In Healy, AK.....posting from pc..

Hi peeps -
We are at the White Moose Motel in Healy AK, in the Denali Range.

Larson is playing with my D40 while I am using his netbook to post here.

We went into the Dalton Highway portion of our trip only to find that there is no cell capability at all north of Fairbanks, so I apologize to those who were following the blog....I just had no way of posting!

The Dalton Highway is a two-lane road that encompasses almost every road surface that you are going to encounter on Earth.

The road starts in Livengood AK, and continues for 480 miles up to Deadhorse Camp at Prudhoe Bay.

We rode the 66 miles from Fairbanks to the start of the Dalton, and you immediately run into a fairly normal looking gravel road, not unfamiliar to you in the cornfields of central Illinois, the difference being the voluminous heavy industrial traffic - that is to say LARGE trucks, many designated "oversized loads" and accompanied by leading and trailing pickup-trucks with orange strobes and signage.

The road is 2/3 paved (such that it is...) from Livengood to Coldfoot, but the paved portions are littered with "damaged road" signs that indicate to those on a motorcycle that you will have something to dodge coming up....

You will see every surface from nice, smooth, marked pavement to large, coarse one-lane gravel. Remember, this road, although now designated a scenic drive by the state of Alaska, is really just a way to get industrial equipment and supplies up to Deadhorse Camp and support the Alaskan Pipeline.

The most challenging aspect to the road from my perspective was the routine maintenance crews consisting of a pump-trailer to pump water into a water truck, which then applied the water to the road (mixed with calcium-chloride to give the gravel dust a concrete-like consistency). The result was a slippery surface so slick that I was forced to slow to a crawl on these sections. This is where you will have trouble if you are on a bike equipped with sport-bike tires, as were my two companions and myself.

Aside from those wet sections, the road was either bumpy pavement or rough gravel. We could easily manage a 55mph average speed on the road.

We were the only people here on sport bikes, all of the other cycles were of the "adventure" style, meaning that they were part dirt-bike, and part street bike.

People up here thought we were crazy to ride our bikes up here - as did most of our friends and relatives back home lol.


Tonight I sit at a comfortable and clean motel called the White Moose in a small town in Denali called Healy.

We will post more pics, and when I return we will post high quality pics and HD video of our adventure.

Tomorrow we will head for Anchorage, where we have new tires for our machines (we have over 5000 miles on the brand new tires we mounted prior to leaving) and will change the oil in the bikes - then we will be heading across Canada via Edmonton and Winnipeg, entering the states near the North Dakota/Minnesota border.

Thanks for all of you checking in on us - you have added an interesting aspect to our trip!

best

mqqn / Lars / Krazi