PLANET HESTON'S Alaska 2006--Day one con't...

We were driving to Alaska in Robert’s pick-up and I was flying home.  Until we found those last couple of items, we’d just make do with what we had.

        Most of the trans-Canada highway, from Thunder Bay to Dryden, looks like the upper Gunflint Trail.   Granite outcroppings, beautiful lakes and vast jack pine and black spruce forests. And rock cairns on every roadside cliff.  As we passed the road to Pickle Lake, we took note that it has indeed been paved.  This confirmed our suspicion that there were now three paved roads between Gunflint Lake and the North Pole.

        After a whopping 325 miles, we made camp in Aaron Provincial Park.  We did this by climbing into the back of the truck and shutting our eyes.

Day Two

        Woke to a beautiful morning.  Made coffee and drove through Dryden, Kenora and the rest of Ontario, while munching on granola.  Manitoba prairied out on us, but it is still beautiful.  Drove through Winnipeg and Portage la Prairie, a town I had last been to nineteen years ago when Robert was a three-month-old baby.  Back then, I was hauling a pick-up load of green buffalo hides from Montana to the Prairie Tanners, for my cousin Mitch. This time, I had Robert sitting next to me in the cab of another truck, on his way to Alaska to find a job.

        Somewhere in eastern Saskatchewan--perhaps near Summerberry?--we stopped at a roadside fruit stand and bought a big basket of British Columbia cherries.  We ate them and spit out the pits--some out the window and some on a napkin on the dashboard.  We did this until the pile of pits was bigger than the pile of deer jerky that was to be our supper. 

        We drove through Regina and Moose Jaw, then Parkbeg (I love the name) and Swift Current.  We parked at a municipal campground in Gull Lake, Saskatchewan,, after 782 miles.

Day Three

        Made coffee, threw our pile of pits into the trash, and took hot showers. Then we hit the road.

        Somewhere before Medicine Hat, we stopped at a garage sale, but found no coffee pot, no travel mugs.  But we did find a business called Redneck Automotive.  I took a picture of their sign, then drove on past golden fields of oats, and Calgary, and Olympic ski jumps, to the gates of Banff National Park.

        Ice seems to be a magnetic attraction for us and we took the short hike to Athabasca Glacier.  It is white and blue and grey.  We uncharacteristically heeded the danger signs and stuck to the paths.  The last three attempts to pull someone from a crevasse have been unsuccessful. 

        We slept that night at Kerkeslin Camp after driving 545 miles.

Day Four

        Made coffee with a sauce pan and a Melita cone.  I poured boiling water on my hand, while filling the Thermos, for the third time in three mornings.  Robert just laughed, and said that he never had a problem pouring water from that pan.  It crossed my mind to take a slip joint pliers from his tool box and form a spout on the rim of his backpacking saucepan, but doubted he’d appreciate the improvement.

        We passed numerous emerald green lakes on the road towards Hinton, then spent the better part of a half hour observing a large group of bighorn sheep on a hillside just east of Pocahontas.  Eventually we backtracked through Jasper on the Yellowhead Highway, past Mt. Robson, and across the Fraser River.  The last time I had crossed the Fraser River was in 1986, shortly after losing a wheel on Art Schmidt’s ’73 Travelall.  We had to limp up to the Marguerite reaction ferry, across the swift Fraser and up to Quesnel, where we could buy the parts to fix it right.

        This time, we sailed on through Prince George, Vanderhoof, and Burns Lake, where Robert watched a black bear tipping over garbage cans. On up to the Hazeltons and Seely Lake Provincial Park to camp, after 601 miles.

Day Five

        Beautiful foggy morning.  As the sun burned off the remaining mist, we stood on the banks of the Skeena, climbing on rocks and throwing sticks.

        In the Tlinkit village of Gitwangak, we walked around St. Paul’s Anglican Church and the accompanying old bell tower.  Then, while taking pictures and admiring the totems, a fellow whistled to us from the bank of the river.

        “You wanna see the smokehouse?”

He showed us inside and out, explaining how some members of his tribe net the salmon on the Skeena, other fillet and butterfly the fish, and still others cut and split the wood and tend the fire.  He had been tending the fire all night, making sure it didn’t go out, or flare up too hot and cook the fish.  He explained how the salmon are all hung facing upstream, the way they would travel when going to the place of their birth.  In this way they ask the river to provide them with more salmon.

        The salmon are first divided among the elders, then among those who put in the hours.  (Not everyone comes to help and then they ask why they didn’t get any smoked salmon.)

        The three of us walked from the smoke house to the road.  The young man told us how his father would take him to the fish camp because he was a good worker.  He was telling about some of the totems when another fellow pedaled up on his bicycle, and asked us if we wanted to by some salmon, smoked and canned?  We agreed and he said,

“Let me lay my bike down by this fence and you can drive me up to my house.”  Robert was clearing the camera stuff off the seat to make room for him, and he said,

        “Don’t worry, I don’t steal cameras anymore.”

We drove up away from the river, for maybe a half mile, until we came to a split level ranch.  We waited a couple of minutes for the man to emerge with a large jar in each hand.  One was smoked and the other just canned.  We bought the jar of smoked sockeye for $10, then offered him some dry meat and a ride back down to his bike.  On the way down, he told us he has four kids, his wife died ten years ago, and his daughter is going to have a baby.  Said she’s going out of her way to make him a grandpa.

        He also told Robert that he talks like a rock star.  When we got back to the bike, he said, “See ya ‘round.” And we drove away wondering what a rock star talks like.  We had been in the village for one and a half hours and those were the only two people that we saw.

        There is a side road to the west off the Cassiar Highway that dead ends after 40 miles, in the towns of Stewart B.C. and Hyder, Alaska.  We cruised past steep green slopes, split every so often by an ice-choked gorge.  Silty rivers gushed out from underneath, and we debated whether this was the most beautiful highway on earth.