North Carolina to Alaska July 2011

[Jager]

I've added a few pics to the photo bucket album. No big updates, went to Denali state park for a week looking for black bear with no luck. The ranger there told us that we were really trying to find them at the wrong time of year. Too much vegetation and they are low near the creeks, not the nice wide ones with gravel banks, the grizzlys claim those. Theyre in the little overgrown ones, I'm not done yet, I know how to crawl in the brush. But first I'm heading back to the north slope for another look for caribou. That should bring another round of pics as I find something cool everywhere I go. Here's the link again.

http://s1182.photobucket.com/albums/x448/Toddk375/

 

[Jager]

I"m back home, long drive. I'll admit this wasn't really the textbook overland expedition as I wasn't overly interested in a lot of the countryside I travelled so went through much of it quickly. I woke up in Fairbanks on Monday morning and slept in my own bed on Friday night in coastal Carolina. I did have a blast travelling Alaska which was my goal. I travelled most of the driveable part of the state to include three trips up the Dalton Highway. I'll post a story on that in a separate post.

 

[Jager]

This is a story of preparedness or lack thereof. On one of my trips up the Dalton Hwy I was flagged down by a broken down Pajero,
nice looking rig with snorkel, lift and big tires, nice roof rack. It was a young- 20 ish German lad driving. He asked if I had a jack to help him change a tire. He had his car shipped over and had driven much of Canada, apparently this was his first flat tire. He had a large steel footlocker full of tools but neither the bottle jack nor the floor jack he had would lift up the front end so he could change a tire. I supplied a bottle jack that lifted it, he didn't have a lug wrench, just a half inch socket set without a breaker bar or cheater bar and couldn't break the lugs loose so I provided a lug wrench. When he went to put the spare on, it didn't fit, wrong size center hole. He didn't have a tire repair kit but I had one and told him to put some air in the tire so we could see where it was leaking, he produced a $10 compressor that after about five minutes still didn't have enough air in the tire to do anything so I pulled out mine and plugged the tire and had him on his way. But after all that, he was still on the Dalton Hwy halfway from Coldfoot to Deadhorse without a jack, lug wrench, or spare, he was still one flat tire from being stranded. I'm not bragging about being prepared, but this kid thought he was ready for the trip. He hadn't tested either of the two jacks, one being a 2 ton floor jack, compressor, tools, etc. I'll admit that I drool over some of the articles in the Overland Journal like the one on building the ultimate tool kit but will state that all my tools save the jack and lugwrench fit in a 14 inch tool bag.

Buying stuff doesn't make you prepared unless it works and you know how to use it.