Alcan Highway Adventures!Alcan highway experiences can be quite enlightening as well as amusing or entertaining. Read My Alcan Highway Stories Below OR Skip to the Bottom To Tell Your Story My own personal experiences on the Alcan have not been very traumatic but I have had some very adventurous times on it. That is because I was never prepared for emergencies. I just packed up my car and started driving. But as you may have read on my Alcan Highway page, I was helped by some very nice people when I got stuck. NOTE: If you are planning on driving the Alcan, be a little more prepared than I was. Pick up your copy of the Milepost Magazine BEFORE you start your trip! My first trip on the Alcan was when my parents drove to Alaska in 1951. Here are a few things my parents mentioned from that trip. We arrived in Alaska on April 1st - fool's day. Some old sourdoughs who were at the Inn where we stopped, had the audacity to tell my parents they arrived on the right day! It was not unfriendly at all, but was kind of a grim warning that life was not easy here. And they were totally right. One very cold day, we parked the car for about 15 minutes at a store. As we drove away, there was a strange thumping sound. The tires had frozen flat on one side! But as soon as the tires warmed up, the sound disappeared. Tires back then were not the quality they are now, either. One of my trips was in 1967. My husband, his brother and I and our baby daughter drove to Alaska in a 1951 Studebaker. The car had "overdrive", which meant it went for miles without using hardly any gas. That is also when there were "gas wars" in the US. Gasoline was selling for around 20 cents/gallon at the time, but was much higher in Canada. But we were young and didn't have much money, so we built campfires on the roadside to heat food. I washed diapers in bathroom sinks at gas stations along the way, and hung them out the car window to dry as we traveled! We were so lucky! We didn't even have a flat tire on that trip! But we did have one repair. All the gauges on the car started going crazy. No oil pressure, fuel gone, car overheating!! Worried, we stopped at the first repair garage we saw. It was in a very small, friendly Canadian town. The garage owner was also the mechanic, and he knew his business. In a very short time he had it fixed. He cleaned the brushes on the generator (you guys will probably know what that means) - and only charged us $5! We drove the rest of the way to Anchorage without any problems at all. On my last trip Alcan Highway trip, I stayed in hotels or motels every other night and slept in the car on odd nights. Hotels in general were acceptable, but they did have the frontier flavor - they weren't too careful about cleanliness. There was a stretch of nice, flat straight road that had been plowed and wasn't even very icy, so I relaxed and was getting a bit sleepy anyway. All of a sudden, I realized there were some huge coils of wire immediately in front of me all across the road and I could stop quick enough. By the time I stopped, it was entangled around the axle in several places. Luckily I had some pliers and I twisted pieces of it back and forth until they broke. That way I disconnected the main coil from the car. Since I couldn't get the rest of it off, I just left it and drove all the way to Florida with it still on there. During the trip a few snowstorms made it hard to see, but only slowed me down. On one hill, I saw a big semi-truck that had slid over a snow-covered bank on a hairpin curve. He was about 40 or 50 feet below the highway. Luckily, because there was so much snow for padding, the truck didn't appear damaged and no one was hurt. But I bet it cost a lot to get it back on the road! One scary part was not actually part of the Alcan Highway but the highway through British Columbia that took me into Washington State. That highway went very steeply down hill, with a steep drop-off on one side and a mountain that went almost straight up on the other side. The road had been plowed but since it had snowed a lot, the snow was quite deep on the mountainside. Looking up at it was a bit frightening! To make it worse, there was a very BIG sign at the top of the hill that read, "Avalanche Warning - Do NOT Honk Your Horn!" Or words to that effect. I slowly let my car roll down that hill, keeping it somewhat braked and practically held my breath until I got to the bottom. I was also praying that no big truck would come up or down that hill at the same time! It worked. No other traffic showed up until I was out of the danger zone. Overall it was a great trip. I enjoyed spotting moose along the roadside who were smart enough to stay there, and porcupines at night. If you take your time on this trip and stay at a few parks along the way, you'll undoubtedly see a lot of wildlife. And of course, the scenery was always ever-changing and beautiful! It's Time for Your Stories: Those are the most exciting or interesting parts of my Alcan highway trips. And I'll bet you have some even more adventurous stories to tell. I'd love to hear about them and so would other folks who plan on traveling this highway. If you know some great places to stop or places you wouldn't, let us know about that too. Everyone appreciates hearing that kind of information and advice. So feel free to join in the fun and tell about your great Alcan Highway Adventure Trip, in the form below! Have A Great Story About the Alcan?When you drove the Alcan Highway, did you have some great adventures? We'd like to hear about them. Please share with us! Other Alcan Highway Adventure Stories...Click below to see Alcan adventure stories from other visitors to this page...
The Alcan's Destruction Bay
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