Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Driving/Recovering

Monday was lame, well as lame as driving through the wilderness of Canada can be. I drove through rain basically the entire day, hoping to take advantage of my healing knee to get some good driving hours completed. Almost all views were spoiled by clouds. Not the cool kind of clouds that give you cool perspective and depth, the lame ones that obscure almost everything. The variations in weather, climate, and vegetation at different altitudes is really startling though. One minute you'll be driving through fairly dense forest with budding deciduous trees, the next minute you'll have climbed a few thousand feet and the temperature will have dropped, it's snowing, and even the conifers are having a tough time clinging to life.

I passed several gorgeous lakes, and stopped at one to make dinner. I'm increasingly worried about bears, not for fear they might take my food or damage the car, but rather that they'll damage my new bike in doing so. I'm prepared with some bear mace to fight them off and the stupidity to do so. I'm currently at around 58 degrees north, so only another 8 degrees before I hit the Arctic Circle, if I make it that far.

I did finally make it to the Yukon! So there's that, the goal for tomorrow will be Whitehorse, a small but relatively large town.

A photo posted by Byron Young (@byron.a.young) on


The Miata's rattles are getting increasingly annoying, consistent, and maddening. I'll probably spend some time ditching some more interior panels to track a couple down. The bike rack's bolt keeps loosening, allowing the rack to sway but it's not in danger of falling. It's more concerning that that swaying would create some contact pressures and fatigue the metal. I'll have to tighten it up tomorrow before I drive farther north.

I'm currently writing this in a tent at 9 PM, and the sun has just barely gone down. There's at least another hour of twilight. At some point I'm going to need to check out the Northern Lights, hopefully the weather clears up soon to let me. It's been cloudy fairly consistently since I was in Whistler, with only some brief hours of sunlight. 

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