Dateline May 16, 2011, Dawson Creek, BC: Mile 0 of the Alaska Highway

We reached Dawson Creek on May 15, the meeting point for the Walkabout caravan and Mile 0 of the Alaska Highway.

The place itself carries some weight. In 1942, Dawson Creek was a town of just six hundred people when the United States military arrived to start building a road north. The plan was to push almost fifteen hundred miles of highway across British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska to just south of Fairbanks, opening an overland supply route in case of war in the Pacific. It is now considered one of the great civil engineering achievements of the twentieth century, alongside the Great Wall and the Hoover Dam.

The numbers are still hard to believe. The road was built in less than a year. Crews worked from both ends and met in the middle. Soldiers labored through winter temperatures dropping to seventy degrees below zero, and the stories say a man could lie down for a nap and never wake up. In the summer the mosquitoes came out, and the old timers say they were big enough to kill a horse, which is the kind of story you do not entirely believe but do not entirely dismiss either.

Our schedule had us meeting the rest of the Roadtrek group on May 15 to begin the trip north. When we rolled into town, twenty-five vehicles were waiting, RTers from every corner of the continent, including one couple from Hawaii. Apart from Joan and Chuck, whom we had met for lunch in Florida months earlier, this was the first time we had laid eyes on any of these people who had been ghosts in our email inboxes all winter.

The group had been pulled together by the Western Chapter of Roadtrek International. A Yahoo site had been set up, and over one hundred people had signed up at various points to potentially join. Not everyone made it to Dawson Creek, but another ten or more vans were planning to catch up with us along the way. It was a real pleasure to finally put faces to all those email addresses.

Wendell Nunes was the leader of the trip and had organized the whole thing with Judy Willis, mostly over the internet.

Of the twenty-five Roadtreks at Mile 0, twenty-three were heading straight north on the Alaska Highway.

We, along with two friends who had also signed up, were taking a different route. From here we would turn back south and west toward Prince George, then continue to Prince Rupert to catch the 10:30 AM ferry up the Inside Passage to Juneau. The plan was to work our way back down the Alaska Highway from Fairbanks toward the end of the trip, so we could share the road experiences with the rest of the group. We would meet up with everyone in either Tok or Valdez during the first week of June.

Off to Prince Rupert. Back on the blog from Juneau.