The Wholewheat Sourdough Inside Passage to Alaska

The Rise Up Ride 2022: Days 28-33

The Wholewheat Sourdough Inside Passage to Alaska

Date: 23 May 2022 :

Start Location: Bellingham, WA

End Location: Haines, AK

Distance/mode: 1702 km / ferry

Latitude: 59° 14′ N

Slow travel, like slow cooking, includes the essential ingredient of time. By speeding from one spot on the map to another, following a line or flying over the contours, one misses the sensory experience of moving with purpose through nature across the world. Those sustainable conveyances, like bicycles, a good pair of hiking boots, or a rolling coastal ferry allow the traveler time to learn the land, how the rivers connect and the mountains come to meet the sea. To fully know where you are in the world and to appreciate the value of "here", taking the time to arrive is delicious.

It's only Gorilla Tape that will affix a freestanding tent to the helicopter deck of an Alaska Marine Highway ferry in a gale. By the morning of our first night at sea, the three passengers who had brought aboard and used rolls of the right stuff were happy campers. The others had gathered their gear and retreated indoors sometime during a wet and windy night. Then the wind abated, the sun shown, and the survivors were joined by other passengers who helped us in the search for sea creatures.

The most interesting of people seem to find their way to the edges of the planet. It's at the end of a long dirt road, at the top of a mountain, the bottom of a reef or camped on the aft upper deck of a ship along the Inside Passage, where they tend to hang. Our four-day voyage was a magical intersection of adventures and shared anticipation for what lay ahead in the upper latitudes. Some were biologists off to count and dissect fish, others to work seasonal jobs in new lands, and some returning home to cabins after a long winter in less hostile climes. I was bound for Haines, my homebase and staging area to lead cycling tours and for personal adventures further north.

The owner of Breadfarm, an excellent bakery in Edison, Washington had sold me a two kilo Miche round of sourdough whole wheat bread with the assurance that it would travel well on the journey to Alaska. The voyage was punctuated by some exquisitely epicurean shared meals while watching for whales and porpoises, sawing off hunks and serving them to new friends, topped with thick slabs of salted Irish butter. The huge round got smaller and we grew closer and closer to Alaska until we were all friends, the huge round was gone, and we had docked in Haines.

For two days I've been busy in town, meeting new colleagues at Sockeye Cycle, reorganizing my gear, cooking up a batch of Texas-style moose chili (excellent), and buying stores for a ten-day trip up into Canada. The terrain that I need to explore, slowly and by bicycle, was served up in a tasting menu last summer at 2000 feet by my old adventuring friend @kateoffmars in her 1957 Cessna 172 named LEO (Low Earth Orbit). From that altitude I knew that this year, before doing anything else, I needed to know the Tagish and the headwaters of the mighty Yukon River. As Robert Service wrote in his poem, "The Spell of the Yukon,"

There’s a land— oh, it beckons and beckons,

And I want to go back— and I will.