Ushuaia or Bust: The Pan-Am 2K Expedition

[Revtor]

Awesome Tom!

[disco2hse]

Enjoying your thread and looking forward to the next instalment.

[tmckeon88]

Update: Alaska, the Dalton Highway and the Arctic Circle

We drove through some notable locations in BC and the Yukon Territory (it still amazes me to have visited the Yukon, after have read a bunch of Robert Service and Jack London as a kid). Whitehorse, Yukon is a great little town with a natural history museum describing Beringia, the prehistoric landmass encompassing Alaska and eastern Russia, connected by a land bridge then. They have fossils and reconstructions bears and giant sloths and so forth. Keeping an eye on the radiator levels, we drove to Fairbanks to get ready for the final push up the Dalton Highway.

I'm having some trouble with uploading these pictures; as I recall these are slides of prints and are not great quality anyway. We camped in Fairbanks in a commercial campground that was unfortunately noisy and dirty, so we were glad to get our supplies and head north with full jerry cans, water jugs and food.

The Dalton highway runs alongside the famous Alaska pipeline, which we criss crossed a number of times. It's essentially a big pipe on a raised scaffold crossing the tundra. I've heard that the friction of the oil running through the pipe keeps the temperatures around it above freezing. The road is gravel, but big and wide and generally in good condition, so you can get going 50-60 mph if you are inclined, but watch out when the big trucks come barreling along because that's really their road, not yours. We got more stones and chips thrown at us and got a chip in our windshield, which is still there as a reminder to me. I had that screen over the front grill so the radiator was protected, but we were traveling on borrowed time because we had to keep adding water to the radiator and I began to worry that we would never be able to make it without an overheating problem which might really damage the engine. We crossed the Arctic Circle (again, my picture files are too large for some reason) and went on. We had planned for stop in Coldfoot, Alaska, where there is a little restaurant and PO, and there we had to assess our plan.


As you can see, Coldfoot offers few amenities. There were lots of trucks and truckers though and I asked around to see if there were any mechanics who could patch our radiator, but no luck. It was gray and drizzling and muddy and not an auspicious day generally. We ended up going as bit further on to stay at a national forest campground but at that point we decided to take the better part of valor and return to Fairbanks.

We had intended to go all the way up the Dalton to Deadhorse and Prudhoe Bay, where the big oil refineries for the Arctic Sea are, but we were concerned with not finding lodging or fuel, and also with the fact that the oil companies limit access to that area. Not just anyone can blunder in. So we sort of consoled ourselves with the idea that we had gotten into the Arctic and a mechanical fault forced us back, but we hadn't really lost too much. On the return trip we were stopping to refill the radiator every few miles, so it had gotten pretty bad (despite the large dose of coarse ground pepper I had dumped into the radiator from the little diner in Coldfoot).

We got back to Fairbanks and stayed at a B&B rather than camping. I had had a new speedo cable sent to that address (ours had failed in Yukon somewhere) and had a memorable time lying on the side of the street trying to get it installed around the overdrive unit. We also washed the truck- it had picked up a thick ,velvety layer of dust from the gravel Dalton Highway. We sought out a radiator shop and persuaded them to repair the radiator- if I removed it myself and delivered it. So , I parked the truck at their shop, got out the wrenches and removed the radiator and gave it to them to work on. The shop was staffed entirely by women, which I found notable at the time, and apparently mostly worked on giant tractor-trailer radiators, big, finned monolithic slabs of copper. But they got ours fixed in a day and I put it back in and it never gave us any more trouble. We hiked around where the Yukon River cuts close to town and rode bikes around that were loaned to us. Now that we had reached the "beginning" of our southward route we felt like we'd turned a corner.

Other mechanical issues: we were averaging about 18 miles to the gallon. It actually improved over the course of the trip, perhaps because running the engine at high revs for so long burned away some gunk. My mileage now is worse. We lost the speedo but got that replaced (although this car tends to eat speedo cables, I've found). We still had the weak brake issue which never got better and my rear hubs tended to leak oil. I repeatedly pulled the drive flanges and resealed things, but it never got fully fixed until somewhat later, after the trip. We were consuming oil as usual and generally couldn't get oil changes because quick-lube places wouldn't have the canister replacement filters for us. But generally the car started every day and ran all day without too much fuss. We would usually drive through two or three tanks of fuel a day, maybe 500 miles on a big day. That's a lot in the hot, noisy truck. We had a radio but usually couldn't hear it well. We both learned to doze sitting up in the passenger seat with a pillow on the lap. So we were making headway.
Next: Back in the USA.

[disco2hse]

A note on preparing photos for upload. I tend to use Photoshop to resize mine to a constant size if there is a limit on the site I am uploading to. 800 pixels on the longest side, JPEG format and use the best quality setting. Seems to work most times.

The other thing, if you use one of the photo sharing sites like Google+, you can upload your scan and resize them using the image location url. For example the image below is of my friend, Jerry's cool Carawagon in Australia. The image location is

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-XvnrkatIjKk/UOSpw7uNyiI/AAAAAAAAAfs/_0Rq6Ei7_bg/s805/P1030964.JPG

The important bit is s805. That denotes the size. Change to make it bigger or smaller.

s805 ==



s350 ==



Important: Deselect the "Retrieve remote file and reference locally" check box if you don't want it copied to this site.

[tmckeon88]

Update: Alaska-BC-Pacific NW

Just a few pictures to show of the return trip down from Alaska. After getting our radiator and speedo cable sorted out, we headed down through British Columbia which is a spectacular place that I recommend to anyone. Mountains, lakes, even semi arid landscapes, plenty of places to camp and so forth.



Some black bears and a grizzly in the distance. (We were in the truck at the time so we could do a quick getaway if need be.) Beautiful provincial parks and campgrounds, although I encountered ferocious mosquitoes here a few times too. This part of the trip went fairly smoothly as I recall- we were just tooling along and adding oil to the engine pretty regularly. The roads were good, just not superhighways.

What was probably most noteworthy was getting close to Vancouver (actually Chiliwack, BC) I was stopped at a gas station and when we pulled away I heard sort of a "kathunk" and then noticed oil drizzling out from under the car. Upon inspection it turned out there was a hole in the rear differential case, right near the bottom by the drain plug, and oil actually dripping out. (I admit part of me thought "Yay! My diff casing still had oil in it!") and we were dead in the water. I got it towed to a garage close by and then there started a chain of phone calling events that ended up with us going to another garage where there was a mechanic who knew Land Rovers (he said he used to race them?!) and who relatively quickly got under it, pulled the differential off, and determined that all of the crown ring bolts had come loose and the diff was essentially floating in the casing back there. One had been jammed against the axle case and made that hole. Well, we were sort of stalled until MORE phone calls were made and he located a distributor of Rover parts located an hour or so away who had a new set of those bolts (and some sundries). We just had to go pick them up. How, without a vehicle? Well, this mechanic actually loaned us the use of his pick-up camper, which we drove down the highway, got the bolts, brought them back, and gave them over to the mechanic. All this happened over the course of a couple of days, during which we stayed at a little B&B in Chiliwack ("Hedgehog Hollow"). I was pretty astonished at how helpful everyone was, which is a theme that ran throughout the trip. When we had mechanical troubles, usual people were only too happy to help the old beast get running again. Once in a while I even had an appropriate spare part on board.

He got it all buttoned up again, had the hole in the casing welded (still holding today) and we were off for Washington State where my wife had relatives. That experience gave me faith that we could find help just about anywhere, a belief that was tested and borne out a few times further down the trail.


Next- Washington, Oregon, California.

[Skookumchuck]

Great read keep it coming. This is a trip I would love to make someday.

[JohnsD90]

Very good read so far, always wanted to do the North American/South American Expedition!

[tmckeon88]

Update 2/24/13 I've uploaded some images to imgur and I'm hoping it will be easier to post them in here. [IMG][/IMG][IMG][/IMG]

Here are a couple more Alaska pictures, including the marker at the Arctic Circle.

Once we got the differential repair sorted out we crossed into Washington and ended up staying a couple of days in the Seattle/Tacoma area, where I had some sort of eye infection from a bug bite that made my right eye swell shut. We got that treated and were able to move down to Oregon, where we stayed with family out along the Oregon coast at some impressive beach areas.
[IMG][/IMG][IMG][/IMG]

In Oregon we also made the trip to Crater Lake National Park, which is well worth the visit if you ever get the chance. We camped at one of the national park sites and did some driving around and hiking. It is an amazing sight, deepest blue water you will ever see, a cinder cone island in the center called Wizard Island. A long-dormant volcano; some of the Native American stories of the area make reference to a great explosion that night have been the eruption that created the crater, which is thought to have happened thousands of years ago. The myths of the area apparently still carry some remnant of that event.

We also drove some of the Oregon coast and stayed with some friends in the Mackenzie River area, in the drier eastern part of the state. I can recommend Oregon as a great vacation place for all kinds of outdoor activities- hiking, biking, canoeing, kayaking, rafting, skiing, mountaineering.

Somewhere along this time I got a new radiator cap too, as ours seemed leaky, and I recall from this point on our radiator troubles seemed solved. We were still having the weak brake issue, which would never really get better until last year's fix, and also the rear hubs would consistently leak oil. I have since fixed that too, but in those days it was a common nuisance.

We drove down the northern California coast and made our way to the SF Bay area, where we stopped for a few days. More later-