Leftover pic from yesterday:


Yes, it is hard to drive with that banner across the windshield.....

Today's Update

We left Valdez on a very cool, crisp morning and ran a TSD right out of Valdez. A course measuring error caused the the section to be thrown but not before all of the navigators had their blood pressure raised a bit!

We then went to Glennallen, where we ran the 2nd last TSD.

We knew we didn't have much time for lunch, so I picked a roadside cafe at random (now called the Eureka Cafe by Jenne!) which made us the best BLTs!! This saved us a bunch of time and so we weren't stressed when we arrived in Palmer (next to Wasilla) for the final TSD, a tricky run through country roads.

Driving down the aptly named Glenn Highway, we stopped at the Subaru dealer for an air filter element (the Forester was not so crazy about being clogged up) and then to the hotel.

No scenery pictures today, sorry. Too busy!! Amazing scenery, with glaciers BELOW us on some of the roads. Alaska has taken my breath away. I will be back.

We got to watch the bikes get packed and loaded for transport, and then headed out to the awards dinner.

I'll end the suspense now and tell you we won!! Both we and the Damms scored 2 for the day, dropping 1, and we wound up with a grand total of 42. We are happy, but exhausted....

Team Arctic Challengers also won the team prize (3rd time in a row!) aided by 1st in Class wins by Chuck and J, and Mark our biker.

The Team presented Kit Toevs with an award for being the first person to complete the Alcan in a sidecar. So great to watch her and her dad Roger having fun together. I'm inspired.

Full scores haven't yet been updated on the Alcan5000.net site. I will post a deep link when they have been updated.

Here is what I learned on this Alcan:

1. I mistakenly considered the summer Alcan a poor cousin the winter event, not any more. The summer Alcan is NOT a doddle or a tour. You have to work. I thought we'd take scenery pictures and do a few TSDs, but we pushed ourselves the entire way (having the Damm's right behind us helped....).

2. Precise communications are essential. Even things as simple as who is doing what at the gas stop. This concept is reinforced to me every Alcan (this was my third).

3. You work as a team in the car, and work with your team buddies, but the entire event (workers, competitors) works as a team to move from point A to B and keep everyone safe, help fix broken cars, bikes, people, call out dangerous pieces of road.... and that's a pretty neat thing to see.


What Next?
A few of us are heading home the same route - it will take about 3.5 days. Jenne and I are going to hit the road early so we can take lots of photos. R.Dale and his lovely wife Francesca are heading out from Anchorage for a cruise. I will update the blog from the road as time permits if I have forgotten anything or get some pictures from today.

Thank you for reading!

Day 9 Map

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Well, Sarah Palin sure does live in a majestic, natural state. Today we drove the scenic Denali Highway, as part of an "extreme control".

Views from the Denali Highway:




Our main drama today was coming across an area being re-graded, with no flaggers, and having to navigate by all the equipment. As we drove past the grader, a rock rolled down off the berm (I think), missing the front tire, but going under the rear right tire, causing the rear suspension to bottom out, and giving Jenne a pretty good jolt. Everyone is ok.

Here is the road right before we went by (pic by Jenne):


The rally then headed south, and finally past a couple of glaciers so close you could almost touch them, before coming down into the port of Valdez.



Tomorrow: we tackle three final TSDs: Valdez,  Glenallen and Wasilla before we head into Anchorage, check into our hotel and go to the awards banquet. We won't know the final results until the winners are announced at the banquet. Wish us luck!

Day 8 Scores
Though there was a little confusion in the car today, we got the lowest (best) score on the Chena Pump Road TSD - even after we had to wait for 2 school buses with flashing lights. This put another 2 seconds between us and the Damms in Car 4, who are now 10 seconds behind us.
Click here for the current scores.

Day 8 Maps

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Here is a better picture of the windshield crack. Artistic, huh?


We left Whitehorse this morning, and drove up towards Tok Alaska. The Alaska Highway, especially on the Canadian side, were very poor with a lot of frost heaves and potholes. We think the roads would be better left as gravel, and then just graded regularly. Lots of gnats --- I get very fussy about insects in the car (as R.Dale and Jenne will tell you) because my skin pretty much reacts to anything I am bitten by.

Beautiful scenery, and we saw one small black bear who scampered off the road as we came past. We didn't get a picture of the bear:


At Tok we had a fast and tasty meal at Fast Eddies and caught up with John Fouse who had come up to work a few controls. We then ran the Tok TSD, which featured some very interesting roads (a little muddy, a little paved, a little narrow, and then a CAST 62 on the highway!)

We then drove to Fairbanks, stopping briefly at the North Pole to see Santa's house and pull his sleigh along:


At Fairbanks we're staying at the Wedgewood Resort which is quite nice.

Tomorrow is a TSD just outside Fairbanks, and then an extreme control down the Denali Highway - should be fun!

Day 7 Scores
Both car 2 and 4 took 5 points today, so we're still first and no change in gap, but car 6 again blitzed the field with a 1!

Click here for current standings. Huge thanks to Marvin, Jeff and all the control workers who are doing a superb job scoring this event!

Day 7 Map
I'm going to move the older maps to links, and just keep the latest map embedded.


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Apologies that my updates have been so brief, it is hard to remember everything that happened and get it down straight, especially after a long drive.

This morning we left Dawson City and on the way out, did the Mountain Dome TSD (first run in 2006 I think). It follows a dirt road uphill (CAST of 16MPH), and then an acute left onto a paved road that takes you up to Mountain Dome, which overlooks Dawson and the river, then we had a 10 minutes pause and ran the rest of the TSD down the mountain.

View from the Mountain Dome:


Tomorrow we head to Fairbanks, via Tok.

Let me talk a bit about some of the other entrants!

Today, the cars:
Car 1 is a white Subaru Legacy, with Alcan legend Gary Webb (yes he's won a few times) and the Alcan organizer Jerry Hines' 17 year old son, Cameron Hines. He seems to be having a great time and taking a lot of photos.

Car 2 is the silver Forester XT (us!) with R.Dale, Glenn & Jenne. Jenne and I worked together for 11 years or something, and have kept in touch even after she left. Yes, she's 6 months pregnant, a math wizz (handy for TSD rallying) and has done a few rallies before with R.Dale and me.

Car 3 is a red Forester XT with Frank McKinnon and John Putnam. Frank and John did the 2008 Winter Alcan with us, as well as the 2006 summer Alcan. They hail from Portland, Oregon. They are always in good spirits, even when they have a bad scoring day.

Car 4 is the BMW 328 wagon with Marinus and Rene Damm. Two nicer people you will not meet (and I am not saying this just to be kind) --- we've been on a lot of rallies with them. A few years ago they were "getting into rallying" and now they are excellent competitors. Other than missing a pause instruction, they had some amazing low scores at Mountains to Sea rally and beat us soundly! They both also have a great sense of humor, which comes across well on the radio.

Car 5 is the black Contour SVT, with Chuck and J, our Arctic Challenger team mates. They are in "S" class, which means they are not using a computer. CHuck is an Electrical Engineer, and J is a defense laywer. We had a drink last night and they are very interesting guys.

Car 6 is orange and black GC8 Subaru Impreza wagon, with Oliver and Kacee. They're doing pretty well, and having fun.

Car 8 is the yellow Toyota FJ, with two very nice ladies, Carolyn and Jessica. Their husbands are entered on bikes. They are having fun from what I can see!

Equipment
Here is a quick summary of the kind of gear we are using.

Our car is a 2008 Forester XT (turbo) manual, with Cooper Weathermaster ST2 tires. Cooper is our sponsor, and makes a great product. Very durable and excellent grip. These are winter tires, but we are running them without studs for summer. A very versatile tire and good on gravel. We have two full size spares, one in the trunk, one on the roof rack.

We have a Primitive Enterprises skid plate set (front and rear), a East Coast Bullbar nudge bar, with Hella 4000 HID driving lights (not needed so much with the long summer days up here). Home made mudflaps, a Yakima basket case roof rack, complete with cut down hoe, complete the picture.

Electronics wise, we have an ICOM VHF/UHF radio, a Timewise 798A rally computer, a TomTom 930T GPS, a GPS data logger (that produces the maps I post here) and a Hella TC400 Tire Pressure Monitoring System.

Day 6 Scores
We took 6 seconds today on Mountain Dome, and the Damms scored 10. Sorry guys!
Car 6 got 5, excellent job!

My rough math (with drop of worst control, which may change tomorrow) has
Car 2 Wallace/Kraushaar/Pierce   35 (-2 worst control) = 33
Car 4 Damm/Damm                         44 (-3 worst control) = 41

8 points is a more comfortable lead than we had yesterday. Phew!

Some drama in the bike category, with the bikers that did the North Canol extreme control/camp getting their best TSD score in place of Midnight Dome and Long Lake, so our team mate Mark (bike 20) moved up to first overall bike. There were a few high bike scores on a couple of controls on the way up the mountain, I hope they have the right checkpoint times for the right bikes...

For everyone else's scores best for you to go look at the full summary.

Day 6 Maps

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This morning we ran the famous Long Lake TSD out of Whitehorse. It features an easy to miss turn (you miss it and you wind up in the hospital parking lot), the hard to see "Powerboats" sign.

This was the first time I'd run it in summer, so got to drive the muddy power line road which turns around at the end of the TSD to run it back out to the main road. Coming out of the forest our trailer hitch turned into a hoe and dug a nice furrow, leaving us with some foliage to take home.

We left Jenne in Whitehorse to get some rest, and headed to Dawson City. Along the scenic Klondike Highway, the windshield was hit by two rocks from a semi-truck, which created a HUGE bullseye pattern, about 6" diameter. Yes, it is right in my line of sight.
There is a better picture on R.Dale's camera which I'll upload later.

Once we arrived in Dawson City, it was nice to have time to spend time walking around the shops, something we couldn't do in 2004 or 2008 winter Alcans. I bought a few books, and we had a drink with Chuck and J at Bombay Peggy's. Our waitress was a Canadian doppelganger for the Australian actress Claudia Black (schwing!).

Dawson City:


The most interesting store had both antiques and prospecting equipment. I hope my mum went there when she visited Dawson. Watching father and daughter bike/sidecar riders Roger and Kit Toevs having so much fun again reminded me of my mother, so I really do need to plan that prospecting trip to the southwest with her.

Day 5 Scores

The tide turned a little today, with the Damm's closing the gap by 2 seconds, bringing them within 5 seconds of us.
Uhoh!

Day 5 Maps

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Sorry, I'm behind on writing about our exciting trip up the Campbell Highway to Ross River, and then down the South Canol road.

Day 4 Maps

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(Here is the day 3 update. I am a day behind, and will try to post both day 4 and 5 tomorrow.)

Day 3 saw us leave Dawson Creek heading for Watson Lake (home of the famous sign forest, but more about that in tomorrow's entry.)

The "Old Alaska Highway" TSD is one of my favorite locations, like retracing Route 66.

Then we did the challenging "Not in Kansas Anymore Toto" TSD, which includes the famous uphill switchbacks covered with two or three controls. We ran very well on this TSD, except for a 3 seconds early turning off the highway (I thought I was 1 second late....). I think we also zeroed a tricky right-into-left-uphill with a hidden control, almost guaranteed to make you late.

Coming into Fort Nelson, I decided to make a "donation" to the BC government, they looked like they needed the help.

We did a "do it yourself" TSD section (not scored) out of Liard Hot Springs, though we didn't go for a dip in the hot springs, as it was rainy and we were behind schedule, and there is now a park entry toll booth. What's up with that?

As we drove up the Alaska Highway, through the provincial park, we saw bison on the roadside: (this is a calf)


One even walked towards the car, of course we took off before he got near us:


They definitely notice you and watch what you are doing!

Beautiful scenery the whole way, and we drove into some heavy rain and colder temps, which was tough on the bikes who had to suit up. It reminded me a lot of Grand Teton park, but with more wildlife and better scenery, and fewer cars:


Near sunset:



Day 3 Scores
See the day 4 update for details, but we're still in 1st.

Day 3 Map

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We left the hotel in Quesnel to find our cars dusted with ash. Not a good sign.

Our first TSD, "11% Grade" took us to some familiar roads, mostly gravel, including a tricky left hand hairpin into uphill, which gave us a 4 second penalty. Luckily our dear competitors took 6 seconds there. 

We then went out to Blackwater TSD, which covers some amazing roads with flowing curves. Unfortunately, we had a small computer glitch, and while R.Dale sorted that out we took 2 seconds penalty. Luckily, all was sorted out, but we kept driving into thicker and thicker smoke. (pic by Jenne, our backseat driver)



At some point, we shut down the fan, as even on recirc it was just blowing smoke around inside the car, not good. We reached a road that was barricaded off to due to the fires, but luckily our route had us turning right there and eventually out of the smoke.

Which made me wonder, if there is so much lingering smoke, how do you spot a new fire?

We then stopped for lunch at A&W (Glenn's favourite) and shopped for essentials at Canadian Tire (also Glenn's favourite).



Our route north to Dawson Creek took us through some fantastic scenery.




We arrived at Dawson Creek, for the traditional Mile 0 photo. (I promise I'll use more pictures of R.Dale or me tomorrow.)



Day 2 Scores
Our scores turned out better than we expected! Car 4, Marinus and Rene, slipped to 23 points, while we slipped to 16 points, but a bigger lead, and still in first place. However, each car/bike gets to drop worst control score from Day 2,3,4, and this is only day 2. If only day 2 were used, it would move them 2 seconds closer to us.

Mark, our bike rider, slipped to 2nd place in the bikes, but still right in there.

I'll try and post more detailed scores tomorrow. The TeamD/Rainier guys may be posting them somewhere....

Day 2 Map
OK, embedding is now working again.... but you'll need to zoom out a little. Sigh. Whatever.


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PS : Good Samaritan award for the day goes to Car 4, Marinus and Rene Damm, who stayed with a stranded Alcan biker while he got his bike repaired, and arrived rather late at the hotel tonight. That's the spirit of the Alcan rally, right there.

OK, a bit rusty at all this blogging stuff.

The day started with a run through back roads near Lk Samish, where we took 1 point.

Then a trip up the Fraser Canyon, where we saw Elvis for lunch. (pics to follow)

After lunch, a long transit into a smokey and ash covered Williams Lake. Pretty serious forest fires up here, very hot (about 90 deg) and extremely poor air quality. At this point I should mention Jenne is about 6 months pregnant... so we ran with the air on recirc just out of caution.



The 2nd TSD took us through Soda Creek Road... an old favorite. We took 1 point here, with the worst score of the day dropped, gives us 1 point total.

Day 1 Map
Embedded maps aren't working (blog software broken....)
View map here

Day 1 Scores
A nice birthday present for me, with us (car 2) in 1st place.

Car 2: Glenn/R.Dale/Jenne         1 pt
Car 4: Marinus and Rene Damm 3 pts
 
Sorry I don't have the full scores, but our team-mates are also first in their classes, with Mark scoring an amazing 42 pts for the day on his bike (no navigator!), and Chuck and J on 25 points.

More tomorrow and I will do my best to post pictures of the smoke haze and conditions here.

Hello. You're reading this because you subscribed to my blog in 2008.

Well, we're heading up north again, this time in summer, for the 2010 Alcan 5000 rally.

You can read more about the route, entry list and stuff at the Alcan website.

This trip our Arctic Challengers  team consists of 2 cars, and a motorcycle:
Car 2: Glenn, R.Dale and Jenne Pierce
Car 5: Chuck Hanson and J Toney
Bike 20: Mark Chatigny

After registration at Cafe Veloce and tech in 100 deg F sun, we headed back home, and then back out briefly to the reception at the host hotel, and dropped off R.Dale's "extra" bags for his cruises from Anchorage (busy guy!)

Stay tuned for Day 1 updates....