Alaska Highway, Day 6: Chetwynd, BC to Liard River Hot Springs Provincial Park, BC

(cross-posted to http://1lap.tumblr.com)

Today: ~540 miles from Chetwynd, BC to Liard River Hot Springs Provincial Park, BC

Approximate Route Map:

View Larger Map

The Alaska Highway (originally the ALCAN Highway) runs between Dawson Creek, BC (yes, the name is correct) and Delta Junction, AK. Up until now, we had merely been moving north to get to the highway; today, we joined up with the Alaska Highway proper. The shortest route to Alaska from Chetwynd actually short-circuited a small chunk of the route, but there was no way that would do: we took a 20-30 mile detour to make sure we got onto the Alaska Highway from the very beginning.

Helpfully, in Dawson Creek, there's a very large sign board as you leave town, proclaiming the beginning of the Alaska Highway. There's a convenient turnoff right across the street from the sign - I suspect we're not the first ones to have pulled off right next to it!

We're finally here - no more roads needed until Alaska.

Traffic on the Alaska Highway is highly diverse. It's the largest road running through significant parts of British Columbia and Yukon, and for many communities and areas, the only road. There aren't a whole lot of locals, so the traffic is primarily passers-through. You'll get an interesting melange of cars, motorcycles, RVs, cargo trucks, logging trucks, and even the occasional bicycle. Of course, by interesting I mean "incredibly annoying to pass in an underpowered station wagon".

This motorcyclist was carrying four spare tires: two road and two dirt tires, among all his other gear.

Lunch was more peanut butter-and-beef jerky sandwiches at Buckinghorse River Wayside Provincial Park, where the most notable sight (other than a somewhat diminished river) was the incredible mosquito population. The pools of standing water that appear up here in the summer (from the ground melting) support incredible mosquito populations. Half my clothes smell like DEET now.

As we were leaving Buckinghorse, we spotted a worker's camp, probably housing loggers working in the area. The extensive use of prefab structures would continue along much of the highway:

Logger's camp in northern British Columbia

Along US-101 in Oregon, there was tons of logging activity (as evidenced by the logging trucks clogging up the road), but the highway itself seemed pristine, walled in by giant trees. In BC, the logging is much more obvious. There are plenty of trees, but there are also giant piles of logs just waiting for the logging trucks to haul them away.

It's Log, it's Log! It's big, it's heavy, it's wood! It's Log, it's Log! It's better than bad, it's good!

The drive up this first stretch of the Alaska Highway, past Stone Mountain and Muncho Lake Provincial Parks, has unseated the Icefields Parkway (between Banff and Jasper Parks in Alberta) as the most scenic and beautiful drive I've ever done. Muncho Lake in particular boasts amazing views from the road and from lookouts

A lookout over Muncho Lake and a river feeding it.

Muncho Lake

Standing on the shores of Muncho Lake

This night, we were camping, so no restaurants were going to be available. I had brought along three cans of chili, to heat over a campfire, but Nathan and JT were....less than enthusiastic about the plan. So, we stopped for gas in Fort Nelson, BC, and at the same time loaded up on supplies at a local grocery store and Subway. The grocery store was named Overwaitea, a name which surely bore no relation to the...bulk...of many people we saw in town.

Upon arriving at the Liard River Hot Springs Provincial Park (LRHSPP for short), the first order of business was setting up a tent:

This tent claims to fit four, but really barely fits three.

Liard River supports a sizable mosquito population of its own. Did you know moose can lose up to a liter of blood to mosquitos, per day? Not only can I not make blood that fast, I seemed a bit allergic to the local mosquito variety. A bite I got in Chetwynd made half my arm swell up (a milder reaction than one I had in Alaska several years ago, which inflated my whole arm). To avoid any recurrences, I took some antihistamines and liberally applied Deep Woods Off.

The insects don't really respect repellent bottles, though:

Flies don't care about DEET

The star attraction of LRHSPP is, of course, the hot spring. It's a popular attraction - the campsite was full up when we arrived (good thing we had a reservation); consequently, Parks BC has done a good job of setting up facilities (changing rooms and a deck) by the springs. It's lovely, and the water is just the ticket after a long day of driving. In one corner, you can see the water actually boiling over a rock formation; the surface layer here is scalding (but you can get past by swirling the water layers). Temperatures fall until, at the other end where the other half of the creek joins in, it's merely lukewarm. We relaxed in the water here for an hour, maybe more; who can say?

The hot springs of Liard River Hot Springs Park

The downside of the water is that because it's geologically heated, there's a ton of sulfur (hydrogen sulfide, actually), floating around. You get used to the smell (useful when you're hanging around people who've also been sitting in the stuff), but it is chemically active. I wore my keyring into the spring for maybe 15 minutes before another visitor showed me the effects of the water on steel: a necklace, blackened. I quickly pulled out my keys to take stock. Aluminum carabiner: fine. Chrome-plated ring: fine. Steel key: now covered in a fine brassy sheen of iron sulfide. Inorganic chemistry at work.

The hot springs aren't just an attraction for bathing. The high mineral content  leads to the formation of tufa, limestone formations coming from deposition by the water. The "Hanging Gardens" are a large tufa formation in LRHSPP supporting a wide variety of plant life. Much of the plant life in LRHSPP is seen nowhere else this far north. The heat coming from the hot springs gives the park an almost temperate climate and plant life which in places looks tropical - ferns and broadleaf bushes and plants.

Hanging Gardens of Liard River Hot Springs Provincial Park

Tomorrow: Liard River Hot Springs Provincial Park, BC to Haines Junction, YT

Alaska Highway: Low bandwidth!

Our Internet connectivity is suffering a bit. In lieu of a full update, here's the view from our hotel tonight in Haines Junction, YT: the Alcan Motor Inn, looking out at Kluane National Park

Alaska Highway, Day 5: Seattle, WA to Chetwynd, BC

Today: ~747 miles from Seattle, WA to Chetwynd, BC

Approximate route map:

View Larger Map

One of the "last minute arrangements" we made last night was to cancel our hotel reservation in Prince George, BC and move it to Chetwynd, BC, reasoning that a 16 hour day followed by a hotel stay would be more pleasant than one followed by camping. This should shorten our next day (when we'll camp) considerably. However, it meant we had to be up really early - or, at least some of us. Our states at 5:30am were rather different:

Gentle souls 2 and 3

This was probably my peak wakefulness for the next 6 hours

We planned to leave Seattle at 6am, and actually managed it around 6:25. We headed north, got some gas, coffee, and breakfast, and continued north into Canada. A short immigration inspection (and no stamps in our passports :() later, we saw the following sign:

Welcome to British Columbia!

One thing we know for sure about the Subaru is that the electrical system is pretty decent. JT asked me before leaving if we would need a cigarette lighter splitter, to which I replied that I had already brought a 1-to-4 splitter. All of the slots were taken, and everything seemed to work fine (including the car):

From left to right: GPS power, inverter (to power camera), phone charger, iPad/GoPro USB power

The drive up the spine of British Columbia and through the Rockies had a number of beautiful sights, and some that were just funny, like a Canadian train that had clearly been through the US at some point:

(You'll want to zoom in; sorry about the glare): Canada, eh?

We stopped at Goldpan Provincial Park for a nutritious lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, beef jerky, and clementines, where I realized that though I'd brought food, I had neglected to buy a knife with which to spread the PB. JT decided to repurpose the discarded top strip of the jerky bag, though.

An Eagle Scout is always prepared!

JT also brought his own camera for shooting timelapse: a GoPro HD. Unfortunately, the GoPro's case didn't allow it to be mounted and USB-powered at the same time, so JT had to hack together a mount from the pieces and then hold it together with parts from my camera toolkit: rubber bands (shown here) and some zipties (added later). I also moved my camera higher and to the right. Maybe the perspective will be interesting.

Airbag? Never you mind that.

At a gas stop in Prince George, we saw an RV that looked frankly ludicrous - taller than its wheelbase was long, and bright yellow - until we saw the back and decided that it was probably doing OK. The owner was making the trek, on ground, from Argentina to Alaska. Ironically, I'm doing the same thing, but I skipped a bit of ground in the middle. He wasn't much for conversation, though, and left quickly after getting gas:

Dinner was also in Prince George. The burger was good, but the real draw was getting some Canadian poutine. Maybe the next place will step up the authenticity even more and use cheese curds instead of plain cheese!

After Prince George was a mostly easy and totally stunning bit of driving through the Canadian Rockies, over the Continental Divide, to Chetwynd. The only snag was a 9km segment of road that had been washed out; we were stuck waiting for 20 minutes (in what we didn't realize till later was a mosquito-infested area) for an escort truck to drive us through. Long day's drive: we arrived at the hotel at about 11:30pm.

Tomorrow: Chetwynd, BC to Liard River, BC

Alaska Highway, Day 4: Seattle, WA

Today was sightseeing day in Seattle. First point of business was to hop a UW free shuttle to downtown; in crossing the University Bridge, I got a great view of the waterfront on a beautiful day:

On the way from the Harborview Medical Center (where the shuttle drops off) into downtown, I passed by St John's Cathedral and figured I'd compare an American Catholic Cathedral to a Latin one. Still grand, but less ornate (and, I think, more to my preference for it).

St John's Cathedral: Let there be light (and don't tell me about mixing up the Testaments, OK?)

A beautifully appointed devotional wing of St John's Cathedral

After St John's, I hiked (slightly) uphill to Capitol Hill to visit the Skillet Diner, a restaurant to which Nola had never been, but which she had suggested as "always smelling delicious". Good enough for me. I planned to get something small and then follow up with seafood on the waterfront, but then I got this monster meal:

Fried chicken sammy and poutine at Skillet Diner, Seattle

The sandwich was delicious. The Seattle hipster interpretation of poutine isn't as good as the real deal in Canada - notably, there wasn't any gravy, so it was basically just cheese fries. Still, cheese fries are pretty good.

After lunch, I went downhill to downtown to catch a ferry from the waterfront, and on the way visited the magnificent Seattle Public Library:

Main atrium of the Seattle Public Library

Finally, hours after starting out, I caught a ferry to Bainbridge Island. The island itself has a small downtown and is otherwise mostly residential. The ferry ride, though, has spectacular views on a nice day and is well worth the $7.10 round trip. The island is a nice place to grab coffee and read a book, too.

I'm on a boat.

The return ferry didn't follow the posted schedule, putting me 30 minutes behind schedule. Then the bus didn't stop in the designated place, making me run 5 blocks uphill to catch it. All in all, my hour-and-a-half margin turned into fifteen minutes - which still meant that I was on time to pick up Nathan. On our return to Nola's, he was greeted with a surprise birthday celebration:

Happy birthday, Nathan!

After another lovely dinner from Jing, we headed out to pick up JT from the airport, at which point our Alaska crew was complete. After dealing with a few last-minute trip arrangements, we settled down to an all-too-short rest before the early morning drive.

Tomorrow: Seattle, WA to Chetwynd, BC

Alaska Highway, Day 3: Seattle, WA

Not much to report today. Sat around for a while, went out to get a late lunch at Aladdin's Gyro-cery near UW, and bought a bunch of food for the Alaska drive.

On the timelapse for this drive, I'm trying to shoot with a longer shutter to get a bit of motion blur in the shots. Problem is, we're mostly driving during very bright daylight, so even at the smallest aperture this camera can maintain and min sensitivity, the longest usable shutter is around 1/250 of a second - still too fast to get significant blur. On an SLR, the right solution would be to add an ND filter (like sunglasses, but for a camera) to knock down the brightness, but this camera has no filter mount.

...So the right solution is still to use an ND filter, but to hack it. In the earlier pictures you may have seen a filter just rubber-banded on top of the lens. That worked, but each time the lens retracted on power-down, the filter would fall off, and it's a bit of a pain to get attached again. I spent 10 minutes at True Value Hardware picking out parts and then a few minutes tonight hacking on the camera to get a slightly better solution going:

Yes, that's right. Three 10x24 machine screws held onto the camera body with Stik-Tak does, in fact, constitute a "better solution". The lens has room to move, and more importantly, the filter is no longer held up by the lens and its motor, so the camera ought to be able to power down without messing up the filter. This also means I can add a bit more force to the filter restraints without worrying about overpowering the lens motor:

Look, this whole setup only cost me about $50, OK?

Nola's old roommate Jing is also visiting right now (full house!), and happens to be a great cook. Dinner tonight was Chinese food (and miso and couscous) prepared by Jing:

Tomorrow: Seattle, WA

Alaska Highway: Another blog!

My co-conspirators in this journey are also blogging this trip, at http://1lap.tumblr.com. I'll be cross-posting both here and there, but if you'd like to see more about our Alaska trip, check it out!

Alaska Highway, Day 2: Coos Bay, OR to Seattle, WA

Today: ~420 mi from Coos Bay, OR to Seattle, WA

Approximate route map:


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Plan today was to start out from Motel 6 at 8:30. We left at 8:40, which might make it the timeliest day I have ever had on a roadtrip. We had breakfast at Portland Bagel Company, which has delicious bagels (protip: the jalapeno and jack cheese bagel is AMAZING), great coffee, and chalkboard tables so you can draw while you eat.

420 miles doesn't sound like all that much over the course of a day's driving, but it's a lot longer when your average speed is a hair above 45 mph. High-speed interstate this is not, folks. I still think it's a worthwhile and very scenic drive, because when 101 opens out onto the coast it really is spectacular - but know that there will be circuitous forest segments where you'll be trapped behind an RV doing 15 under the speed limit, and won't be able to do anything about it for 15 minutes. Just...accept it.

We neglected to bring any way to play music over the car stereo on this segment of the trip: no FM modulator, no tape adapter, and the car certainly didn't have an aux jack. Normally, I hate the loudspeaker on phones: it's low-quality and usually is just a way for someone on the bus to annoy everyone by playing really awful music just loudly enough to be irritating. But on this trip, that same speaker was a godsend. Casey loaded up the top 100 songs of each year from 1998 to 2004, sat his phone in the center console, and off we went. Listening to the evolution of pop over a seven year stretch is interesting, I'll give you that much. Also, the fact that we enjoyed listening to tracks of that age probably means we're officially old now.

Lunch was at the Rogue Ale brewery in Newport, OR. More delicious fried seafood, and then we continued northwards. No terribly interesting photos from this section of the drive, sadly - where there was the rare turnout, we were too scared to stop for fear of losing our spot to all the slow trucks we had already passed.

By far the best sights are to be had as you cross the Columbia River into Washington State, and continue along 101N by the coastline. At least when we were there, it was beautiful, sunny, and the roads were mostly empty. Colors shine and water sparkles. I only wish I hadn't been the one driving; then I could have taken proper pictures of it all. You'll have to live with the following timelapse shot as we descended the high span of the bridge over the Columbia:

View out the windshield as you cross the Columbia River

As you continue towards Seattle, along US-12 E from 101 towards Olympia, you'll see something strange pop up over the fields and forests: two gigantic nuclear cooling towers: 

Up and atom!

What's weird about this is that if you look up nuclear power plants, it doesn't exist. The nearest nuke plant is hundreds of miles east, in Hanford. It turns out the the "plant" is now the Satsop Development Park, just south of Satsop, WA:

From 1977 to 1983, a nuclear power plant was under construction in Satsop, but cost overruns forced its cancellation when it was already about 3/4 complete - hence the cooling towers. It was never completed and is now targeted as a business park.

A few hours after Satsop, we arrived in Seattle, where we drove around downtown for a little while to capture some cool timelapse footage. There are a number of striking buildings downtown, perhaps none more so than the Seattle Public Library:

Finally, we shut down the timelapse cameras at the waterfront and drove over towards the University of Washington. Casey's friend picked him up from there, and I went to meet up with Nola, who had prepared a sign of welcome:

Now that's service.

Tomorrow: Seattle, WA 

Alaska Highway, Day 1: San Francisco, CA to Coos Bay, OR

Today: ~490 miles from San Francisco, CA to Coos Bay, OR.

Approximate route map:

View Larger Map

The plan today was to start out from Casey's apartment in San Francisco at 8am. Of course, breakfast didn't even happen till 9, and then we had to set up our timelapses. That's right - TWO timelapses, for this chunk of the trip. Finding space to hang cameras without obscuring vision was hard! The situation was further complicated by an apparent failure of one of my cameras (or its power supply, unclear); luckily, I had spares for both.

The workhorse Powershot S45 in the center of the dash; Casey's DSLR hanging from the top.

After finally heading out at 10:30, we drove nearly nonstop until lunch at the Lost Coast Brewery in Eureka. Big dish of spinach dip was big, and nearly ruined us for our sandwiches thereafter:

While driving through the various parks on the way up into Oregon, particularly Redwoods National and State Park, there were a lot of signs warning us about elk crossings. We never saw any elk crossing the road (nor any individual elk), but we did spot a massive herd of them in the park:

Shortly after crossing the border into Oregon, we were compelled to stop by an absolutely stunning bit of coastline:

As a consequence of this bit of driving, we decided that sunset had to be observed from the coast, so we continued driving and pulled over to a lookout point just south of Bandon, OR with about 10 or 15 minutes to spare. The car was left on and idling so the Powershot could capture a time-lapse of the sun setting:

Notice the ND filter rubber-banded onto the front of the lens.

Meanwhile, I got a picture of myself:

Because we got in late and weren't ready to get dinner until about 10, the only thing open was the Kozy Kitchen restaurant, sort of like Denny's. I got a fried shrimp plate that was about what you'd expect. Casey wins the value for money award with a $9.25 dinner that included a chicken fried steak nearly a foot in diameter, 4 pieces of toast, eggs, and a full plate of hash browns:

Needless to say, at the end of the meal, more than one bite was left over:

Tomorrow: Coos Bay, OR to Seattle, WA

South America, Day 21: Buenos Aires, Argentina to San Francisco, CA

So my flight back got cancelled. Without electronics, this was hard to correct; doubly so because United Argentina's number is not 24/7. Luckily, I managed to contact a friend online who agreed to call United on my behalf. Thanks to her help, I got booked onto TACA from Buenos Aires to Lima, and United Lima-Houston-SFO, with the possibility of being upgraded on the latter.

Spent the morning buying an extra book for the flight back and sending off some postcards. Went to the airport three hours in advance (just in case!) and hung out in the Red Carpet Club reading my book while waiting for my (late, of course) plane to Lima. In Lima, I had no United boarding passes, so I had to sit around for a couple hours for the gate to open for my flight to get them - but it was worth the wait; upgraded from Lima to SFO! Dinner in first class was fancy, and surprisingly good:

In Houston, I managed to wheedle my way into the lounge in time to get breakfast before my flight:

And after a bit less than 24 hours of travel, I concluded the South America trip at SFO, five minutes earlier than originally planned thanks to the new routing!

South America, Days 19-20: Buenos Aires, Argentina

Asado de tira (short ribs) and garlic fries at Desnivel, in the San Telmo district:

The colorful Caminito, in the La Boca neighborhood, the traditional home of the tango.

The Riachuelo is the river that runs adjacent to La Boca, and it's incredibly polluted. The Museo de Bellas Artes Quinquela Martin, the fine arts museum in La Boca, had an exhibit of political comics about the Riachuelo. Here, a rocker protests: "Unscrupulous industries pollute the Riachuelo with [literal] heavy metals...like chromium, mercury, lead, cadmium, and zinc. I don't want a heavy metal river!"

The museum also had a cool outdoor statuary exhibit.

Next up in La Boca was La Bombonera, the stadium of Boca Juniors, one of the two big soccer teams in Buenos Aires. The stadium itself is cool and there's an interesting museum of the team's history (including a giant mural of Maradona).

The fences near the goals are probably 20 feet high, and are topped with barbed wire, because the diehards who stand here climb the fences when Boca scores:

At night, I walked around the Plaza Colon, behind the Casa Rosada (see Day 2).

The fountain behind the Casa is lit Argentine blue:

The A line on the Buenos Aires subway has creaky old wooden cars that are very retro. Also very slow.

MOAR STEAK. Also a salad, from Gran Parilla del Plata, in San Telmo. Possibly better than La Cabrera, in Palermo. Delicious.