It wasn’t a shock, but it was pretty obvious. Immediately upon departing our “private” camp (see previous post) the landscape continued to change. Our camp’s access road was one of many pipeline/exploration construction roads. At first, the terrain was just forests, carved here and there by such pipeline roads and rights-of-way. These long straight scars don’t do much for the aesthetics of rolling hills and forests, but they don’t impact things much ecologically speaking. There’s still a LOT of un-touched land out there, and unless you are visually lined up with a pipeline, you can hardly see it. And they do provide access to land that can otherwise only be approached on foot.

But then, as we roll through the oil-and-gas region, the side roads (used for exploration and other access) become more frequent. The trucks start coming every mile instead of every 10 minutes. Enclaves of compressor stations are everywhere, tidy squat collections of metal buildings and mysterious plumbing, all topped by a jaunty BIC-flame at the tip of a striped smokestack.

All those workers need more than a couple of RV’s to live in. There are modular-building “camps” along the highway, the modern-day equivalent of the gold-rush tent cities in Anchorage, Dawson, and other towns. But these really are temporary, and will be taken down and moved to new sites as the work continuously relocates. Here’s one at Wonowan. Like the name? It comes from being at Alaska Highway mile 101. Get it?

Our previously slender highway gets more pronounced, with more side roads, and four lanes when it hits population centers. Absolutely EVERYTHING is about gas and oil. Oil equipment rentals, service, oil field supplies, even an oil field for rent. These aren’t tourist towns, they’re working towns.

Then the billboards start sprouting up – sure indications of “civilization” and its multiple encroachments. Want a pizza? How about a college education? We even have well-head blankets. You’ve come to the right place.

Trying to escape the clutter, we encounter – – – you guessed it, more highway construction. Can’t complain, that how good roads get built and maintained, but dang.

Never give up! And we didn’t. We got away (mostly) from the oil and the construction and the too-civilized sections, and sneaked off the highway over to an old Alcan section. This area crosses the Kiskatinaw River, and the original highway did so with a novel curved, banked wooden trestle bridge. But the bridge had a 25T limit, and the heavy oil-machinery transports had to ford the river instead of using the bridge. This spurred the development of a bypass – the current Alaska Highway – and left the bridge and the old road still functioning, for us to visit and appreciate.

It’s really a sweet piece of work, with a deep dark brown creosoted fir trestle that has stood the test of time. The afternoon that we drove up, just by chance, there was a 1:1 climbing instruction taking place about 1/3 of the way across the span. The blonde gal seemed really new, and proceeded very cautiously, sometimes flailing her legs and spinning a worrisome 3/4-turn. A small group of people were watching, with comments that varied from “I could do that” to “No way on Earth”.

It was fun to watch, but not all that exciting (for us). The climbing student, well, she was probably a bit more thrilled. So we packed up the camera and drove a little further down the road to camp. This time, we didn’t have the whole place to ourselves. There was another camper there, on the far side of the loop. We picked a place just above the river and pointed Howie so we could have a nice view out the windshield. We always enjoy looking out through those giant glass “viewing screens” at nice parts of the world. Not too shabby.

Walking out on the river sand bar, Howie peeked out through the riverbank brush and trees. This is how camp looked from the river’s point of view.

It was a fine camp, but there was not much to explore right around the area. We decided to spend only one night, and trek on down the highway for more sights and scenes. Tomorrow, we’ll pick up a few items in Dawson Creek, go take our pictures at Mile Zero, and camp the other side of town at Pouce Coupe.