An old original section of the Alaska Highway

Hitch-hiking the twisty old gravel Alaska Highway of the early 1970’s had resulted in being witness to someone else’s broken and shattered dreams.

Sitting comfortably in the back seat surveying this new Kingdom of my Heart that I’d finally arrived in, I was the only happy one in the vehicle. And all I could say to them after all the miles of argument about it was a quiet comment of “I tried to tell you guys, but you wouldn’t listen. Well here you are – this is the reality. Deal with it.”

Dealing with reality in this form hadn’t found a life yet though in their lexicon of human understanding, and with their visions of grandeur shattered and burned to black ash in their hearts these boys just couldn’t come to grips with what they’d discovered Whitehorse to still be like in 1971.

Bitter, angry, disillusioned and swearing with frustration the boys decided to take a motel room for the night and invited me to join them in it. I gratefully accepted because I had few enough dollars in my pocket to spare as it was, and had been fully prepared to find a tree to sleep under for the night. All those boys took into the room with them for the night was their toothpaste and toothbrushes, because it appeared their decision had already been made about their stay in Whitehorse.

I woke in the morning to find them dressed and already brushing their teeth, anxious to make tracks. Another invitation to join them for some breakfast was again gratefully accepted and we left the room to find a nearby café to have it together.

And that was that as far as these boys were concerned – after breakfast they were heading right back down that same dusty Alaska Highway to go home to Victoria and get a ‘real life’ as they described it to me.

I just smiled quietly at their comments and thanked them for the ride that got me there, before they ducked out the door and practically ran back to their vehicle. They couldn’t wait to show their heels to Whitehorse and to everything it no longer represented to them. Their vehicle passed me by in a cloud of dust accompanying their final waves of farewell and faded quickly into the distance.

Personally I was glad they left, because they were in no way suited to either the lifestyle or the rigors of northern life as it still was back in those days. Scared out of their wits by the realities lying open before them, it’s undoubtedly a good thing their fears drove them back down the road and out of the sphere of northern living. I doubt they’d have survived long in it if they had tried to stay, because even the reality of the situation hadn’t kick-started any veins of common sense in them that could have helped them overcome their fears and preconceptions.

Like I said earlier, the North Land has its own way of dealing with these kinds of folks too – and to me it was already clear that such an action had been taken by it where these boys were concerned; and had by that action preserved itself from their kind who were so clearly unsuited to understand and live within its many-hued and rampant splendors.

I on the other hand was to discover the full range of those hues and splendors over the years to come. It’s a decision of travel I’ve never regretted and never will because of all the wonderful things I’ve learned and experienced in the Land of the Midnight Sun since my first arrival in a cloud of dust.

Hitch-hiking the twisty old gravel Alaska Highway of the early 1970’s had turned into one of the best decisions of my life.

A bridge being built along the old Alaska Highway

Hitch-hiking the twisty old gravel Alaska Highway of the early 1970’s gave you the chance to get to know the people you were traveling with, which was not necessarily something you would normally have chosen to do under other circumstances.

What turned out to be not quite so ideal about this trip though was the continuing argument we got into early on, and kept feuding about during a lot of our waking hours over the rest of the near eight hundred miles before finally reaching Whitehorse. Our arrival there at 5 pm on April 9, 1971 settled that argument but good – and I won it hands down despite never having been there before either!

You might remember my earlier reference to a clear lack of common sense in other areas regarding these boys? They showed that lack big time when it came to their cast-in-stone preconceptions of what Whitehorse would be like as a city. They were absolutely certain it would be just another version of Victoria BC where they’d come from, complete with clean paved streets, traffic lights on every intersection, and all of the amenities their clearly pampered lives had led them to believe must exist there.

I hadn’t been there before either, but large doses of ordinary plain common sense alone told me this grungy gravel road wasn’t going to lead us to no big city lights and broad paved avenues of asphalt – never mind to any too many of the other amenities they were clearly fixated on expecting to find in abundance there.

It was a wryly interesting and confirming experience for me to witness their successive and increasing disappointment as each little town we passed through failed to exhibit the slightest inclination to use pavement, even for the dusty rock-strewn sections leading through the heart of those communities. To me it was a clear harbinger of what was yet to come, but these boys just couldn’t bring themselves to believe Whitehorse could be anything but what their expectations had convinced them must exist there.

Today Whitehorse Yukon Territory is a bustling hub and capital city of the Yukon, with all of the infrastructure, paved roads and amenities those boys were expecting – but not yet anywhere near such a state on that late April afternoon in 1971.

Weary, road battered and anxious but still filled with their golden expectations, the brother who finally turned that dusty station wagon off the Alaska Highway to drive down the South Access hill was clearly disappointed to discover it was still just another gravel trail. As we followed its wending course down into the valley and along the famous Yukon River of Gold Rush fame, all that could be seen over the scanty buildings of Whitehorse was a faint pall of dust hanging in the air.

The increasingly bitter disbelief evident on their faces soon matched the bitter oaths beginning to stream from their mouths the closer we got to what appeared to be a downtown area.

As we drove slowly up and down the two dozen or so streets of the town they discovered to their final chagrin that there was only one short strip of pavement in the whole town, located along a two-block stretch of Main Street – and that there was only one single traffic light in the whole place too, located strategically at the intersection of Main Street and Second Avenue, the other seeming main thoroughfare through the place.

Hitch-hiking the twisty old gravel Alaska Highway of the early 1970’s had finally landed me in Whitehorse Yukon Territory.

A dozer at work building a portion of the old Alaska Highway

Hitch-hiking the twisty old gravel Alaska Highway of the early 1970’s also meant you were willing to take your life in your hands to get to your destination.

The Alaska Highway in its old configuration had a well known reputation as a harsh and unforgiving road that didn’t allow for much more than one or two stupid driving mistakes.

Being crowned high in the middle for drainage purposes also meant it was canted on both sides, meaning you were always leaning in one direction or another depending whether you were driving north or south on it – while at the same time trying not to fall asleep because of the lean. You could get used to that or not – not that there was really much choice involved for you in the matter if you wanted to stay alive and on the road.

Being composed of gravel also made it an ideal skating surface for vehicles, especially if you drifted into a curve a little bit too fast. Lots of wrecks, injuries and fatalities happened along its route because of inattention to this other minor detail of staying alive on this gnarly old gravel road.

What was a little harder to get used to and usually made up the scariest experience for those unfamiliar with driving this road though, was how to live through the experience of driving over the crest of any one of the hundred thousand or so roller-coaster-style short hills deliberately engineered into it along its full length. Most folks got it wrong at least once, but if they survived it, once was usually enough to not only scare the living snot out of them but also make them maniacally safety conscious about all the rest still left for them to cross.

The reason this particular driving technique was so critical to learn was that most of these hill crests were blind ones, meaning you couldn’t see what was coming at you from the other side of it until you actually topped the crest of it. If you weren’t paying attention or were simply too stupid to pull as far over to the right side of the road as you safely could before cresting it, there was no guarantee there wouldn’t be a transport truck or another vehicle about to give you the big metal kiss of a head-on collision in the microsecond of fatal realization left to you before impact.

Countless deadly collisions of this nature had already occurred over the years of its existence, and many more were still to come over the years remaining before governments decided it was time for major upgrades and rebuilding of the entire road system.

There were even signs to this effect about pulling over to the right preceding every one of those hills, but that didn’t seem to prevent most of the inattentive or stupid ones from dying under these circumstances anyway. A brutal reality and a brutal process of elimination, but at least it weeded out those who didn’t have enough common sense to get to the North alive let alone survive a stay in it. They’d undoubtedly have found another way to kill themselves by inattention or stupidity even if they’d been lucky enough to reach their original destinations – plus the North Land itself had a natural way or two as well of handling those kinds of folks, and they didn’t usually last long up there in any event.

Let’s just say that despite their clear lack of common sense in other areas, as drivers the two brothers both survived and learned this particular driving technique pretty quickly after having their own allocations of snot scared clear out of them. As a driver myself I had a natural habit of reading the road signs and actually paying attention to them, so the trip wasn’t nearly as hard on me as it was on them.

Hitch-hiking the twisty old gravel Alaska Highway of the early 1970’s had its moments of terror to contend with when the hands of others were controlling your destiny, instead of your own.