London novel. Leonie and I just drove Nickie's old car up the road to the border station, walked past the boundary marker and up to the armed and masked Canadian border guards.
"No way, nope, you're not getting into Canada", he stated quite emphatically after hearing me out.
I tried. At least I tried.
The next ferry leaves Haines tomorrow and I'll be onboard, cutting my losses and backtracking to Juneau and onwards across the Gulf of Alaska to Whittier, outside of Anchorage. With an outbreak of more than 100 COVID cases (mostly of the virulent Gamma variant) the Yukon is experiencing its "first wave" of the virus with hospitals full and medical staff flying in from Ottawa. Any hope that the Province might loosen restrictions are now dashed. It just wouldn't be safe, even if I could have talked my way across the border, to ride to Atlin or Whitehorse on the way to Tok. The Feds couldn't vaccinate faster than the virus has spread and the entire region is paralyzed, on both sides of the border, due to Canadians' bureaucratic incompetence. I've seen this movie before and didn't like it while working for the think-tank in Winnipeg for years and really dislike watching it now.
Leonie, who I met at Climbers' Ranch in the Tetons, has arrived in Haines and we spent the day doing reconnaissance. Her series of week-long yoga and hiking retreats begin here in town on Friday and we were checking out hiking trails and places where her yoginis might commune with bears and bald eagles between downward dogs. Joe piled us into his ATV for a thrilling ride up a sketchy trail to see his mountaintop cabin (too buggy probably as a sun salutation venue for the yoga gals.) Nickie rode her slick new gray e-bike over to join us for dinner at Reavyn's. I'd heard Nickie on the local public radio station that morning, fundraising with Leslie, who owns the Inn at Haines where I'm staying. They were all organizing a series of womens' self-defense classes that Leonie would be teaching on Thursday nights this month. Welcome to small-town Alaska!
Haines, cut off from the mainland route to the interior, is essentially an island. Seaplanes, bush carriers and ferries are the only ways in and out, isolating the two thousand or so residents. With the cruise ships gone again this year and the road mostly closed due to the Pandemic, the town is just surviving, (but doing much better than their touristy neighbor, Skagway.) It is usually a major shipping port, located on the Lynn Canal, North America's longest and deepest fjord, penetrating 140 km deep into the interior of Southeast Alaska from the Inside Passage at Juneau. For me, arriving and departing by water, it is not unlike many small cays I've visited in my life, with a coconut telegraph network buzzing with gossip and an amazing group of spirited independent women organizing everything and baking scrumptious meals. Welcome to island life at 59° N latitude.
Tomorrow night I'll stay with John and Judy Neary, WarmShowers hosts who live near the Alaska Marine Highway Ferry Terminal in Juneau. Coincidently, they returned this week from cycling the same route that I'm considering from Valdez north on the Richardson Highway through Glenallen and Paxson and the gnarly gravel Denali Highway to Cantwell outside the National Park. They'll have firsthand updates on what services are available on the route, some of which I rode with an Adventure Cycling group in July 2017. It will be extremely useful to know where camping, food, water, and lodging will be available before adventuring across the vastness of the Maclaren and Sustina River Valleys.
Waiting and planning, but not riding, has been restorative while frustrating. I've gained back some weight lost crossing the Bighorns and the Rockies but ache for long days in the saddle out on the open road. Just two or three more ferry trips around closed Canada and The Rise Up Ride begins riding again.
