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.

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.

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.

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

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!

Our first three days from Inuvik were quite hot, which was pretty surprising since we were way north of the Arctic Circle. It was in the 90s Fahrenheit! And the road was dry, and the dust was pretty intense. The road is all dirt of course, and the trucks can raise quite a bit of it. You can imagine the dust-bath we're about to get from this truck!

This is near Tombstone where the river is still frozen. This picture only shows a small bit of how cold and blue the ice on the river was. The Tombstone Mountain Territory Park are unglaciated and therefore are very smooth and round and looks a bit like Ireland.

Here is we are camping in back of the church at Tsiigehtchic which over looks the great Mckenzie River. Little Anthony, one of the kids in the village joins us for several meals. The Gw'chin, the local aboriginal people, have lived here for as long as anyone can remember, came here to hunt and fish and then moved on with the season. Now it is a village of perhaps 200 people who live here year round.

Anthony dad, Russel, helps run the ferry which you can see in the far distance. This one just one of the three ferry crossing we have used so far. A bridge can not be built here because of the freezing and thawing of the river is too mighty it has knocked down bridges that have been built before.

We needed shower desperately so we asked Russel where we could get a shower at Tsiigehtchic. He said just go to his house and help ourselves which we did. He had a lovely home in this great village. Thanks Russel for the showers and the stories of your life. We highly recommend you all take the ferry to Tsiigehtchic and visit with the people here. Look up Carol Norwiegnin and her mom. Carol walked 125km to Inuvik to raise money for cancer. We meet he and her mom, a survivor of cancer, on the road. We have

This is what the tundra looks close to the Artic Circle.