Final Thoughts – Thursday 9/8/2011

Well, it’s now a week since we returned to normal life, if there is such a thing. Actually, I was starting to think of life on the road in a 19-foot motorhome without the distractions of home as being a pretty nice normal, but I guess there are limits to such an existence.

I was hoping to write this follow-up sooner, but once we got home time just started slipping away. My back started bothering me the last couple of days on the road, probably because of the long stretches without the normal stops every few miles for photos or just getting out and stretching my legs. Plus, all the unpacking probably exacerbated it, but when I woke up Saturday morning I was a sore puppy. Even today, six days later, it’s still a little stiff. The only real result of this was a delay of a couple of days in getting the motorhome cleaned up and starting on some repairs and modifications on the Tiger itself. Owning a motorhome is like owning a boat – there’s always some little something to fix or some improvement to be made. So that’s what I’ve been doing the past couple of days. The real start was washing the exterior. It was somewhat surprising that the exterior wasn’t dirtier and grimier than it was after eight weeks of mud and dust, but it sure looks white and sparkly now that it’s washed.

But seriously, reflecting on the journey, I suppose the first question that comes to mind is was it worth it? Absolutely! It was a journey of discovery for us – new places, new people, new ways of looking at life in other parts of the country and world, and most importantly, realizing that once again, when stripped of all the trappings of normal daily life, how compatible and loving we are to each other. After 45 years of blissful marriage you’d think we’d know each other pretty well, but when you live for eight weeks in a space the size of a walk-in closet, you learn real quickly what each other’s foibles and hot button issues are. It’s not like we haven’t done this before, but our longest previous trip in the motorhome was only four weeks – half of this one. Surprisingly, we had only a couple of testy times, neither of which turned out to be anything serious. The biggest problem is really the close quarters. There’s no such thing as a personal space in something this small. We just learned to deal with it, and to always look at whatever the situation happened to be in a positive manner. And it helps to learn to laugh at oneself.

It’s been said that driving to Alaska is America’s last great road trip. After doing it, I’d have a hard time arguing with that assessment. I’m sure there are other great road trips in North America, but I doubt that any of them offer the variety of geography, of geology, of scenery, of wildlife, and of people you meet along the way. I guess the only thing that might beat it would be the Arctic Ocean to Tierra del Fuego journey from the extremes of North and South America, but that’s a trip that is not realistically doable for 99.999 percent of us. Probably the best thing about driving to Alaska is that all it really takes is time. That limits it to retirees like us or someone like school teachers who have an extended vacation. We first started thinking we could do this trip in six weeks, but realized that we would either be driving every minute or else missing some really special places if we tried to squeeze it into that short a period. As it was, I think eight weeks is pretty much the minimum one should plan to spend on a trip like this. In fact, most people we met were spending the entire summer, just taking it slow and easy and savoring every moment and every mile.

So what’s it really take to do this journey, assuming one has the time? Number one would be an RV of some type, either a self-contained motor home or a travel trailer. We saw RV’s of every type – million-dollar Class A motor coaches to pop-up tent trailers. I wouldn’t rule out tent camping – and we saw a lot of people doing that. But even though we never saw dangerous wildlife in any of the campgrounds or boondock sites we camped at, the possibility exists. I for one would rather have a metal wall between me and a snooping bear than a piece of canvas or nylon. Besides, I had my fill of setting up and taking down tents in the rain, and sleeping on the ground (even with an air mattress) in my younger days. So for me, doing the Alaska Highway in a tent would be the last resort.

What about hotels and motels? Sure, they’re there, and that is a possibility if you don’t have an RV, but don’t expect anything even close to a Holiday Inn. Probably the only place between Edmonton and Fairbanks that has anything close to first-class hotel or motel is Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory. Other than that, at least in the towns of consequence, it’s 1950’s style drive-up motels. Between the towns there are “lodges,” which for the most part are rustic cabins, some of which look like converted shipping containers. In short, yes, you can do it without an RV, but your accommodation choices are pretty limited. If you don’t have an RV, I’d seriously consider renting one if you want to make this journey. Probably a fourth of the motorhomes we saw along the way were rented, as evidenced by the logos on the sides. It’s not a cheap option, but it’s certainly a way to do it. If your time is limited to only two or three weeks, I’d suggest flying to Anchorage (for Alaskan destinations) or Calgary or Edmonton (for Canadian destinations) and renting an RV.

Before getting to the physical roads themselves, I should mention other modes of transport. We were surprised at the number motorcycles we saw. Every day we passed a dozen or so, traveling in solo or in twos or threes. Some pulled small trailers, and others were loaded with storage boxes and packs. There were two or three in every campground, each with a small one-man tent and one-burner propane stove for cooking. But what really surprised us was the number of bicycles – at least two or three on most days. These are my real heroes, pedaling for thousands of miles with nothing more than a raincoat, a tiny tent, and maybe one change of clothes. We met one young man who had flown to Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean, and was planning to ride his bike all the way down to the tip of South America. Not only that, he was doing it solo. I’m not sure if he is brave or crazy, but whatever it is, he’s certainly adventurous.

There is one other mode of transport I want to mention and that’s the “expedition vehicles.” These are large 4x4 or 4x6 trucks that are outfitted as self-contained on-road or off-road travel anywhere in the world. Most are built on Mercedes Benz or Iveco truck chassis, and some appear to be converted military-style command vehicles. These are especially popular in Europe, where the more adventurous (and wealthy) types can drive across Siberia and Mongolia and back, or take a short ferry hop across the Strait of Gibralter and circumnavigate Africa. We saw a half-dozen or so of these which had been transported across the Atlantic and were now spending a year or more touring North America, and in some cases South America as well.

OK, so what about the roads themselves? Forget the myth of hundreds or thousands of miles of bumpy, rutted gravel roads, of having to carry extra gas in jerry cans, extra mounted spare tires, jugs of drinking water, and emergency food in case you get stranded. That may have been true twenty or thirty years ago, but today you can easily drive across northern Canada and all around Alaska on decent, two-lane paved highways that are the equal of any two-lane US or State highway here in the lower 48. To be sure, there are stretches of gravel in construction zones and there is one notorious stretch of severe frost heaving, but otherwise, unless you want to take some of the well-known side trips, you’re on blacktop all the way. Plus, fuel is readily available at the numerous lodges and outposts that seem to be spaced every 50 or 60 miles, and there’s always someplace to get food, either in the form of groceries or a café of one sort or another. So from the aspect of roads and wear-and-tear on a vehicle, it’s no different than taking a coast-to-coast or similar trip of eight or ten thousand miles down here in the lower 48. (I would, however, if traveling in an automobile, take at least a couple of bottles of water and a few energy bars or the like. Washouts can occur, and you might find yourself stuck overnight someplace. But that’s standard fare for those of us in the mountain west.)

I guess the final question is, would we do it again? The answer is a qualified Yes. There a couple of reasons I say qualified: First, it’s a looong drive. Our GPS spat out 9023 miles when we pulled into our driveway last Friday. Just getting to the best part is the equal to many normal road trips. Going up the route we took up through Alberta and west into British Columbia at Dawson Creek entails a lot of miles of routine scenery. Things don’t really get interesting until after Ft Nelson, which is 2300 miles from Denver and, for us, ten days of driving. But after that, we can’t complain about any of the scenery, especially since we came home via Jasper, Banff, and Glacier National Park. The second reason is that it seems like every time we’ve gone back to someplace we’ve really liked, it never seemed to be as good as the first time – the old You Can’t Go Home Again syndrome. What I would do again, though, is take two or three weeks and drive back up to Banff and Jasper and spend more time in that area, or fly to Anchorage, rent an RV, and visit some of the places we missed, or spend more time in some of the places we barely touched.

There are so many other places to see, and while I don’t like to dwell on my mortality, at this stage in our lives our time is limited – we need to spend it on new things. So what’s next? Well, for one, there’s a lot of National Parks here in the west that we haven’t seen. Another long trip we’re looking at in perhaps a couple of years is eastern Canada and the Maritime Provinces. And then there’s the theme trips – Route 66, across the country on US 50, visiting all the major league ballparks, following the Lewis & Clark and Oregon Trails, Civil War battlefields, and the list goes on. One thing for certain, as long as the Tiger lives the adventure will continue.

Adios for now, my friends…until we hit the road again.

Day 57 – Friday 9/2/2011

Wolford Mountain Reservoir, CO to Home – 113 Miles

Like I said, it was just a hop, skip, and jump to get home. We left the campground at 9:15, zipped up Colorado Highway 9 through Kremmling to Silverthorne, and then it was I-70 all the way back to Denver. Traffic was negligible eastbound, but the westbound early bird holiday weekend traffic out of Denver was already starting to build up. As much as we would have liked to spend a few more days on the road, finding a campsite without making reservations would have been next to impossible. The campsites we used at our last two stops, Soldier Creek in Utah and Wolford Mountain here in Colorado, already had “Reserved” signs posted on them for the weekend, but because we were only staying one night we were able to get in and use the reserved sites before the weekend occupants arrived.

Highway 9 between Kremmling and Silverthorne passes by Green Mountain Reservoir, a medium-sized impoundment on the Blue River just upstream from its junction with the Colorado River at Kremmling. For the past several years this reservoir has been way down, with wide, bare shorelines marking the difference between the normal water level and wherever the level happened to be during those dry years. But this year, because of the excessive snowpack over the winter, the reservoir was as full as I’ve ever seen it. Not a hint of bare white shoreline was visible. The Forest Service campgrounds along the water’s edge were already filling up with weekend campers and fishermen.

At Silverthorne the long climb up I-70 to the Eisenhower/Johnson Tunnels begins. This is an eight-mile grade up 2000 vertical feet to the twin bores of the tunnels. From there it’s downhill all the way to Denver, except for one short, fairly steep climb up out of the Clear Creek canyon known as Floyd Hill, which is a half-dozen miles east of Idaho Springs. Then it’s another long downhill grade to the western suburbs of Denver. For those continuing eastbound, this is the end of the Rocky Mountains. From here to the Mississippi River it’s nothing but prairie, farmland, and a few rolling hills.

After stopping to top off the gas tank so we could calculate the mileage, we grabbed a barbeque sandwich and were home in the driveway by noon. So ends our journey of 57 days and 9023 miles.

Thanks to all those who have shared our journey through this blog, and thanks especially for your comments. I’ll probably have one last entry, a wrap-up, in two or three days after we get unpacked and have a chance to reflect on all that we’ve seen and done. So stay tuned. Also, I’ve had several queries about photographs, especially from those that know about my interest in photography. I’ve taken well over 2000 photos, plus Jeanette has also taken several hundred. I’ve deferred the sorting, selection, and basic editing of these while traveling to allow me to spend this time writing. I’ve got a winter’s worth of post-processing of images ahead of me, and will post the best of these on my SmugMug gallery as time permits. Meanwhile, I’ll try to post a few that capture the spirit of the trip on my Facebook page as quickly as possible. Again, I don’t know exactly when that will be, but I’ll either put it in a final blog post or let everyone know by e-mail.

Adios for now.

Day 56 – Thursday 9/1/2011

Soldier Creek Reservoir, UT to Wolford Mountain Reservoir, CO – 310 Miles

They say all good things must come to an end, and this is it – our last night on the road, the (almost) end of our great adventure, this wonderful journey that has been the center of our lives for the past eight weeks. Tomorrow morning we wake up, have a farewell breakfast, stow our gear one last time, and begin the last leg of our longest trip ever. We’ll be home in just two hours driving time from here, a scant hundred miles.

I wouldn’t normally do two 300-plus mile days in a row, but I wanted to spend our last night here at Wolford Mountain Reservoir. It was eleven months ago that we set out on a ten-day aspen tour of northwestern Colorado. We’ve done this the last few years since Jeanette retired from her teaching job, taking advantage of the freedom to travel in the fall to see the changing aspens in the Colorado high country. So it was that in late September last year we left our home in Denver and stopped for our first night here at this campground a few miles north of Kremmling, Colorado. As we paused at the entry gate to the campground to register, a Ford SUV towing a dusty, muddy, Airstream trailer pulled in behind us. I mentioned something about the dust and mud as the fellow driving the rig walked up and he said, “Yeah, it’s been a long journey and this is our last night on the road.” “Where’ve you been?” I asked. “Alaska,” he replied. Alaska -- the magic word. I had been dreaming about such a trip for a year or more, sometimes seriously, sometimes just casually. I had mentioned going to Alaska to Jeanette, but she was having a hard time getting fired up about such a long trip. So as the Alaska traveler and I headed back to our individual vehicles after dropping our fees in the collection box at the campground entrance I said, “Maybe we can get together after dinner and talk about Alaska.” “Sure,” he said cheerfully, “Come on over.” So we did, and the die was cast.

As we sat around their campfire later that evening, their descriptions of the roads they’d driven, the places they’d been, and the things they’d seen in the three months of their trip began to kindle the fire that had been simmering in my wanderlust not only for the past year, but perhaps as long as fifteen years. Not only that, Jeanette began to show more interest in undertaking such a journey. Sure it would be a long way, but we had already been to both coasts in our little motorhome, trips of three to four weeks and five to six thousand miles. Maybe we were ready for a really long adventure. And so it began in earnest…we got serious about the planning, and eventually the execution of this journey that I’ve been writing about and you, my friends, have been reading about for the past several weeks.

Our original route planning didn’t have us coming this way and spending our last night here. In laying out a trip such as this I always try to cover as much new ground as possible – that is, as many roads, highways, and places that we haven’t seen before. In spite of our travels around Colorado over the years we’ve lived here, there are still plenty of new roads and places for us to discover and experience right here in our home state. So I had us veering off US 40 shortly after crossing into Colorado and going down through Rangely and Meeker on some new to us roads, and probably spending the night tonight at Rifle Falls, a small but charming state park where we’d ended last year’s aspen tour. It would then be a three-hour drive up I-70 to home. But as I looked at the map, I realized that I was being called to this place, to revisit where, in a very symbolic way, it all began. So we drove a little farther today, even though much of it was all on roads previously traveled, and we’ll drive a little less tomorrow. Besides, we’d be passing through Steamboat Springs if we came this way, and who can deny that the area around that bustling ski resort and the drive over Rabbit Ears Pass is one of Colorado’s great byways? So here we are, and here it ends. From here it’s a hop, skip, and jump to home. In spite of the fact that this journey officially ends when we pull into the driveway tomorrow, emotionally it ends here at Wolford Mountain Reservoir, with a beautiful sunset followed by a candlelit dinner with some soft Bill Evans and Danny Wright on the iPod in our cozy little home on wheels.

Day 55 – Wednesday 8/31/2011

Mackay Reservoir, ID to Soldier Creek Reservoir, UT – 359 Miles

OK, I confess. I’m guilty. After all that talk yesterday about the Interstate Highways and how we always try to avoid them whenever possible, what did we do today? Why, we jumped on the first Interstate Highway we came to, of course. After leaving our campsite at Mackay Reservoir, we followed Highway 93 down to the town of Arco, Idaho where one of those strange quirks of highway planning takes place. Up until this point, Highway 93 was heading due southeast. At Arco, one of those dual-numbered highways where two highways of different numbers, US Highways 20 and 26, share the same roadbed and pavement comes up from the southwest. What do you suppose happens when these intersect? Highway 93 turns back 90 degrees to the southwest and becomes a triple highway, 20, 26, and 93. Meanwhile, Highways 20 and 26 turn 90 degrees to the southeast as the direct, straight-ahead extension of Highway 93. Suddenly an unknowing person driving along on Highway 93 with his mind on what he’s going to have for lunch looks up and sees he’s now on Highway 20/26. Confusing, eh? (I picked up the eh? in Canada). But like a good Boy Scout, I came prepared with a map so I knew I was OK.

Past Arco, the road leaves behind the ranches and irrigated hayfields downstream from the reservoir and reverts back to its natural state, a barren, desolate sagebrush flat. It goes up a slight rise, and suddenly the foothills and the green field and the ranch houses are left behind. It goes on like this for fifty miles. Because this is the outer edge of the Craters of the Moon National Monument lava beds, the land is dotted with occasional piles of broken, black lava rock, ejected from an ancient volcano thousands of years ago and scattered haphazardly across hundreds of square miles of desert. In fact, as you pass through a road cut, you see that the whole area is underlain by a continuous bed of this black lava. What a cataclysmic period that must have been!

Off to the north, a few miles from the highway, we could see a large complex of buildings with a plume of steam rising from one particular area. We had noticed a sign along the road a ways back but it went by so quickly we didn’t pay it much attention; it said something about the Department of Energy. I was thinking that we were perhaps seeing a nuclear power plant. The map showed a small town called Atomic City off on a side road, but it was off to the south and the complex we were looking at was several miles to the north. Then we saw a sign that said something about the Idaho National Laboratories. Neither of us had heard of this before, so Jeanette Googled it on her smart phone as soon as we were able to pick up a signal. (That happened when we reached the Interstate – one of the definite advantages of traveling on these “civilized” highways.) We discovered that the Idaho National Laboratories, or INL, is the Department of Energy’s primary research facilities for nuclear reactor design, that the first nuclear-generated electric power was generated here in 1949, and that the early research and design of reactors for nuclear submarines was done here, as well as the training of the crews that manned and operated those submarines. So we learned something new.

Our blue highway, to use Least Heat Moon’s terminology because it’s actually red on our map, intersected I-15 at Blackfoot, Idaho, just a few miles north of Pocatello. As much as we’d like to stay on the back roads, we’re hoping to beat the Labor Day weekend crowds, so we’ve got a lot of miles to cover and the Interstate was just about our only option. So we merged into the traffic and headed south for I guess about 250 of our 359 miles driven today. We actually spent time on three different Interstates, I-15 to Provo, Utah, then I-84 around the backside of Salt Lake City, and finally I-80 for a few miles until we finally reached US 40, which will take us home.

We always manage to find water to camp by, either a lake, a river, or, as in Alaska, the ocean. Last night were camped by Mackay Reservoir in Idaho, and tonight we’re at Soldier Creek Campground, a Forest Service campground overlooking Soldier Creek Reservoir in the Uintah Mountains about 35 miles southeast of Heber City, Utah. If all goes as planned, we’ll also spend tomorrow night, our last night on the road, alongside another lake, then be home to our house overlooking Marston Reservoir the night after that. What can I say -- we enjoy our lake views.

Note: I'm posting this from the public library in Steamboat Springs, CO on Thursday, September 1. Since tonight will be or last night on the road, I may not get anything written until we get home. I'll also be posting some final thoughts in a couple of days.