We are preparing for departure! Leaving Denver June 1, starting the flight north on June 2, and starting the ride south from Inuvik on June 9! My brother Collin and his wife Marisa of Parkwest Air are going to fly us up there in their Cessna! And they're leading a group of 10-12 more planes. We start from Grand Junction, Colorado on June 3.

Below this posting is a map of the first part of our route and here is the same map as a pdf and as a large jpeg - click to see all sizes (with all the detail).

We leave from Inuvik, which is in Northwest Territories, but we cross over the line into the Yukon pretty quickly. We ride down to Dawson City (450 miles on a dirt road with very little services). From Dawson City we go to Whitehorse, then do a little loop to Haines and Skagway in Alaska, then to the south.


You might like the wonderful flash animations on http://www.experienceyukon.ca/, with the "interactive map".

(This is Nancy's bike that she used from Inuvik to Denver. At that point she switched to a Stumpjumper mountain bike. See the current gear article.

Here's Nancy's beautiful redone bike. She spent an enormous amount of time and money retooling it since our New England Trip. This is a custom Serotta Rapid Tour. She has fairly standard racks and has Ortlieb Classic Roller panniers on the back, and waterproof Nashbar panniers on the front. The handlebar bag is new - it's from Ortlieb.

Randy has a regular Specialized Stumpjumper mountain bike with the heavy-duty Old Man Mountain racks and Ortlieb "Classic Roller" panniers. Total weight of the stuff in the bags: between 40 and 60 pounds, depending on how much food and water we're carrying.

For the Dempster Highway section we're planning to carry about seven days' worth of dehydrated food to get to Eagle Plains (which we estimate to be 5 days) and then we'll pick up another 7 days' food from the Eagle Plains Hotel - we'll ship it there in advance. Normally we don't use dehydrated food, because it's expensive, hard to get in most places, and probably not as good for you as real food. However, since the Dempster is 450 miles long with no services, and since it's at the beginning of our trip, we decided to go with the dehydrated stuff from Mountain House which we actually like quite a lot.

Here's Nancy inviting you into our Sierra Designs Lightning tent. No, it's not very big. But it works. You need to be very friendly with your partner to use this one.

Our criteria for choosing this tent: We wanted something light , warm enough on the cold nights, but not a terrible condensation machine. It's really light. Maybe not warm enough on the cold nights (although we've been out below freezing on two recent nights) and maybe not good enough on the condensation angle. We've had a couple of nights where the condensation was quite surprising. I think you probably can't have everything!

Nancy did an enormous amount of research on bear issues for this trip, and of course she's still concerned about it. She found that these Ursack bags were the best combination of weight and value. The only problem we'll have in the treeless north part of the trip is figuring out how to secure them.

Here's our old faithful (mostly) MSR Whisperlite stove. It will run on nearly any kind of fuel. White gas (coleman fuel) burns the best, but it's really quite hard to get an appropriate amount of white gas when you are bike touring, and it's really easy to get regular unleaded gasoline. So we just pull up at the pump and buy 50 cents worth of gas every 3-4 days. (It used to be 30 cents before the big gas price run-up!)

We use denatured ethyl alcohol to prime it - and never have to clean it any more. It's so much more reliable. See the article here.

We usually carry 3-4 of these Playpus 2-liter bladders. Most of the time they're empty (and light! and compact!). But they when you need them they're there to haul water. We can camp the night, fix dinner and breakfast, and start riding the next morning with about 6 liters of water, although that's pretty tight. When we know we're going to have a "dry camp" at night, we load up with water so we can do it.

We've also ordered a new item from Ortlieb: A 10-liter water bag (with shower fitting!). We'll use it for unfiltered water. It can be used to haul water before it's filtered with our Pur.
(Katadin) Hiker water filter.

We finally got our gear page set up, so you can see our equipment and trust and worries about it. You can see our stove, tent, water bladders, bikes, and panniers. There's even a video of a bear testing the bear bags. Check out the gear page.

Inuvik, of course, was our starting place:

Here are readings for Rock River, which was about 200 miles into the journey. When we got there it was a pleasant day, but a week earlier it had been 32 F with a 50 MPH wind...



Here is Dawson, the bottom of the Dempster Highway:
Weather Underground has a wonderful new Google Map of Personal Weather Stations, so you can see the temps in the whole region.

The Wundergound site has excellent historical information, so I was able to look at the highs and lows for the week of June 9 for several years back. The lowest reading I saw for that week was 29 degrees F, and no precip of any kind.

We're starting as early in the year as would be possible. In April, the Dempster is closed when the rivers start to melt, taking out the ice bridges. The highway reopens in June when ferries can operate.

The current road report shows that the ferries are not yet running on the Dempster as of May 23. If we started today, we could not ride the highway.

The historical data for the Peel River Crossing and the Mackenzie River Crossing show that the ferry usually starts running the first week of June, but in 1977, it didn't start until June 16. I don't know why we chose June 9 as a starting date because we didn't know anything about this. But I'm glad it looks like it was a reasonable date!

Today is June 1st, 2006 and we are really doing it, we on our way. After months of prep we are on the road but not on our bikes. We drove to Grand Junction where we will fly out of Grand Junction Airport (Walker Field) in the morning in a Cessnar piloted by Collin Fay and Marisa Fay. Collin and Marisa do this all the time with their business, Parkest Air Tours.

We are flying to Helena, Montana to meet 13 other small planes which will fly us to Inuvik and drop us off with our bikes and all the gear. We will then ride south on the Dempster Highway, a 450-mile gravel road with very limited services. What a great way to see the world.

Wish us luck and good riding weather.

Today our airlift of 12 planes flew us about 800 miles today from Helena, Montana up to Dawson Creek, BC, Canada, the beginning of the Alaska Highway. Some of it was a bit choppy, but it was a successful trip.

You ask why we need 12 planes to get us to the North Country? We have no idea. When we were planning this trip, my brother Collin and sister-in-law Marisa asked if we wanted a ride up there in their Centurion light plane. We said yes. They also invited many, many of their Parkwest Air Tours clients... and all of them said YES! So it's a really big group.

Tomorrow we go on to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory if the weather works, or perhaps to Dawson City, at the bottom of the Dempster.

As I write this, the temperature in Inuvik is 2 degrees above freezing, and we're wondering if we're really ready for that kind of temperatures. The forecast is a little better than that, though, and cooler temps mean less mosquitoes...

We flew from mile 0 of the Alaska Highway all the way to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. It's 10:11pm and the sun won't go down for more than an hour. But tomorrow the sun won't go down at all.

The flight was wonderful today - we hugged the river due to low-hanging clouds and had great views of beautiful places. The ride over the Continental Divide was spectacular. A few of the pictures are on flickr here.

Hope to update you more and provide some pictures from Inuvik, if we have internet access.

We made it to Inuvik and we're headed south on the Dempster Highway tomorrow morning! I'd hoped to have a picture of Inuvik for you but the library is closing so I'm rushing it.

480 miles to Dawson City. A store in Fort McPherson and the hotel at Eagle Plains are the only real things between here and there. It's almost all dirt, and of course we hear all the horror stories about it, like bears and mosquitoes and moose. I think we'll have a blast. We'll let you know in 10-14 days. We're glad to have you along with us!

Well, it took us six days but we made it to the halfway point on the Dempster Highway, the Eagle Plains Hotel. We've had a wonderful time - quite a stretch for us to do something this hard as the first thing on the tour, but we're well. The weather has been incredible. Because there's no night, the earth gets lots of warmth from the sun this time of year. In our first couple of days the temperature was in the 80s and 90s Fahrenheit! Really hot.

No bears! Nancy's worry level may be decreasing - she spent a lot of time talking with a woman whose extensive experience in the wild in this part of the world (and no problems with bears) gave Nancy more confidence to deal with possible encounters (and less fear that we'll have them).

And so far the mosquito season has hardly started. We have plenty of bites, but it's the kind of thing we've experienced before, not the intense disaster people talk about in July up here. However, we have a long ways to go... But we have mosquito outfits and spray and such.

Today we're taking a day off and just resting here at the Eagle Plains Hotel. We swapped a night's lodging and dinner with them in exchange for developing a website - http://eagleplainshotel.com - that they've never had before.

Well, we've been out for a week and have met the most amazing people. The stories that we're hearing are phenomenal. Between the stories are many incredible landscapes - the awesome Richardson Mountains that form the divide between the Arctic watersheds and the Pacific, between The Mackenzie and the Yukon.

No bears but lots of bear scat. I'm calming down a little bit.

We'll try to get some pictures uploaded and write some of the wonderful stories we've heard when we get to Dawson.

North Fork Pass was the last pass on the Dempster. Everything is downhill from here!

We made it to Dawson City and the Dempster Highway is behind us! While we get our laundry done and our bikes cleaned up, here are some pictures for you to give you an idea of the Dempster:

• All the pictures
• As a slideshow

We're terribly pleased with our new Ortlieb 10 liter water bag with shower attachment!. Not only can we haul water, but we can get water and take a shower! We got hot water at the store at Fort Mcpherson (no showers available in town) and took it out of town, found an isolated gravel pit with this abandoned caterpillar. We hung our bag on the equipment and took the most wonderful shower. Between river washes and showers like this we've had several showers already, which is a big breakthrough for this trip!

Just at Kilometer 4 of the Dempster we met Christof and Gernot, from Austria, who were just starting up the Dempster. We shared advice and stories and sent them on their way. They had just hiked the Chilcoot Trail, canoed the Yukon from Whitehorse to Dawson, put there bikes together, and started up the Dempster!

We've met quite a number of cyclists here in Dawson City. What a treat to compare notes with new friends.