Day 13

Woke up with a headache today, and am sore all over. The previous day 500+ mile Dalton marathon was tiring and it's still pouring rain in Fairbanks. I left my gloves on the heat register overnight and they feel dry, so that's a good thing. We have breakfast at the hotel and talk with a couple other bikers there. They are heading for Anchorage in the rain.

We are a day ahead of schedule because we combined the return from Deadhorse to Fairbanks into a single day because of the weather. Fairbanks was supposed to be an off day but the with the lousy weather we decide to head for Tok where the sun is shining and see if we can get into the motorcycle campground there.

Before we left we needed to find a car wash to clean the mud from our radiators and bring our tire pressures to normal for asphalt. We stopped at Walmart and pulled the bikes into the cart return area to get out of the rain and we did some maintenance there. The parking lot had standing water in it and they were still expecting 2 or 3 inches of more rain.

The weather cleared up about 30 minutes east of Fairbanks. The trees are different here - a lot of trees with real leaves, not the stunted black pine we saw to the north. A sixty year old black pine at Yukon River is just over an inch diameter.

The road is a good one....

Following Risto.

 

Tok is a major highway junction. The highway to the north leads through Chicken into Dawson city, to the east is the Canada border, Valdez is to the south, and Fairbanks to the west. A week ago, in Stewart over coffee with some other riders we had heard that Tok is only a single store with lawnmowers on top (obviously someone with a chip on their shoulder for Tok) so I took a picture of it.

 

 

Then we found the Thomson's Eagle Claim motorcycle campground. They had a few campsites open for ten dollars a night. Risto and I each took a site, and Graham was sharing a four-bed bunk house with some other guys.

It's an amazing place. Vanessa (the owner) lit a wood burning sauna for us. It had a big barrel stove but not the building wasn't insulated at all. There was another guy who wanted to join us and he warned us that he doesn't wear anything in a sauna. I told him I don't wear pants in a sauna either. It wasn't real warm because it had a high uninsulated ceiling and a low bench, but Risto brought a bench from the dressing room and stacked it on top of the sauna bench to sit higher, and I and the other guy stood up on the benches and held on to the rafters. We weren't expecting a sauna, so it was a pleasant surprise. The shower had Arctic water piped in.

The campground has a variety of huts, tent sites, and even an old ambulance to sleep in. She also has a workshop for bikers - fully stocked with tires, oil, tools, jacks, etc. An outhouse with sunlight shining through the large cracks in the wall. An awesome guy place.

A fully stocked outdoor kitchen for cooking.

The neighbors.

Even though its light out, its almost 1:30am and I need to sleep... I hear some guys playing horse shoes.We are planning to stay here the next day. Because we are so far ahead of schedule we may change our plans a bit and ride the top-of-the-world highway and possibly the Dempster to Inuik.

I'll post some more pictures tomorrow.