Up the Cassier, down the Alaska Hwy, 2015

[jcravens]

Just realized that I never posted a link to our ride report from 2015: 16 days from Oregon to Hyder, Alaska, the Yukon & the Alaska Highway, starting in late August and lasting through the first week of September 2015. It was 3700 miles / 5954 kilometres. At a visitor's center in Canada, we found out from a brochure during the trip that our route actually has an official name: the Great Northern.

We went from the Portland, Oregon area to Stewart, BC/Hyder, Alaska, up the Stewart-Cassiar Highway to the Yukon, then down the Alaska Highway to Dawson Creek, then over and down through Jasper, across Canada's Yoho National Park, Glacier National Park and Mount Revelstoke National Park, down British Columbia Highways 23 and 6 along Slocan Lake, down through Castlegar and Trail, over to Rossland, back over the border into the USA, and across Washington state to home. We could have gone to Skagway and Haines instead of Jasper and Banff in the same amount of time, but we didn't, because of weather.

This trip was a very big deal for me, because in 2014, I crashed on the infamous Shafer Switchbacks in Canyonlands in Utah - it was mostly my head that did the crashing, into a rock wall - and my confidence was utterly shaken. It's taken a lot of work to get back to a point were I felt like I could go on a trip like this, all the way to Yukon and back, and I'm so pleased to have done it - though it included two days of the absolute hardest, dangerous riding I've ever done and I'd be happy never, ever to experience such days again!

I write my blogs with a lot of advice regarding what to see, where to stop, where to camp, what to bring, etc. Hope it's helpful to others.