Sascha, Author at Round the World by Bike

It was time go further north – the most northern part we wanted to visit on this journey is the Arctic Circle. The Dalton Highway was pretty ok and Sascha said it is a trip of about 350km from Healy to the Arctic Circle. After being about 6 hours on the road we reached the point he entered in the GPS but we could not even see a sign. A car came towards us and we asked where the Arctic Circle is and they told us it is another 90 miles (150km) to go and the road will be really muddy and slippery. So what to do – we continued, got coffee and fuel (not really cheap up here) at the Yukon River Roadhouse and finally reached the Arctic Circle. A great place, much warmer than expected and we settled at the free camp site and lightened a fire to fight the monster mosquito’s (the only bad thing at this beautiful place). On the way back we proudly picked our “I crossed the Arctic Circle Certificate” and decided we deserved a SPA-day at the Chena Hot Springs. What a good feeling to bath and hang around in this hot water again and again after all these long riding days. And additional we had time to check the bikes and doing the laundry.
Now it was time to check out the real gold rush area! In Tok we had a nice chat with two gold miners at the liquor shop (where else ;) and settled at “Thompson´s Eagle´s Claw”, a motorcycle camp. A really nice place done by heard. As we are early in the season we stayed alone for that night. The next morning we enjoyed our coffee in the sun and planned to ride the “Top of the world highway” TOW later. But suddenly a thunderstorm with (3 to 4cm) hail appeared and covered everything in white. Unfortunately it continued hail/raining for about 3-4 hours. So we decided to stay one more night. Therefore we enjoyed the great company of 4 other motorcyclists (greetings to Jaakko, Alf, Jep and Philip) this night at the fireplace. They did the TOW that day and did not even see a drop of rain the whole day.
So the next day we went for it. First we had a look at Chicken, an old little gold miming settlement when dark clouds came across the mountains. Kerstin became a little bit nervous as everybody was saying the TOW is awesome but the road will become narrow and winding, with steep dips and can be very slippery when it rains. Nevertheless we went for it. In the end it was a great ride on a well graded wide gravel road. The scenery was nice, the sun was shining and we arrived at the Canadian Border. Just shortly before Dawson we could see the Thunderstorm in the Rocky’s and caught a little rain. We took the ferry over the Yukon and arrived in the famous Dawson City. It is a really nice place with open minded and friendly people and it is a lot of fun to straw around and catching the spirit of this historical gold mining place. We joined the yearly Commissioner´s Tea (who personally welcomed us to Dawson!) at the Commissioner´s Residence and enjoyed speeches, music, tea and homemade dainties. For sure we will have a great evening before we leave tomorrow. See you soon! – Oh wow we just had an earth quake… everything was tumbling but nothing to worry…

In the early chilly morning we left Anchorage to reach Denali National Park and finally made it at the end of the day. It was mostly cloudy and later on it even started to rain. Finally, after a 400km ride in the rain we reached Healy and moved in the warm and dry trailer of Paul who is a fellow rider which we know from ADVrider.com. We had an awesome time in and around Denali. Actually it is hard to find the right words to express the beauty and the variety of the wild life and the scenery – it is breathtaking and we were incredible lucky with the weather. Even Mount Denali was showing his full presence to us and we now belong to the 30% club (only 30% of all visitors to the park can say that they even have seen Denali without being covered completely in clouds…). We saw bears (even quite some beers….;), moose, Dall sheep, arctic ground squirrels, caribous, marmots, a raven nest and many more… we had a wonderful time in the wilderness and spent some very relaxed moments with Paul, his son Brice and the friends of Paul (THANK YOU PAUL it was such a great time and whenever you come to Germany there is always a place for you!). Very strange thing here is the “time”… you are sitting at the fire and having a beer or two and you think it must be around 19:00 or 20:00 o´clock… and Paul says “ohh I think I should go to bed soon…”, my response was “hmmm, Ok what’s the time?” “00.45”… the Sun here at this time of the year nearly never goes away… And what it doesn’t make it better is that all our “watches” e.g. camera, phone, laptop they all show a different time… but we are working on it to set them right…. ;)