From Buffalo to Alaska. Day 8 - 8/24/96

Left Calgary at 10:00 am, under clear skies, heading north. After an hour, we reached Edmonton, and turned northwest toward Dawson Creek and the beginning of the Alaska highway.

The Rockies are still 70 miles away, and the terrain remains friendly (i.e. plenty of flat fields for an emergency landing). This leg of the trip is beautiful, as we fly above cumulus clouds at 8500 feet.


After a short stop in Whitecourt, Alberta for fuel, we're off again. We decide to skip Dawson Creek on this leg, because the weather is so great for flying. Instead, we circle Dawson Creek for a photo of the official beginning of the Alaska Highway.


The Alaska Highway was built during World War II by the United States, with the consent of Canada. President Roosevelt determined the Highway was necessary after the Japanese threatened the western islands of the Aleutians, at the western tip of Alaska. Before the Highway, there was no practical land route to Alaska. The U.S. Army built the Highway in the incredibly short period of 8 months.

There are two legacies of the Highway construction project that affect light airplane travel to Alaska. During WWII, America supplied Russia with bombers, ferried to Russia via the Alaska Highway. Every 100 miles or so along the route they built airstrips to handle the bombers. Some of those are used today as the primary airports of the small towns we will visit. Others exist as abandoned gravel runways that parallel the Highway. But all of them afford a luxury to the light airplane pilot -- an unusually long runway on which to set down in some of the most rugged countryside in North America.

The other legacy of the construction crews is their determination to build the Highway as quickly as possible. To do that, they gave up the idea of following the rivers in some places, because the soil along the rivers was soft, wet, and unstable, and would have required much reinforcement. Instead, they followed the path that was likely to be solid and either dry or frozen most of the year. That meant cutting a road up and over the mountains, rather than around through the valleys. For us, following the Highway, that will mean some very interesting passages through some high country. (I know what you're thinking -- an airplane is supposed to fly high. But when flying in the mountains, it is usually more comfortable to be in the middle of a wide river valley than hugging the side of a mountain. We've elected to following the Highway, however (i) so we won't get lost, and (ii) in case we need to land, we're sure to have pavement under us. Once that decision is made, it's off to the mountains.)


We land for the day at Fort St. John, British Columbia. This is a beautiful town, offering a transition between the civilization of Edmonton and the wilds of the Yukon.

We arrived early enough to take a look around, and stumbled across the first postcard photo of the trip. This is the Peace River Bridge, across the mighty Peace River. The Peace drains the eastern Rockies, and at this place, far up the headwaters, had a current that would rival the Niagara. I know this is a postcard photo, because after I scrambled out on the rocks to take the picture, we found the same picture on the postcards in the general store. I've provided this picture in a high resolution version, too, for those who are interested.

High Resolution (about 60K)

Tomorrow the wilderness begins, as we head for Watson Lake and Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.
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