HaveKidsWillTravel

There’s a good reason that despite its natural wealth and spectacular scenery, Alaska is one of the least populated regions in the world – and it’s not the 9 months of winter, incessant rain, unbelievable cold or rambunctious Bears. When you take all that away (as we discovered on a quiet night mid-way between nowhere in particular on the Alaska highway) there’s the bugs. And the frost heaves.

We pulled over close to midnight on the aptly deadman’s lake – in the featureless taiga forest, a hundred mile short of Tok and a long way from anywhere. As we switched off the engine, instead of the silence of the wilderness you might expect, there was a noise – eerily like a formula one racetrack – of unimaginable swarms of mosquitoes, horse flies, the chiggers, midges and ‘no-see-ums’. All wildly excited to have company for the evening.

But while we’d experienced insects before, the frost heaves were entirely new. To get from the Alaska panhandle in the SouthEast up to the rest of Alaska, you have to duck into Canada – a few hundred mile through BC and the Yukon. While the highway is supposed to be entirely paved these days, somewhere, just out of Haines Junction, you start to hit patches of bitumen with flags marking sudden dips or rises in the road. Soon, you’re heaving about like you’re on the open ocean, with the only respite being incomplete roadworks breaking the bitumen entirely for stretches dozens of miles long. It turns out that beneath the swampy black spruce taiga forest is permafrost, and nobody’s really come up with a good way of building a lasting road across it. And that despite the US agreeing to fund the upkeep of the road joining the two bits of Alaska together, it hasn’t been reliably paying its bills.

The only way to get across it is to slow way, way down, forget about where you’d planned to get or when you’d planned to get there and flow with the undulations of the road. Hence, we found ourselves pulling up somewhere called Deadman’s lake in the middle of the night.

But eventually we made it – a slow three days on the road from Haines to Anchorage, and 14 hours on the road on day 3 (albeit with plenty of sanity stops). There were amazing highlights along the way – spectacular mountain scenery, bears, trumpeter swans, ptarmigan, arctic ground squirrels, camping at the top of a mountain pass and renacting the fateful crossing of the Chilkot (when the kids crossed a snowdrift in their crocs, only for the icy crust to give way and sink to their midriffs halfway across…), but unfortunately there were casualties – I think all the heave and ho took it’s toll on the laptop, and it gave up the ghost on the last day- and almost all of the photos of our trip were lost.

Well, at least we know we’ll get to pretty much see it all again – there’s only one road back out…