Dawson’s Creek

Dawson’s Creek is the start of the Alaskan Highway… Milepost 0. Absolutely every tourist must take obligatory pictures at the two markers in town, and I’m no exception. Yes, here I am at the actual milepost 0 marker, which is located in the middle of the street! You actually have to jaywalk to get to it, and dodge incoming traffic to get your picture taken! The locals are real nice about it, tho, and slow down a bit to give you a fighting chance.

There is a highway house right next to the milepost that has lots of information about the day back in 1942 when the Army descended on the then-tiny little town with 10,000 men, trucks, bulldozers and road building machinery to make a road to Alaska. They built the road, all 1500 miles of it, in 8 months!

Yes, it’s the World Famous Alaska Highway! And there is the somewhat less-than-world-famous me, posing on my Yamaha, set to head up the road to Alaska!

The nearby visitor’s Center has a very nice museum in it, with some of the nicest animal mounts I’ve seen, and neat displays of road-building artifacts.. well worth a visit!

  

The folks at the visitor’s center were really nice: they arranged to have someone meet us at the sign for a group photo op. The same gal that did the presentation for us on the highway came out with a big basket and collected everyone’s cameras, and then proceeded to take several pix of our group with each camera. All we had to so was stand there and look good! I suspect they have done this before. So here is the official 2014 Loosey-Goosey group photo at the start of the journey, and one somewhat less organized one of us all milling about smartly under the sign, trying to decide where to go to eat lunch or something.

  

After lunch, I knocked about town a bit and got supplies for the expedition… mostly Beer and food stuffs. I ran across this neat mural on the side of a building and figured it was photo-worthy…

We start up the Alaska Highway tomorrow! The true beginning of the adventure!