Don't Throw Your Life Away - Battling Marine Debris from Alaska to Panama

[Voyager3]

I only drove a short distance north from the entrance to a park to continue with my tour of Alaskan river beds, and in the morning I played with Jenson, throwing sticks for him in my pajamas and the sweater Murph's mom gave me in Haines. Everything was great.



This guy is a traveler, too. Even reminds me of when I used to be a desert dweller.





When I'm absorbed in tiny details, I'm ok.



Because this morning, even the mud was beautiful.





Driving in to Fairbanks, things amused me again, people driving the other way in a fully loaded old school mini, trucks transporting enormous earthmoving machinery. This very cool homemade snowmachine.









And then I got some vehicle maintenance done, like an oil change and tire rotation. Here I found an issue, but it was overshadowed again by the brilliance of the humanity of an individual. Aamco did a great job with the second rear end repair. It's been over 5k miles now and it's still fine. But, I fear like many other shops they get carried away with the impact gun when "torquing". The rears could not be loosened with a normal cross tire iron without sitting on the ground, putting a boot on the bottom and heaving from the top until it snapped loose and I hoped I didn't ********** myself. As I was doing this an older man in crutches climbed out of his RV to help. He came over to the Jeep, rested his crutches against it and got in to help, offering to help stabilize the wrench, and even pull while I was kicking. Even with him helping to stabilize the tire iron, I could bounce on one of the arms and nothing would budge. So to yet another gorgeous human, thank you for your assistance, and to shops that take wheels off and on, just do the stupid lug nuts by hand.

I used my Anchorage donation to get some much needed laundry done and have a shower before settling down to post the first handful of pages of this update last night. This morning someone here at this coffee shop thanked me for my service with a fire department thousands of miles away because I have my Newport Fire hat on. Life is great up here in the North. There sure is a lot more north and west of the northwest where I have been, but pretty soon we'll have to point south and east. Thanks for reading.

 

[Riversdad]

I plan on doing some traveling in Canada and Alaska next year and can't see doing it without my dogs. Big dogs. Could you comment on some of the problems you have with having your boy along and what do you do with him when you go to museums and other indoor places?

 

[Voyager3]

I plan on doing some traveling in Canada and Alaska next year and can't see doing it without my dogs. Big dogs. Could you comment on some of the problems you have with having your boy along and what do you do with him when you go to museums and other indoor places?

One thing dogs are especially good for us limiting your exploration of many National Parks. Keep that in mind. I just leave him in thr Jeep when I go do inside things, and he's fine with it. A lot of places I've eaten let him be outside with me, some stores even let him in. There really hasn't been a whole lot outside National Parks that I haven't been able to do. He went on the boat with us in Haines, and stayed home in a crate at my friend's when we were on the boat in Juneau. He did the 16 ish hour ferry ride from Port Hardy just fine in the car, and i even missed the halfway ashore for a potty break because i got the call about my bike. On the ferries where I didn't have the Jeep, I borrowed a crate ans he stayed there in the vehicle bay. There have been so many opportunities to let him free and ve a dog and run and swim, he deals just fine with the frequent time in the Jeep whetber we're driving or I'm off doing some human thing. Keep them as active as you can when and then when you have to leave them, make sure they have what they need.

 

[Voyager3]

Even though I'm heading east across Canada, and it will be a while before I see an ocean again, there will be endless supply of lakes and rivers. And so I formally have said goodbye to Alaska for now, and I'm really excited to see more of Canada for the next two months.

 

[FIRE74]

Looking forward to meeting you at Expo East! Be safe and enjoy your journey!

 

[logoris]

It's great to see someone doing their part to help while on an adventure to see some of the most amazing places.

We would love to do something like that on a smaller scale

If you are going to be passing through Toronto or Markham let me know,

Also are you still short a bike?

 

[Voyager3]

Looking forward to meeting you at Expo East! Be safe and enjoy your journey!

I'll be there, long way to go still!

It's great to see someone doing their part to help while on an adventure to see some of the most amazing places.

We would love to do something like that on a smaller scale

If you are going to be passing through Toronto or Markham let me know,

Also are you still short a bike?

Thanks so much for saying so. You can do any scale you want, even just down your street. I used to be able to just about fill the back of the Jeep with just cans and bottle thrown out on the last half mile of road to where I was living in Colorado.

I might be headed through there, haven't planned ahead really apart from ....east. And yes, but I will find a way to have mine shipped out. Or maybe someone here is headed east from the Seattle area and can assist. We'll see what happens. But I won't be coming down into the states again until the end of October, beginning of November and I don't want to ship it into Canada. Maybe I won't see it until Expo or later.

 

[Voyager3]

How did I get to such a beautiful spot with such a happy dog? To answer this question we need to backtrack quite a bit. I last posted before my museum day in Fairbanks and well, now I'm in Fort Nelson, BC now and I don't have anything written yet, so I've got my butt in the seat at the visitor center with WiFi, and I'll try and catch you all up.

 

[Voyager3]

So in Fairbanks, I visited the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum. This is a combination very early auto and fashion museum, and well worth the 10 bucks to anyone visiting. The vehicles on display are phenomenally rare. We're not talking 1 of a dozen in a particular color and trim combo like muscle car guys talk about rare. And many have really cool connections to early Alaskan history as well. First off, let's all be thankful that suspension, brakes, and steering have all improved since the late 1800s.







How am I going to get through all of these photos.....I've just seen how many there are. I uploaded 1139 since I spoke to you last. No, I won't post all of them. Alright Travis. Just one at a time. All day.

Hello viewers, how many of you have ever seen a shaft drive bicycle? I'm not sure I had until now



Can I take a moment to talk about electric cars? Why did they fail so early on? People seemed to love them, maybe it was a big oil conspiracy, but imagine where we would be today if we had continued with battery development and electric drives for the last 100 years properly. This 1912 Rauch & Lang had up to a 70 mile range AND room for your tall, fashionable hat. So where did we go astray?



This 1913 Argo could do up to 75 miles. And had 5 forward speeds and 5 reverse. And silk shades. Of over 500 produced, this is one of 2 known to exist. Not of the model....of the whole manufacturer.





I've been around some expensive cars in my racing and coaching days, but none had an umbrella like on this 1904 Buckmobile, which I might add has only been cosmetically restored. Apart from the headlights and one buckboard, this is all original.



While we're at it, let's bring back wicker trunks



Are you guys sure you're ready for more of this? Because I'll keep going.

 

[Voyager3]

So that last gem from 1903 is the last known gasoline powered Toledo known to survive. That kind of rare. It also had a parking brake that was a pole that swung down from the chassis and dug into the ground.







This one is rare because it was a homebuilt by a man called Robert Sheldon, so don't even try to turn to your friends there and say, oh yeah I saw one of these at Pebble Beach. He even made it the same width as the narrow gauge White Pass & Yukon Railroad so he could swap out wheels and drive on the rails to hunt mountain goats in the pass.



But see, I know you overland types, you want something high with big wheels. You want a vehicle for the thick mud of Alaska. Well in 1909, you would have had this IHC Model D Auto Buggy.



But Travis, it snows in the far north. It does indeed, but I have you covered there, too. Turns out man flew before he figured out how to get a motorized vehicle to travel on snow. But in 1931, Virgil White of New Hampshire put wooden runners on a Model T with tracks on tandem rear wheels. He then in 1917 patented his "Snowmobile" kit, decades before snowmobiles as we know them today ever came to fruition.



Or if you had a lot of snow and a bit more creativity you made this, the Fordson Snow-Motor. Three were brought here to haul 15 tons of aviation fuel, oil and supplies from Fairbanks to Barrow to support a 1926 trans-arctic flight attempt to Europe by Sir Hubert Wilkins and Carl Ben Eielson (who the AFB base up here was evantually named after). After just 60 of the 800+ miles they were abandoned because they were using so much fuel, there would be none left when they got there.



So maybe normal fuel isn't your thing. Steam is definitely for you like this 1907 White Model G Custom Touring steamer.

 

[Voyager3]

1907 Franklin Type D



And yes that's Pebble Beach hardware on this 1906 Pope-Toledo.

 

[Voyager3]

Ok, in the interest of time, suffice it to say the museum is excellent, and I will just post some of my favorites. Just come see for yourself.



















Just go see it. Now we are moving onto another museum, which for me is obviously part of traveling. I missed one in Anchorage apparently, but the aviation museum in Fairbanks is rather small. No matter.....they still managed to stuff some planes and plenty of cool Alaska related flying history in it.

 

[Voyager3]

Before we get to the airplanes I want to talk about the word "rig". When someone says something to me that includes the words "new rig", this is what I think about.



Now, it may not be practical for the kinds of things I like to do, although you never know, I could be a trucker man someday. Anyway, the services intervals are enticing, could make it livable pretty easily, 2050lb-ft of torque sounds good. And it's already got a Cummins in it, so I'll have something to talk about at parking enthusiast meets. I mean, cars and coffee.





If you really want to impress me with your engine swap, try this 28 cylinder radial.



Here's a good candidate for a rebulid



Did you know that up here the ran P-38's and early P-51's on retractable skis?



This Fokker had a cool history of going to bring a spare engine and parts to a stranded Stinson, but itself later crashing on takeoff. It then sat where it came down for over 50 years and still has the Stinson's original broken engine on the floor of the cargo hold.



I was happy to see on this map a route taken that I was already familiar with. The first Round the World flight by the U.S. Army Air Service. Do yourself another favor if you like exploration stories and pick up The First World Flight by Lowell Thomas. My copy is back in Florida. That would be the lighter blue line that dips down into southern Asia and through the Middle East. Amazing story.



And this is my unicorn. Your right hand drive Toyotas are cool and all, but may I now present the North American XB-70 Valkyrie. Well, it's only a model. The real one is much bigger. Soon, once we're done with Canada, I'm making a side trip to Ohio to finally see it. Something I've been waiting for since I was a kid.



And finally bits of the Eielson crash. All arctic exploration is hard, but the crashes in airplanes are harder.

 

[Voyager3]

And now the story finally moves out of Alaska. My last trash picture made a point that there is still plenty of work along the way. And I am sticking to taking care of waterways because I like the water, and if this was a show about trash on the side of the roads, I might only be in Washington now.

So after Tok, near where that shot was taken, I decided to take the Top of the World highway and make my way to Dawson City. Beautiful scenery is coming.

First though, I didn't know they had bred turkeys and tomatoes, but there you go. Science delivers.



And to my fellow men, it's really ok to buy wipes. But, if you will only do yoga if it's called Broga, then by all means, get yourself some Dude Wipes.



And it was just funny to see a front end loader at the self service pumps.



But these are all town things. We want out-of-town things like this. If I had a nickel for every time I went towards where there was a solitary marker on ioverlander, found it was crappy, and then went out to find a more interesting road to a place like this....I'd have many nickels, but the reward is really being here.











I like it out here. You can keep your tomato turkeys and dude wipes.

 

[Voyager3]

So a peculiar thing happened at the Canadian border. I was remembering back to crossing at Vancouver a million years ago and the lady there was asking the usual questions. I was headed to Alaska, so how long did I think I would be in Canada. I said, "well a couple weeks for sure." The response was a little confused, "It doesn't take a couple weeks to drive to Alaska."

Very true, but it can. or much longer. And what's the point of traveling through your lovely country if I do it too fast and miss it?

So crossing this time, I'm planning on being in Canada for almost 2 months. That didn't go over well. How are you going to support yourself, do you have insurance, you know you can't get a job here right, and so on. Apparently this was a very thorough check to make sure I'm not a burden on Canada, taking jobs away from Canadians, using up all their healthcare. As the interrogation kept going and I had to explain that part of it was being assisted by a grant, they were concerned with the way it was being paid out, they were concerned with my online work. How could I possibly support myself while I was in their country. And then I started thinking.......hmm. Maybe they're right, what am I doing out here, how am I going to manage? What if I never make it all the way across and I have to get a job in Canadian healthcare.

But finally, the lady handed me my passport back and reluctantly told me "I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you can support yourself the way you say you can, ok?. You're free to go."

Did I almost not make it into Canada? Maybe next time I'll try a different tactic.



But crucially I DID make it. And I'm fairly certain they'll let me back in the states in November. So nothing to worry about now except the spectacular failure of the whole circus on the way.



And so I made it to the ferry to Dawson City across the crazy current and into town.



So what's the first thing I did when I got there, if you said museum, you've been paying attention well. Dawson City has a charming little fire fighting museum. They have two very cool Waterous steam pumpers. An enormous, 1300gpm unrestored monster and a beautiful smaller pumper. The deputy chief there said they need to keep filling that donation box up to around $300,000 to restore the big one. If you look at the $50,000 worth of nickel plating on the smaller one and take into account they made some savvy decisions like making a new floorboard which is just bent steel instead of spending $5k to restore the old one, you can see how it adds up, but it was all paid for out of the pockets of the volunteers at the department.





I'm adding another favorite smell. Not just crushed spruce needles and low tide in the northern Pacific, a barn full of old firetrucks. If it makes sense out there, it smells like it looks. It's difficult to describe beyond that.







Dawson City is a cool little town, I didn't get to explore as much of it as I wanted to. I was flummoxed early on when I thought, yeah, I'll spend a little Canadian money here. I'll help bolster the local economy instead of being a drain, and I'll get some good eats. A local, reasonably priced eatery was right across from where I was parked, and seeing as how I needed a walk too, I would come back and have something warm. So I took that walk around town to come back and find it had closed. At 4pm. This was surprising to the gentleman at the visitor center who suggested that I head to the locoal store where they're having a block party with free hotdogs. Perfect.

Out of hot dogs.

Trials and tribulations.