June 17th, 2014 – Prudhoe Bay, AK to Fairbanks, AK ~500 miles
We had made it to the top! Now, sadly, it was time to make our way back home.
Now that we weren’t in as much of a rush, we had a chance to take a closer look at the pipeline.
Saw a little pool of water so we decided to take a quick break.
The mudguard broke again. I wanted to just rip it off and throw it out the next time I saw a trash can (even if that wouldn’t be for over 400 miles), but Bui wanted to give it one last fix.
While I convinced him to give up, I decided to give Baby Jack a much needed bath.
I figure this is the closest Baby Jack gets to a Baywatch photo…or maybe one of those absurd shampoo commercials where the model throws her hair back with a wave of water.
Looking good!
I’ll give you one guess as to how this got its name. Truckers have given nicknames to certain landmarks on the road. My favorite would be “Oh Shit Corner“, even though I somehow managed to miss the sign when I was on the road.
This is the oil spill we saw on the way up. What I didn’t realize until the way down was that it was basically a mile away from Oil Spill Hill. How fitting.
We came to a stop at yet another construction zone. This time I saw an impressive pile of rocks – it was about 6 feet tall, though it’s hard to tell without another item for scale. Turns out that the guy in charge of traffic control had built this during slow periods.
While we were stopped, we saw a bunch of motorcycles heading up, presumably on a tour.
Thumbs up from the KLR650 guy.
More of the tour – crazy how a quick setting change on the camera can alter the photo. At this point I suspected this was a MotoQuest tour…
…a suspicion confirmed when I saw Jethro, the MotoQuest support truck. I joined a MotoQuest group ride of Death Valley just a few months earlier, and they had Jethro there as well. This truck is following me!
Yours truly, back on the top of Atigun Pass.
Well, I guess that sign didn’t work.
Another sign I missed on the way up. The road was built in several small sections, as camps were established every 30 miles. Runways were built so planes could drop off supplies and personnel, and people built both north and south until the entire road was completed at this point in 1974.
We got back to Coldfoot, where it looks like my bike has a skin disease. They coat the road with calcium chloride to keep the road sticking to itself – unfortunately it will also stick to your bike.
Though I took plenty of GoPro pictures, a good chunk of them just turned out brown because the camera got covered in dirt and silt.
It wasn’t just the camera – the whole bike got covered. The windshield and headlight cover are completely opaque.
My second casualty – the left front fork seal. Seeing as we were hoping to tackle the Denali Highway tomorrow, I was not looking forward to somehow getting this fixed first thing in the morning. Thankfully, inside Coldfoot Camp there was a fellow rider who gave me the phone number of a well-recommended father/son mechanic duo in Fairbanks who were supposedly open 24 hours. Unfortunately I did not have phone reception, so I figured I’d wing it when I finally got into town. Yay for procrastination!
Yet again, Bui is a tiny speck in the wilderness.
And just like that, Baby Jack is filthy again.
Had to get a picture underneath the pipeline.
As you’ve probably heard, there’s tons of mosquitoes. I had been trying to get a video of the little bastards – this was pretty much the best I could do.
80 miles an hour in the wet on the Haul Road – not bad.
This is the only place in Alaska where the Yukon River has a formal bridge. Because of the security risk of this being an exposed part of the pipeline on the left, there are cameras and loudspeakers all over the bridge – they will yell at you if you stop!
Bui and I cross the Yukon.
We made it back on pavement, but we decided against trying “At Your Own Risk Road.”
Got back into Fairbanks and quickly went to a coin wash to spray off as much of the calcium chloride as possible. The reason we were planning on doing the Denali Highway tomorrow is because I had recently received news that would require us to cut the trip about a week short. Obviously, this made our schedule tight, so I was hoping to get the fork seals taken care of the next day. As soon as we got back into town around 11pm, I called the number I was given in Coldfoot but got a female voice. It took another hour before I was able to get internet access, at which point I looked up options on ADVRider. I found more mentions of the father/son team, but with a different number. So after midnight, I decided to really test this “open 24 hour” theory and gave the son a call. No answer, but I left a voicemail. Oh well. Nothing to do now but get some rest and worry about it in the morning.
Go to Day 15
June 18th, 2014 – Fairbanks, AK to Tok, AK ~200 miles
Go back to Day 14, Part 1
June 17th, 2014 – Happy Valley, AK to Prudhoe Bay, AK ~90 miles