Dirt Bag for a Day - North Pt. 1

Then, it was a Chrysler LeBaron convertible, and the road trip took us from Dallas, Texas to the Arctic Ocean, with a few months of fish-gutting thrown in to boot.

I still remember the looks of incredulity we collected as we puttered up the 500 miles of dirt they call the Dalton Highway, passing what in winter are ice road truck stops in "towns" that bear progressively more foreboding names as you head north: Livengood, Coldfoot, Deadhorse.

By the time we hit the Arctic Ocean, I like to think we have given an entire platoon of Alaskan truckers some of the deepest belly laughs of their careers.

The ten-dollar plastic gas can strapped to our trunk definitely completed our greenhorn look. Only one thing could have made us look even more hilariously out of place — if we had rolled through Coldfoot with the top down, blasting a little Ace of Base on the stereo.

But back to Tok, Alaska, and our crippled mechanical steed. The Toyota appeared mortally wounded.

But the view was unreal. If ever there was a contest for "Most Beautiful Place to Have your Car Fall Apart" — the Richardson Highway bordering the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park would be hard to knock out of first place.

I immediately began a quick mental count of the granola bars left in the car. And then I thought about our nearest sources of help.

There was the metropolis of Tok, where hyperactive sled dogs outnumber people.

A quick glance at the snow cover on the ground (two inches at best) disqualified my first thought — ditch the car, buy a team of sled dogs and complete the journey by mushing into Homer in rented mukluks.

Too many Jack London novels do nothing for your mechanical abilities, but they sure can help you come up with a useless, and inappropriately humorous, idea in a time of crisis.

From my years of living in Truckee, my second course of action was pre-decided — make cannibal jokes.

My sister, who had endured a repititous series of hard brakings and cries of "Moose, moose, moose!" as we drove through the most dangerous sections of wildlife crossings on the Alcan highway, already knew this was coming and failed to laugh to the degree I was expecting.

My third idea, to see if I had Internet access on my Crackberry so that I could tweet "Broke down outside Tok, Alaska; somebody help. OMG. SOS." also went up in flames when I realized I was in one of those dreaded "dead spots."

So, as a last resort, I asked my sister to turn the key in the ignition as I craned my head under the hood.

Miraculously, minutes after completely dying on us, the car roared to life.

I apologized for all the cannibal jokes and we motored ahead through some of the most jaw-dropping scenery in the world.

Fall in Alaska is the forgotten season.

The hordes of summer tourists that caravan up and down the Alaskan highway, looking like the illegitamate children of Ted Nugent and a band of Gypsys have thinned out. A stillness rules the land. And the scenery, in places engulfed in the orange, yellow and read flames of autumn, is superlative.

Just outside of Fort Nelson, British Columbia the road snakes into the Canadian Rockies. Driving between Fort Nelson and Muncho Lake at the peak of the fall color show is one of those unreal experiences that makes you thank whatever deity or force or evolutionary process you credit with your existence that you were there then.

You may have the road to yourself, or like us, you may find yourself sharing it with a herd of 70 bison, a few caribou, moose, and couple of fat bears.