Transiting back to Whitehorse - Day 8!

Today, we made the 530 mile transit from Eagle Plains to Whitehorse. This drive included about 250 miles on the Dempster "Highway" and another 250+ miles on Hwy 2. The Dempster is really just a gravel road just barely wide enough for two vehicles in most places. Right now, there's enough ice and snow to make it "exciting" as Bill likes to say. Hwy 2 is pretty much paved, but I use "paved" loosely- especially compared to I-5 or something. And it's still just two lanes.

We did the Dempster in 4-wheel drive and then switch to 2-wheel drive to save gas on Hwy 2. We noticed that using 4-wheel drive reduces gas mileage by 1-2 MPG.

In general, the drive was beautiful through the tundra, although there were also some long stretches of road that had been victim to recent forest fires, too. We did see our coldest temps yet on this transit- -13F!! But it warmed up to around 0F before we had to get out of the truck for anything.





In Whitehorse, we're staying in the same hotel - The Yukon Inn - that we stayed in a few days ago. When we arrived, Bill snapped a shot of this dogsled team truck. The sleds are on top and there are dogs in the kennels. Pretty cool!





In honor of seeing the dogs (and because I was thirsty), I drank this beer.





So, we've been having a lot of fun but now it's time for the serious stuff. This is a competition after all! There are three cars in our class, which is a class for SUV's with some advanced calculation equipment but no fancy real rally computer. In our case, we simply use a laptop to do our Time-Speed-Distance math. In our class, we are currently in second place. First place, Josh and Evans Keatley (in a Subaru Forester), have 125 points. We have 168 points, and the Alkemas in a Chevy pickup have 435 points. Remember, lower is better. So, we are in striking distance of 1st place in our class! The bad news? The Keatley's have years of experience in TSD rallies and are unlikely to make any major errors. We will do our best to overtake them, though! They may be the one team that we would not stop to help on stage! (Just kidding about that last part!).

Overall, we are in 11th place out of 24 entrants. We hope to break into the top 10. It will be difficult, though- There are some great competitors here.

The group running the Alcan is really fun loving! There has been some chicanery in the parking lot tonight. Maybe some photos will surface of this tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Tomorrow, we start the day with a 8 mile TSD, and the some more Ice Racing. Whoo hoo! After the competitive stuff, we head to Liard River Hot Springs for the night. Liard is about 400 miles from Whitehorse and there are some Hot Springs that we plan to go enjoy.

So far, we have not seen one drop of precipitation. The temperature has only dropped below zero once (today), and roads and skies have been clear. Crazy. Definitely not what we were expecting. Tomorrow's forecast includes some snow. So we will see how that goes. Actually, we're looking forward to a little falling snow!

Highlighting (or lowlighting?) the warm weather, don't miss the Primitive blog page from yesterday: Click here

Hopefully, we will have internet tomorrow, but we're not sure yet.

Thanks for all of your comments and encouragement (even yours, Becker!)

Doug

ps for Becker: I haven't noticed any Ice Worms yet, but you would have gotten a real kick out of the three locals who visited with us last night. Crazy guys!! They claimed that they could fit 30 Caribou into their pickup truck. They asked if I knew you. You have some reputation up here as a Caribou lover!