Driving in The Bush

On the road again, Ashley and I left Vancouver to make our way through the rest of British Columbia. We coasted through majestic mountains past jade-green rivers and lakes in the rain and the fog, and it felt like just us and the open road, which was fragrant with the smell of wet pavement. Service stations and other amenities in The Bush are scarce, and it's possible to go two hours without seeing a gas pump or even a speed limit sign (though we did see several signs cautioning to look out for horses and livestock for the next however many kilometers). Law enforcement is seemingly nonexistent, and the only sort of "regulation" we encountered was at a construction site where traffic was stopped; a man behind us dismounted his Harley and came to Ashley's window to tell us to slow down if we didn't want to get ourselves killed. He turned around to rejoin his biker friends and proceeded to smoke a doobie with them in the middle of the highway.

At one point the GPS led us on a sort of wild goose chase, and we ended up going in a roundabout loop. Once back on the main highway I noticed we were behind a truck that we had passed a while back. I said to an oblivious Ashley, "Dude, we're behind this guy again," and she replied, in all seriousness with, "Do you know him?"

After many hours of driving, Ashley and I opted to sleep in the car at a Safeway parking lot in a town called Smithers, and in the morning we forged on to Highway 16 and then 37, both of which had signs such as: "Hitchhiking: Is it worth risk?" and "Girls, DO NOT hitchhike! Killer on the loose!" I think it's safe to say we were both glad to have wheels at that point.

39 miles from the Alaskan Highway, Hwy 1, we were stopped abruptly in the middle of The Bush. A highway worker approached the car window to tell us that the road would be closed for 6-10 hours. I thought, "Haha, good joke," and then the woman proceeded to tell us that an old man had driven his truck into a ditch and gotten himself killed; it would be at least six hours before the nearest coroner would even arrive to the scene. So we did what seemed like our best of very few options and waited it out on the side of the road, intending to sleep in the car again for several hours (the road-worker cautioned against sleeping outside if we were "on our monthly").

Waiting on the Cassiar Highway for the coroner from Terrace to come, we had the good pleasure of befriending a fellow named Marty Olson, a jolly, unassuming Sourdough who worked at a jade camp down the way (and who told us to "bear-ware in The Bush"). The three of us played cards and shared stories, and just as we were about to set up our grill in the middle of the highway to make dinner, traffic started to move. What was a five-hour wait only seemed like an hour. We hugged our new friend goodbye (and thanked him for the Smirnoff coolers he bestowed upon us) and carried on to the next campground.

Un-phased by the delay of the previous day, we entered into the Yukon and cruised along the Alaskan Highway, which, even more so than the highways in BC, gives you the feeling of being in utter wilderness. Wispy fuschia flowers line the road, and the few cars that you pass going the other way often have red gasoline jugs strapped to their roofs. We were thrilled when some black bear cubs scampered across the road and could sense that Alaska was just around the bend.

And now for a little vocabulary...
sourdough: someone who has spent at least one winter in Alaska or the Yukon; a person who's sour on the land but without enough dough to get out