On the Road to Inuvik: Dispatches

Christa & Tobin, July 29^th

Right now I'm sitting in Ron's EuroVan by the side of the road in Dawson City, Yukon Territory. A thunder shower is just rolling over, and rain drops the size of large ball bearings are pounding off the roof. The sides of the van were caked in mud, but by the time the shower is over, I'd expect the mud to be streaked with the rain water that is overflowing the roof.

This trip has been a long process for Christa and me. The idea came to Christa within weeks of our return from a 15,000 mile trip in our VW camper around North America that took us nearly as far south as Guatemala, and east to Canada's Maritime provinces. We've always wanted to see Canada's north. When we passed a road sign that read "Welcome to the Western Arctic," we knew we'd arrived.

Christa and I live in a one-bedroom apartment in a high-rise in Vancouver's West End. Everybody joining the trip in Vancouver was to meet at our place, where I'd reserved 10 parking spaces for people and their campers. By Sunday night, we had 8 VW buses, and 2 more arrived in the night. Two more were running late and would meet us at the end of the first day's drive.

Christa and I hosted a send-off party at out place the night we left. At least 35 people packed into our place for food, drinks, and merriment. Mark McCauley, Harry Yates, and a bunch of other local people from the internet vanagon list showed up as well. Peter Viney, an exec for VW of Canada, and a VW tech also popped by, but I missed them since I had to make a last minute run down to the border toget Eddie Hintz and his dad into Canada. I'll leave Eddie to tell that story, if he hasn't already.

We kicked everybody out at 11:00 pm to get some sleep, which was an exercise in futility for me. We still had wash and a bunch of other stuff to do. Total hours of sleep for me that night? Zero.

Christa and I admitted defeat at 3:30 am and gave up trying to fake the other into thinking we were asleep. By 4:15 we were out of the house and walking down to CBC Radio studios for Christa's interview on Morningside. Christa was thrilled to be talking personally (well, with a few million other people listening in) with Shelagh Rogers, our favorite radio personality--even if the studio's clock swept past 5:05 am as the show started.

By 6:00, we were back at the apartment, madly loading the final things into our camper, filling the water, and lashing things to the roof. By 7:30, the group was assembled at the side of the building, motors running. A few more delays, and we were finally ready to roll.

Eleven buses in a line snaked around the Stanley Park Drive, with a stop for the obligatory buses-lined-up-in-a-row photo opp against the Vancouver skyline. We putted along up to Pemberton, chatting on CB channel 2 (for type 2) as the elevation and temperature increased steadily. We were all feeling pretty fine, and we attracted a lot of stares as we passed through small towns along the way.

I had deliberately planned the first day's route to give the vehicles a shake-down to prepare them for the rigours of the remainder of the trip. Twenty minutes north of Pemberton, climbing the steep, 10 mile, first gear grade over the Coast Mountains, mechanicanical problems began to present themselves. The Stutsmans' bus overheated and they were forced to turn back to Seattle. The Clark's vanagon erupted into a geyser of vaporized coolant. The rough steep descent on the unpaved Old Cariboo Trail west of Clinton nearlt burned off the remainder of Don Kane's brakes. Glen Buhlman vaporlocked on the first gear dusty ascent in the desert heat. The Clark's bus blew up again.

All in all, I was very pleased. I wanted problems to present themselves early, rather than 187 km froma phone booth on the Dempster Highway.

How's our camper? Running fine! Burning a bit more oil than I'd like, running a bit hotter, but I have no complaints. We knocked off a suspension bushing on a dirt road somewhere along the way, but we liberated a suspension bushing from an abandoned bus in Fort Nelson, so now deep potholes and frost heaves don't present a problem. A heater duct fell off our bus along some road work over Pine Pass in the Rockies, but Jack Stafford, who was driving behind us, saw it on the road and picked it up for us.

The North is truly beautiful, and I'm so glad we've chosen to get off the beaten path wherever we can. Along the Campbell Highway, we drove all morning and meet only two other vehicles. I'll write about that in more detail later.

Tomorrow we head out of town and turn left at the Dempster Highway turn-off. Two days and 756 km of unpaved road later, we'll arrive in Inuvik, where we'll spend a day exploring.

Then we'll turn around.

Northward ho!

Tobin