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Hamann journal: To nowhere and backNovember 26, 1999 EDITOR'S NOTE: Seattle-based correspondent Jack Hamann is headed on another adventure, this one to just to the south of the Arctic Circle. He'll be driving through the Canadian Rockies, across the windswept northern plains, up the Inside Passage and along the northernmost section of the Alaska Highway. Follow along here for regular dispatches on his journey. By Jack Hamann and Leslie Hamann
Journal date: November 23
(CNN) -- It isn't adventure unless you take some risks. Today, we took a risk. A big, fat orange moon hung above the flat horizon this morning while the sun fought to make an appearance by 8:15. Go back to sleep! No! No! Wake up! The sun won. We hit the road. Few tourists make it this far north in late November. We expected deep snow and brutal cold. What we got was blue skies and relentless sunshine. The sun was bright, but it stayed low on the horizon. The effect was an extended "Golden Hour" -- light that turns the powdered snow beneath the grain-stubble fields into an endless show of lines and angles and shadows and sparkle that changed with every few degrees. At one point, the temperature dipped to 9 degrees Fahrenheit (-12 C), but without any wind, we barely noticed the cold. The sun was still bright as we pulled into Dawson Creek, the infamous "Mile Zero" of the Alaskan Highway. The town is still smarting from a recent guidebook review that panned it as nothing more than a place to get food and gas before setting out on the 1,500 miles (2,400 km) northwest to Fairbanks. We chose to tour the small gallery for local artists housed next to a museum in a former grain tower. Some of the photographs in the gallery were impressive, and the winding museum tour documenting the military's nine-month construction job building the mammoth highway was more fun than we had expected. Naturally, we also got a little food and gas.
Jack traveled the length of the Alaska Highway in the summer of 1997 and found it to be breathtaking in some places, monotonous in other places, and disappointingly easy to navigate, considering its now-dated reputation as a torturous trip. Our itinerary on this journey does not take us on the road from Dawson Creek to Fairbanks (except for a stretch later on in the Yukon). But not far from Mile Zero, we saw a chance to test a road that might offer some of the uncertainty of the Alaska Highway before it was fully paved and plowed. Our detour took us on a loop to the south. The road to Tumbler Ridge is paved, but deserted, until we passed what is reportedly the World's Largest Open Pit Coal Mine. As we continued south, the gravel road was covered in ice, at first sanded, and soon simply slick. We were headed for Kinuseo Falls, the crown jewel of Monkman Provincial Park. The brochures told us the Falls are "taller than Niagara," though not nearly as wide. The photos looked so beautiful, and the road was so enticingly remote. Leslie has always loved trying impossibly difficult roads, but as we pressed on, not a soul in sight, the snow grew deeper, and the icy ruts in the road grew far less forgiving. We had crossed into the Pacific Time Zone, so the sky was already getting darker, and a few flurries of snowflakes greeted us as the road turned west. We missed the final turn. We didn't know it, of course, until we had walked up the river one way and down another, with no falls in sight. Snow, impending darkness, hours invested on this road -- and no payoff. Being way off the main road in a remote stretch of northern Canada has a way of focusing the mind. We retraced our steps until we found the small sign with the arrow pointing right where we had turned left. Within minutes, we had hiked to the overlook, and the magnificent Kinuseo Falls gave us our own private showing. Naturally, we have to drive OUT of our remote corner, and it wasn't getting any lighter. Our headlights managed to give us just enough warning as we raced up upon herds of elk and moose on the icy road. Today's risks have paid off, so far...Jack Hamann is a correspondent with CNN's Environmental Unit and CNN NewsStand.
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