Alcan Highway...

Get your kicks on route 66 and your adrenaline fix on the Alcan Highway.



The infamous Alcan Highway (also known as the Alaska Highway) seems to be the only sane way to pull an RV through Canada to reach Alaska. When you research how to get to Alaska driving, all roads lead to the Alcan. There are some alternative routes, but it seems that unless you are an adrenaline junkie and have a big repair budget, they are not recommended.

But as we have found out, the Alcan still offers plenty of adrenaline for a Cheechaco RV'er.
One vintage photo of the Alcan in the visitors center, depicted a portion of the road with a sign that read:

"Suicide Hill -- Prepare to meet your God."

I think that today, the Alcan is not -that- bad, but perhaps the sign could be updated to:

"Financial Suicide Hill -- Prepare to meet your Financial Advisor."

The online research on this highway is peppered with horror stories of blown tires, broken axles and all kinds of misfortune, mostly furnished by the perennial frost heaves and rough road in general. We completed the route in one piece. These are our factoids:

• It took us 6 days to drive the 1422 miles of the Alcan.
• We averaged about 230 miles per day.
• Depending on how rough or slow the drive, we averaged about 4 to 5 hours drive time per day.
• Most of the route is marked as 100 Km/hr as the speed limit.
• Almost everybody was exceeding the speed limit.
• We did not see a single police car on the route of 1422 miles.
  
• The longest pull was from Liard Hot Springs to Whitehorse in one 7-hour pull....brutal.
• We got some dings on our Airstream rock panels.
• We got 3 rock chips on our truck windshield.
• We grew some gray hair while driving over frost heaves.
• We paid up to $5 US for a gallon of diesel.
  
• We encountered about 10 sections of unpaved road, totaling about 30 to 40 miles of dirt road driving.
• One close call occurred when the hitch scraped the bottom of the road while we drove through a frost heave.
• We had one low fuel close call when we arrived at a station listed on the map, and it was closed out of business.
• One wrong turn at Haines Junction led to the always fun two-lane-highway-u-turn.
• We lost all cell phone signals from Fort Nelson to the Tok with the exception of Whitehorse.
• There were no radio stations AM or FM for most of the drive.
• We only spotted 2 churches in the 1422 miles! In Texas, you roll down the window to spit, and you hit one.

This is the only police car that we spotted on the Alcan :)
It was placed after a "slow down sign"

Repairing windshield rock chips at Whitehorse

Beautiful day to stop at the Sign Forest in Watson Lake

One of the many delays due to road repair. These were the unpaved sections that turned the highway into one lane.

There were some big mosquitoes on the highway

End of the Alcan!