Alcan - Day 8 / Day 9

Alright, we are back in civilization and can’t believe our Alcan adventure ends tomorrow. We’re currently in Dawson Creek, BC, but it really feels more like an Alberta farming town (and in fact is less than 10miles from the AB border, and is on Mountain time). Tomorrow we complete the last leg of our rally down the Bighorn highway from Grande Prairie, to Hinton, and then onto Jasper for the big finish.

You can tell you’ve been spending too much time with other teams when the pranks start to become more important than the competition of the rally. We bought some stickers for our and Sirius Rally Team #17’s car which read “DODGE THIS!” and “RAM THIS!” in response to Car #18’s “Subaru Recovery Vehicle” sticker. We also replaced “Reovery” with “Wanna-be”. Of course when we woke up in the morning we were expecting something, and we saw some can’s tied on a string to the Sirius Team #17’s car. After removing them and having them inspect the rear of our car, we drove off to a loud CLANKLE CLANLKE sound. When we pulled into the gas station some locals asked if we were just married and pointed to the cans tied to the FRONT of our vehicle.

We left Whitehorse yesterday after a repeat of Day 4’s TSD’s and Ice Racing. Did alright on the TSD and really took it easy on the ice racing after putting the car into a snowbank during the parade lap - it was -crazy- slick this time since there hadn’t been any snow since we were there 5 days ago.

After the TSD and Ice Racing we stopped at Tim Hortons for coffee and Timbits and made the 450mi trek to Liard Hot-springs in BC. It was a nice treat to arrive to some natural hot-springs, and we were obviously the only group of folks there. Our team, Bill and Doug from Team #18, and most of the Team Mitsubishi teams enjoyed some relaxing time in the hot springs before turning in early. We can tell the endurance portion of the event is taking it toll on us as we are electing to sleep rather than party at this point. We also stopped off at this sign forest which was a little weird but actually pretty cool; we found signs from California, Oregon and all over the world.

This morning, we got up and proceeded through Fort Nelson, Fort St. John, and eventually to Dawson Creek which was another 450mi day. We had 2 TSD events, one which we nailed (5 points), and another we screwed up on due to a wrong turn at a 4 way stop, which really screws up your odometer, although we were able to get things together by the end of the TSD. We also had a look at the TSD computer in Team #20’s car, which would definitely be a serious advantage if we were to do more of these.

We had some great wildlife viewings today and yesterday and it was obvious we were back in the Rocky Mountains.

Bison:

Wolves (very cool):

Beautiful Rocky Mountains:

That’s all for now, as we’ve lost an hour due to the time change and need to get up early to finish the rally tomorrow.

- Stevan & Kristin

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