A few pictures from the Alaska road trip last month. Lots of pictures of road and snow. I would’ve taken more, but I drove the majority of the trip, so there are huge stretches of time without shots.

Day 1: Just across the border into Canada on the way to Prince George, sweet bus. Day 2: The roads were in great shape still. 185 km to Dawson Creek (and the start of the Alaska Highway), on the way to Fort Nelson.

The open road in British Columbia. Our first really steep grade of the trip (right picture), though it’s tough to tell from the photo. Overall, day two was by far the easiest day of driving we had. Nice weather, clear roads.

The 4-Runner and trailer (with overloaded front end that I had no part of loading) at a frozen gas station in BC. Day 3: Into the Canadian Rockies west of Fort Nelson. This was one of the prettier stretches of road, and exciting on the icy sections without guardrails.

Finally some wildlife, elk on the side of the road. See, I told you I’d get some blurry pictures of animals. And some gas station known for its boring hat collection. I walked in to take a picture of the boring hats and the lady at the counter give me the evil eye, so I pretended to look at their crappy souvenirs instead. Outside, some crows flew up and landed on the light post above the car, crowing gutturally at me until I fed them Wheat Thin crumbs.

Traffic had already been sparse, but it was really empty now, maybe one car every 10-15 minutes coming the opposite direction. Muncho Lake.

“This Means Watch for Wildlife Use Caution!” Well hey, the sign was right. Those tiny brown dots up on the hill are bison, I promise.

Okay, now you can see them a little better. Our guidebook gave us an Extreme Caution! warning about bison on this stretch of road and they were spot on. Bison everywhere, just lounging right next to the highway. The guy I was driving with had some gigantic lens for his camera and we stopped the car right in the middle of the highway (again, still no traffic) so he could zoom in for the picture on the right.

Definitely icy now, though in the daylight neither of seemed to be too concerned with zipping along at 55.

Welcome to Yukon! Look at that sign, classy. To be fair the highway crosses over the BC-Yukon border like six times in a twenty mile stretch, so maybe the Yukon Dept of Transportation doesn’t have the budget for a bunch of sweet signs. Yet another gas station, and it already looks like it’s getting dark out at 1 pm. Much of the rest of this day, the after dark portion at least, was spent whiteknuckling it though a blinding blizzard. If I hadn’t been driving the whole way, I would’ve shot some video for you. Oh well, next time.

I’ll get the last few trip pictures from the Whitehorse-Anchorage section up in my next post.