The Alternative Alaska Highway

There's the Alaska Highway (which we drove as a family in 1975 back when it was dirt the whole way), and then there's the Alternative Alaska Highway. Naturally we took the latter. Fewer RVs, still some stretches of dirt, and large expanses of stupendously uninhabited wilderness. It's hard to get your head around some of the numbers - Yukon province is 25% bigger than Zimbabwe, but the total population is 37,000 people (about the same as Rusape), three-quarters of whom live in the capital Whitehorse. The rest of the province is very empty indeed. (And the few people that do live there are extremely colourful, as you can imagine!).

The start of the Stewart Cassiar Highway

For the map geeks, this is the route. From Prince George in BC you head west towards Prince Rupert, and then veer north on the Stewart Cassiar highway. Stewart is well worth a side-trip (we watched a black bear fishing for salmon, camped beneath a glacier and ate ice cream from an old school bus here), but Cassiar bequeathed its name to the road and then promptly ceased to exist. So don't bother looking for it.

Bear Glacier in Stewart. We camped here….

Another stunning campsite - Boya lake

Dawson City

Up in Yukon you then briefly join the Alaska Highway, keeping a watchful eye out for those retirees in their RVs (towing cars bigger than ours just as "runarounds"!), and then veer north at Whitehorse on the gold rush trail towards Dawson City (whose population swelled in 1897 from 50 to 40,000 in 18 months). From here you take the sublime Top of the World Highway and enter Alaska at the tiny border post of Poker Creek (population 3). Thence to the delightfully quirky community of Chicken (whose bar now proudly sports a shiny new Zimbabwean thousand dollar bill on its front door) and finally rejoining the tar at Tok.

The lonely border post at the Top of the World

From Jasper to Anchorage took us 8 days to cover around 3,500 kms. But what a breathtakingly beautiful drive it was. Wish we could just re-live it all over again in slomo!