Last week, we may have dipped into Alaska by most technical definitions of the Canadian-Alaskan border by visiting Hyder, but it didn’t quite feel like it. We left and ahead of us lay the North end of British Columbia, the Yukon, and finally Alaska proper. The roads up to all this were two legendary highways: the Stewart-Cassiar Highway (or simply ‘the Cassiar’) and the Big One, the Alaskan Highway (also known as ‘the Alcan’).

Setting off from Stewert and Hyder, Alaska we found ourselves on a long stretch of road that would eventually connect with the Alaskan Highway. We had over half a thousand miles ahead of us before we’d make it there.

Our first stop from Stewart was Deese Lake. The road there was occasionally broken up into a gravel two-lane road and at times deteriorated into what could generously be called a ‘mud road’. The GT1000 handled all this fairly well, though. You get used to it quickly.

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An overdue update! We finally hit the roads in what can be legitimately considered wilderness, so our updates will be somewhat irregular and Wallpaper-A-Week backers will have to be a bit more patient… our apologies! I am writing this from what is technically Alaska: Skagway!

I’m getting ahead of myself. First, we have to detail how we ended up in the Yukon. We left off in Vancouver last time…

Vancouver treated us well. When we rode into town, we originally planned to stay with a Couchsurfing host, but as it was Canada Day the hosts we were planning to meet up with were off getting drunk somewhere on Granville Island, a small island in the middle of the city. We headed there, somewhat tired and very much thirsty after riding for hours without water and as we got off our bikes in the middle of thick (more drunk than not) crowds in Canada’s red and white colors we immediately got treated to Canadian friendliness. We struck up a conversation with a mother and son and Stuart talked with some other locals.

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Phew, did the last week fly by. After editing photos at the Panic office and sending off the wallpaper of the week, we said our goodbyes to our generous host James. Having a bit more forced downtime in Portland as we waited for my laptop to come in, we went out to see the city and find cheap (read: free) lodging.

Having drank plenty and met some girls the night prior (of Stuart’s birthday!) that expressed interest in hosting us, we napped our hangover away at Mt. Tabor park (somewhat hopelessly) awaiting a reply to our texts and happened upon a very nice Suzuki GSX-R riding fellow named Danny. Danny was intrigued by our story, asked some questions about the hammock I was lying in as he was about to embark on a honeymoon on motorcycles — a dream marriage, if you ask me — and rode off.

Less than thirty minutes passed and he came back up the hill, excitedly exclaiming that he told his fiancée all about us and they wanted to host us for the night. Score!

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