Not Every Day is Smooth Sailing

Ok...so the story continues... this is where it gets really exciting...

After our exciting rest stop watching the helicopter land in the road, we finally arrived in the cute river town of Talkeetna.

 

The campground was at the end of town but felt like we were right in the middle of town haha. Lots of people around. We walked out to the Sustina River where you can sit and have a beautiful view of Mt McKinley. Mt McKinley was almost fully visible.

Just the very top of it was in the clouds. Jason stayed awake long enough to eat supper and then crashed hard to sleep off his sickness. I didn’t feel like going to bed at 7pm, so I stayed up to type some more blog stories. While I was sitting there, a guy, named Chris, stopped by to chat about our bikes. He said he was riding a BMW 1200GS from California. We met so many nice riders during our stay in Talkeetna.

From Talkeetna we cruised up the Parks Highway (stopping at all the viewing points for Mt McKinley) to the Denali Highway.

Mt McKinley was hiding under the clouds the whole time.

The Denali Highway is a very scenic, beautiful dirt road.

It cuts straight across Alaska from just south of Denali Park to Paxson on the east side. We were a bit shocked to see tour buses on this road though. Those poor people had to have been bouncing all over the bus haha. We tried to take a side road to an old abandoned town; however, not too far down the road was a nice sized river crossing. Of course Jason was all about it and zoomed right across but I wasn’t going to follow this time.

I just got a brand new exhaust and didn’t want the freezing cold water or hidden rocks to destroy it; so we turned around and started to look for a spot to camp. We came across a campground in a little town called Tangle Lake. It was getting late and we were starving, so we threw our camp together and cooked up a delicious salmon meal with the last bit of salmon we had caught in Soldotna. That was when all hell broke loose.... not only did it start pouring rain during supper but we noticed Jason’s water pump seal had broken! He has a see-through clutch cover so we could see a cloudy mixture of oil and water in there and his whole coolant container was empty. We didn’t want to deal with it in the rain and wind, so we ditched our dinner plates and hopped in the tent. It was so windy Jason had to reinforce the tent with more ropes. We used our pannier boxes as weights to hold the tent down haha. On top of the rainy nasty weather, my air mattress started leaking air. I had to blow it up 3 times during the night just to stay warm.

Morning rolled around and we were both miserable. Jason was pissed about his bike being broke down and I had caught Jason’s cold at full force. At least it was sunny outside. We talked about our options for rescuing Jason’s bike and made a few phone calls (thankfully our phones had signal out there). We even talked with 3 other fellow riders to get their opinions. One guy offered to tow Jason’s bike with his own bike to Glenallen. Our final game plan was for me to stay and watch our stuff at camp (so I could sleep and get rid of this cold) and Jason would ride my little bike 100 miles to Glenallen to rent a UHaul, throw my bike in the back, and then drive 100 miles back to the campground to load up his bike and me.

We needed to haul his bike back to Anchorage to get the water pump fixed. Jason had the kit to fix it already but needed a dry, clean garage and some oil to fix it (half the engine has to come off). Jason drove us as far as he could toward Anchorage after driving all day but decided to stop and sleep on the side of the road after almost hitting a mama moose and her 2 babies.

 

We set up our pads and sleeping bags in the back of the UHaul and slept as much as we could. It was soooooo cold!! It was the worst nights’ sleep ever.

We drove the rest of the way to Anchorage in the morning. The Motorcycle Shop was closed because it was Monday when we arrived (most moto shops are closed on Sundays and Mondays), so we unloaded Jason’s bike and locked it up. We were so thankful Jason’s friend, Josh, was still in town. Josh helped us out big time. He let us drop off my bike at his cousin’s house, we returned the UHaul truck, and hung out with Josh the rest of the day.

 Josh and his family are so nice! His cousin had a pop up camper set up in their yard, so they let us sleep in that for a couple nights. She even had a bottle of wine and 2 wine glasses in the camper for us. It was so sweet!

We got a great nights’ sleep after freezing our butts off in the UHaul truck the night before. Josh took us to breakfast and then dropped us off at the Motorcycle Shop to see what the verdict was for Jason’s bike. Jason was more than ready to buy a brand new KTM 1190 if he had to. Since he had the water pump seal kit already, the shop said they could get it in right away and fix it that day! These guys are the best. I highly recommend The Motorcycle Shop to anyone riding a bike through Alaska. Josh decided we needed to go do something fun while his bike was getting worked on, so we all went to a small town called Hope. That was the only little town we hadn’t seen on our south Alaska trip so it was perfect. We had a great lunch there, saw the sights, and then had to haul ass back to Anchorage before the shop closed. We made it there with 5 minutes to spare haha! They were just finishing putting it back together so it was perfect timing. All went well. Fingers crossed this new water pump seal holds til we get home or at least up to Prudhoe Bay and back! Jason has replaced his water pump seal 5 times on this bike.

Josh’s cousin let us spend one more night in their pop up camper so we could sleep well and hit the road in the morning. We grabbed one last yummy breakfast with Josh and then put the pedal to the metal heading North. Jason’s break down was a blessing in disguise. It gave us both time to get over our colds before heading into the cold and as we drove passed Mt McKinley this time around it was super clear. We could see it from top to bottom and I guess that’s a rare occurrence. Not too far down the road we saw a huge moose grazing in a swamp.

We stopped to take some pictures and then kept truckin for Fairbanks. It was raining by the time we reached Fairbanks; so we stayed at the Best Western, ordered pizza, and did some laundry. 

Bright and early (just kidding we never leave bright and early... more like 10am) we hit the road. We had to swing by Northern Powersports for Jason to pick up some parts he ordered. They only had half of them in; so we grabbed what we could, changed his oil, and continued North by 2:30pm. The goal was to make it 200 miles to Coldfoot (the midway point to Deadhorse) and then set up camp.

We were quite surprised how much pavement there was on this road. From everything we read and people we talked to, it sounded like the whole route was dirt like the Dempster Highway. Half of the road to Coldfoot was paved and half was nicely packed dirt. We had beautiful sunny skies the whole way which made the traveling easier.

We rolled into Coldfoot around 8pm and fueled up. They had a buffet at the truck stop restaurant until 9pm, so we enjoyed some good food and good company of 4 other motorcyclists. 3 of them were older guys from New Zealand and the other guy was traveling alone from Vancouver. We had great fun chatting with everyone but hit the road again to find a spot to camp. We could have camped in the yard at Coldfoot but it was noisy with semi engines running all night long. There was a campground down the road, so we quickly set up camp and went to bed. We were going to have a long day of riding to Deadhorse tomorrow.