I'm not feeling well today. I had trouble sleeping again last and woke up feeling very off and unmotivated. I had another episode of my guts letting loose yesterday. To top things off, while I didn't notice the smoke myself, the forest fire on the horizon has apparently been sending some smoke this way. I had noticed I was starting to get tired yesterday, a common allergic symptom for me, and today I was already completely wiped out.

So I've decided to stay at the hotel here in Fairbanks another day and see if I feel any better. I hope to catch up on all my writing and then get under way to Valdez tomorrow. I've been told it's the Switzerland of Alaska. There are boat tours that go out to a glacier which I would like to do.

I've been invited to join a ride in early August up to Nova Scotia with Phil who I met in Deal's Gap. I am sorely tempted to go, but I am feeling the pressure to make it back when I said I would, namely in early August. I have dear friends who miss me, problems that my mom needs help with and I need to get back to the business.

My business partner, Anatoly, has been extremely understanding and patient with me as I mess around out here trying to get my head screwed on straight. He's been extremely patient through the six years of the hardcore Nightmare that kept taking so much of my time. There wasn't much of me left to help. I am behind on so many internal projects, some of them by an embarrasing number of years. Can you say the new ecommerce system?

You can't imagine a better partner. But things with our little huge multinational corporation of two people are not going well. I was hoping to get some brilliant insights into what we need to do to turn things around, but so far I've just come up with simple ideas that may or may not help. It's not a good time to be trying to sell stock market investment software for the Windows PC. Websites and brokerages have gotten so good of late that our bread and butter target demographic, beginning and intermediate investors, no longer have a compelling need to buy our software. Most who do use it rip it off. Add to that the ascendance of the Mac along with a whole spectrum of varied hand held devices from the iPhone to the Android, and we have a near perfect storm of forces making our lives difficult. The investors we do reach these days tend to be more advanced portfolio management types, but we don't reach enough of them. In addition, we are competing against mega million dollar companies for their attention.

Despite the fact that our products are very highly regarded, investors who use it love us and that we've gotten all kinds of positive press and reviews, the bottom has dropped out of our business and we need to find a new and creative way to reposition what we do to survive.

I confess I feel very guilty about how badly things are going. I haven't been able to find any new relationships that are producing; just a series of small attempts that have brought exactly zero. Anatoly could easily make bank anywhere. A couple of phone calls and he'd be involved in the next big project making six figures along with equity, easily. He's the best applications software developer/engineer I've ever met. What he is able to accomplish with the level of professionalism and engineering discipline he brings to his work is simply unparalleled.

It's strange. The blog has helped me see what I do, motorcycling and this trip, through other peoples eyes. It helps me point out things I would never have thought to mention; things I would never have thought were interesting. This may turn out to be the one of the most important lessons from the trip.

We have an excellent product. It rivals Quicken in it's polish and professionalism and completeness. As a matter of fact, being out here and talking to so many people has made me realize, the best way to describe what Anatoly has built is probably "Personal Stock Monitor is for investors what Quicken is for personal finance.".

For our business, I need to see through other people eyes. I need to get out and talk to people. I need to listen. I need to write. I need to give people a personal insight into what we do. I need to show them that we are much more than just a couple of guys with a little product. We've tried before but everything we've written has been too technical, too matter of fact, too dry. There's an interesting story to tell about what we've done, who we are, if only we can get the courage to tell it.

I think this trip and the blog I am compelled to write is helping me see that. Maybe I can learn how to do this for the business. Maybe I can find a marketing partner or even a buyer.

I simply write about what I think about. I've been loathe to write about the business and about some other topics. Too personal. Too revealing. Too many reasons not to. But I spend alot of time thinking about the business.

I also spend alot of time thinking about the Nightmare, wondering how much I should reveal. I feel compelled to. I want to, but I fear to as well. There are illusions about my family that would be shattered if they knew. There are so many reasons not to.

So for the moment, sitting here feeling rather ill in my hotel room, I'll continue on with my motorcycling story. Sorry for rambling off topic.

I had arrived in Deadhorse in the early evening, which up there is indistinguishable from mid day. The ride up had taken a little over six and a half hours. This was mostly due to me stopping to take so many photos.

When I arrived it was really cold. The tour guide would say later on that it had reached 25defF but I don't think it was quite that cold. Maybe 32. Having not slept the night before and having done 240 miles of mixed dirt, gravel and paved road requiring constant concentration I had no energy to go out and walk around. So I stayed in my little military style room in the Arctic Caribou Inn and wrote. I should have gone to bed after I finished but I ended up chatting with a few friends on Facebook until after midnight. This would have consequences later.

It was still light out when I went to bed. I bet I could have seen the sun if it weren't for the thick layer of clouds.

Midnight.

The Prudhoe Bay oil field operation is simply massive. It resembles a massive construction site. There are temporary buildings raised up off the ground to house workers. There are oil rigs in various states of readiness waiting to be deployed, others in operation. There are vast rows of construction equipment. Backhoes, graders, and other strange vehicles whose purpose I do not know.

It feels like a temporary camp. The temporal nature of this operation is evident everywhere. Moving through this place you can just feel how, once the oil and gas runs out, it'll all be abandoned. In fact, it was supposed to have been abandoned 10 years ago as the original estimate for the field was that it could only be operated for 20 years. It's now past 30.

I was told this operation supplies something between 20% and 30% of the oil in the US. It is in decline however. It used to produce 2,000,000 barrels a day but now produces less than 1,000,000, if I remember correctly. I'll have to look up and verify that I have my stats correct.

I had to get up early. Wicked early. At 6AM, which rolled around much too soon, I was up. By 6:30 I was at breakfast. I had a few cups of coffee after breakfast and went to the tour assembly room.

To go on a guided tour of the Prudhoe Bay operation you have to call 24 hours in advance. Each hotel can hook you up with a tour, but you have to provide them with your identity information, either a passport number or drivers license number. They do a simple background check on you before letting you enter the field.

The German tourists I had met in Coldfoot camp were there and sat down next to me. I continued to enjoy seeing the same faces as I travelled.

We were shown a short 17 minute movie about the history and operation of the oil field. In the movie, through the apparent rules and during the subsequent tour, they really attempt to do a good PR job about how they limit the environmental impact of their operations. While much of it is clearly a PR effort, some of it is very real. For instance, what I did not understand was how they set up the wells. As drilling techniques have improved they are able to place the well heads closer and closer together thereby allowing them to create a smaller gravel pad on which to place said well heads. From there they drill out in all directions for miles.

(I'll have to remember to ask Robyn from Prince George, BC about the realities of the environmental impact when I meet her for coffee on the return trip.)

After the movie we were herded out of the room and onto a bus. Each person had to show ID before being allowed on the bus. It had been raining for some time.

I should have taken notes or maybe they should have produced a flyer with relevant facts to hand out on the tour because I've forgotten too many of the details of what was discussed. The tour consisted of a several mile long drive around the center of the operation.

Oil rigs could be seen everywhere.

It's a muddy dirty place. As I mentioned, it feels like a massive construction site.

To the left an oil rig. To the right one of the "hotels".

Construction materials are stacked everywhere.

It doesn't feel or look like a "town". Imagine a flat space of dirt several square miles wide. Roll a trailer in here. Put a huge piece of equipment over there. Set up a tent in some other place. Pile up a bunch of wood and supplies in some other place. Now start driving around between the various places where you've put stuff. Eventually you decide to put down some gravel so the mud doesn't get too deep, and after a while you start thinking of it as a "town", but really it's just piles of equipment and temporary housing haphazardly dropped where ever it ended up when you first delivered it. At least, this is what it feels like.

Another thing that can be seen are seemingly endless arrays of pipes running from the various rigs, some miles and miles away, to the separation plants. I forget what the correct term is, but when crude is pumped out of the ground it contains impurities such as water, natural gas, bacteria, and sand. This has to be separated out before the crude oil can be sent down the Alaska pipeline.

Some of the stranger vehicles we were shown were these low impact crawlers designed to ride out on the permafrost and tundra without sinking in, and thus without impacting the ground too much. The tour guide told a story about how the pressure these exert on the ground as they roll is so low they could roll over a human being lying on the ground without injuring the person. The tall tale is that this is how these machines were originally demonstrated to the oil field operators. The tires are never inflated. They roll as the are seen here.

It is my understanding that the structures here are all built up off the ground to protect the permafrost. If too much heat escapes below a structure the ground can melt causing it to become unstable. Here's is yet another improvisational looking motel.

There are very interesting contrasts on this trip. I spent time with people at Dancing Rabbit whose very mission in life is to have the smallest environmental impacts possible. I now stand in the midst of what I believe is probably the single largest environmental impacts in existence, the oil and gas industry. "A necessary evil.", Robyn said and I agree with her. Without this industry, at this time, it is unlikely that even Dancing Rabbit could exist. They may not see it that way, but I think I could make a pretty compelling case for it.

Our modern lives are so dependent upon this industry that we are, to a large degree, held hostage by it. The very reason that I, a single middle class guy, have the economic muscle to, by myself, mount a machine and travel on it across many thousands of miles all the while staying in contact with everyone, being able to write this blog, is because of this industry. I imagine much of the gasoline, that magic substance that makes my bike Go, came from oil pumped out of the ground here.

As we toured the facilities, one thing that became very apparent to me are the tremendous risks involved in an operation like this. They deal with simply huge quantities of the highest energy transportation fuels we know of. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of miles of pipe. Seemingly millions of pieces of interconnected equipment.

On the one hand we know what can happen when things go terribly wrong. There is always the business desire to reduce costs to increase profits. Infrastructure upgrades are always painful and with publically traded companies, such upgrades reduce quarterly earnings and thus affect stock prices. Often times, with lax regulation, safety protocols are ignored and Bad Things Happen as we are seeing in the gulf.

This is apparently similar to the device that failed in the Gulf.

But I imagined being an engineer, or a safety guy or an operations guy, who was responsible for designing this place. Imagine the magnitude of that task. Imagine coming up with the information systems, the mechanical systems and the human systems policies and procedures to make an operation like this run.

From what I see here, it's amazing this place runs. It's seems like such a hazardous line of work. Tens of thousands of individuals. Millions of pieces of equipment. And it all works, more of less, most of the time.

Everywhere around you can see small buildings dotting the horizon which cover the well heads themselves. Safety valves such as the one above are contained in each small building.

The tourguide, a native Alaskan who has done a tremendous amount of hunting, had this uncanny ability to see wildlife all around the operation I would never have noticed. I would strain to see the critters he was pointing out to the left and right. It's an excellent PR move on their part to have someone so versed in wildlife conducting the tour.

When a given critter crosses the road traffic stops. I watched as other vehicles also stopped, not just tour busses.

I was impressed by the number of critters seemingly living out their lives in the fields between the rigs unbothered by the presence of all this construction equipment. The tour guide pointed out a number of red foxes.

One of the scarier aspects of this operation is "natural gas injection". In the case of the Prudhoe Bay oil field, the oil isn't actually pumped out of the ground. It hadn't dawned on me but one doesn't see of the Texas style pumps out here anywhere.

What they do is take a portion of the natural gas that's separated from the oil and the reinject it into the ground pressurizing the entire field which forces more oil out of the pores of the rock.

The pressure use to reinject the gas into the ground is astronomical. Apparently a single uncontrolled spark at the injection site could cause the entire site and surrounding buildings to explode. The blast radius would be miles wide. If memory serves, there are several such injection sites at Prudhoe Bay. If any one of them were to go, the entire operation could be shut down for years.

The furthest point of the tour was on Prudhoe Bay, which is part of the Arctic Ocean. We were allowed out for the obligatory "walk around and dip toe into water" part.

The tour guide and I talked for a while about the operation. He was kind enough to shoot this photo of me.

There are a few islands in the distance across the water on which are oil well heads.

So I opted for the "boots in the arctic ocean" shot. I wasn't about to take my boots off out in this cold.The waterproofing goo I applied to my boots seems to work.

I talked to the German tourists a bit. They offered to snap a photo of me too.

We returned to the bus and having dallied at the water too long attempted to get back to the hotel quickly. Our progress was thwarted by caribou in the road. Traffic on both sides came to a halt. The tour guide explained that across the Prudhoe Bay operation wildlife has the right of way.

While we were at the water he had explained that grizzly and polar bears can be quite a problem. The grizzlies hibernate in the sand dunes in the field. Polar bears come back on land at some point. Taking photos of polar bears in forbidden. This is apparently due to it changing the behavior of the polar bear. They do hunt humans after all. Anyone caught taking a photo of a polar bear will be fined. For workers there, the tour guide said they could lose their contract. If a polar bear starts changing it's behavior and pursues humans it has to be destroyed.

We passed the Alaskan Clean Seas operation. These guys are experts in oil spill cleanup. I noticed the OSHA VPP Star certification and thought of my buddy Bruce, whose family I joined camping in Ouray, Colorado. Bruce is a safety specialist so I've heard alot of stories of what's involved in that line of work. Looking around the Prudhoe Bay operation I think Bruce would have a field day here. He has this incredible insight into how truly large operations are organized, both from a physical perspective and a human management policies and procedures one. I used to rent a room from him ages ago in College Park, before I bought my house. I learned alot about business from listening to him. I don't think he actually realizes how much I learned from him then and continue to learn from him now.

Signs of construction and construction equipment everywhere.

We got back from the tour. I was pretty tired at this point, not having slept the night before and having only gotten about 5 hours of sleep. I thought about taking a nap but I was told I had to vacate my room immediately.

So I got my stuff packed on the bike and had a couple huge cups of coffee. The KLR riders had reported massive mosquitoes. The tour guide had said the day before I arrived was the worst he had ever seen the mosquitoes in all the years he had been up there.

I walked out to my bike to leave when the sun came out and the wind died down. Within seconds of this, literally seconds, the mosquitoes were everywhere. One landed next to my keys.

Sorry it's blurry. THe mosquito is the huge thing in the upper right of the photo. It's was about half as long as the key. The wind would come and they would disappear for a few moments. Then they would be back with a vengeance. I put my helment and gloves on. The evil blood suckers attacked my transit suit. The bug spray I bought at Camp Coldfoot was working like a champ.

Then I noticed the first kamikazee of the day. This one seemed to be enjoying life for the moment.

During the tour the guide spent a great deal of time talking about cold weather conditions. All the roads around the operation had tall reflectors set up on the shoulders spaced evenly apart. Blizzards are a common occurance on the North Slope, what the larger area around Prudhoe Bay is called. Blizzards are measured in "Phases". Each phase is measured by the number of reflectors one can see from the cab of a truck. I forget, but Phase I is something like 4 reflectors. By phase III all traffic is forbidden except specialized emergency equipment.

Making sure engines can start in the extreme cold, which can reach -50degF or colder is a constant task. There are banks of extension cord racks in each parking lot. All the vehicles up here are equiped with block heaters, which you can tell from what look like extension cords hanging out of the front grills on these vehicles. Once it gets too cold engine oil gels and prevents engines from being started. A block heater keeps the engine oil warm enough to allow the engine to start in even the coldest conditions.

I wanted to find something I could attach to my bike to attest to the fact that I was up here. Ever since the very understated Deals' Gap Dragon sticker I put on my bike I've been looking for understated ways of marking my bike. Most guys just plaster their saddle bags with huge stickers. I hate the way that looks, so I wanted to find something small and understated.

For Pikes Peak and Yellowstone I picked up metal pins, like you would put on a shirt. I'll just file down the pin part and epoxy it on the bike. They are really small, like 1/2" wide, so only someone who looks really closely will notice them.

I headed over to the one "General Store", which had kind of a hard core construction and trucking feel to it. Upstairs they had some stuff to cater to the tourist crowd, of which I was firmly a member at this point. Outside the general store I snapped this photo. It's just another rig.

I looked around a bit. They had some native Alaskan art. I had wanted to bring some things back and had asked a friend what I could bring back for her. She mentioned liking "Dream Catchers", so I looked around the shop. They had some but none that I liked or would feel good about giving. "Too commercial.", I thought.

I did pick up a post card for a friend who asked me to send her one. Then I found a pin that would work. I paid for my items and headed back outside into the mosquito infested outdoors and headed out of town to points South. As I left I saw rain on the horizon.

Maybe I would experience how "truly 'orrible" the Dalton Highway can be. I was pretty seriously tired but awake enough to ride. As I headed out of town, I ran through swarms of mosquitoes. These things are so large you can actually feel them as they impact the helmet. You can hear them as well. Huge blood suckers. Even the caribou try to avoid them.

The road turned away from the looming rain storms on the horizon. I thought maybe my incredible luck streak would continue until ...

I've heard from people who live up here that the Dalton can become a real mess if it rains for too long. I guess I was going to find out.

It rained pretty hard for a while. It was long enough for the road surface to become good and wet. To top that off, for quite a stretch they found it necessary to wet the road even more using the water trucks. In addition, I found myself in a section where they were putting down new surface material, calcium chloride. There was a good wind from the right, for which I was grateful, since trucks coming from the opposite direction would throw up quite a spray of muck.

But even this road surface wasn't too bad. Yes, it was slippery. Yes, it was muddy. Muck got all over everything. But in the end, it really wasn't too bad. I was able to easily do 40mph on this stuff, slip sliding away.

In the intervals where it didn't rain they seemed to think it was necessary to water the road down some more. I had moved to the extreme right as I was sure I was about to get sprayed but this trucker turned off the water right before he passed. In contrast to what I had expected, truckers were very courteous on the road. They would move over if it was dusty. They would turn the water off as they passed. They would wave.

I was stopped at one of those pilot car required construction sites. I got to talking to the stop/slow guy for some time. It was a 20 minute wait until the pilot car came. He asked about the bike and told me stories of locals. There was some guy who had gotten very familiar with some black and brown bears in the area. He had semi-tamed them and would fly out to his shack somewhere out on the tundra. Eventually, wildlife and game or some other agency got wind of this. They fined him and took away his pilots license. Feeding bears is illegal because it makes them associate human activity with food which can be very dangerous. The construction guy seemed to think the guy knew what he was doing and should not have been fined like that.
Then he mentioned the naturalist who was eaten by grizzlies not too long ago, it was a famous case. And a woman who was attacked and killed by wolves who had been fed by humans.

There's alot of anecdotal evidence to say feeding wildlife is a Bad Thing.

The mosquitoes here were just harsh. It's strange. If you're moving they seem to disappear quickly but once you stop they swarm. It's as if they lie in wait for hours until some critter approaches then they pounce. I had to keep my visor down they were so thick. Some would get up in the visor and start buzzing around the helmet in terror. I had the bug spray on. Disgusting stuff but the mosquitoes seemed to hate it more than I did.

The pilot truck arrived and I was able to get underway. Within seconds I no longer heard the smack of terminating bloodsuckers. The road was good and wet and slippery for a while. Muck continued to accumulate on the bike. I was extremely tired and as I had shot photos of this area before I just rode on. Every now and again I would stop to take a picture.

This is not too far from Atigen Pass. As I approach the pass I noticed these low clouds that blanketed the tops of the mountains. I wondered what it would be like through the pass.

As had been the case for hours, the rain wasn't bad. It was just an on again off again drizzle that was just enough to wet the road surface in places. Most of the time the road was only damp.

As I approach Atigen Pass I noticed fog reaching to the ground.

"This could get interesting.", I thought as I wondered if I would run into anything difficult on this road. By now riding on this surface seemed entirely normal and I was able to do it without too much thinking. I was making really good time. At this rate I would be at Camp Coldfoot ini under 5.5 hours. I was really tired by this point, however.

I made my way to the area which had fog in it and just as I arrived and headed up the pass a breeze started and the fog was pushed out. The sun poked through and it got noticably warmer. I was making my way up the North side of the pass when I stopped in a pulloff to take a picture. I went to reposition the bike for a better view and let out the clutch lever out to go.

As had happened before, Nothing Happened.

I also knew, immediately, that this was not due to a piece of gravel stuck under the lower clutch lever arm.

"This could get really interesting.", I said aloud as I pondered being stuck here for an extended period. It was sunny here and warm with a strong breeze. Trucks passed by every now and again.

I stood there for a while taking in the moment. I took off my helmet and gloves and pulled out my earplugs. I surveyed the bike. It was covered in calcium chloride. It had caked on pretty thick, just like you would imagine cement does if you lob it at your bike for hours.

"Yea, I bet I know what happened.", I thought. I peered back to the lower clutch lever and sure enough, calcium chloride muck had accumulated under the arm and hardened layer after layer eventually preventing the clutch lever from dropping all the way. Hence the reason the motorcycle Would Not Go.

At this point, I was grateful for the gravel incident before. If it had not been for that, I don't know that I would have recognized that the lever was not all the way down.

I know this photo is a bit confusing. It was the best I could do. The band on the right is actually the rear tire. The camera is over the exhaust pipe, which is covered in calcium chloride and is lit by sunlight in the lower left of the photo. Directly in the lower middle of the photo is a muck covered catalytic converter. It's made of shiny stainless steel. As you can see, everything looks like it's covered in cement.

Above the catalytic coverter, in pretty much the exact center of the photo is a bar extending from right to left. That's the lower clutch lever arm. If you look, there's a little bit of space between the catalytic converter and the arm.

There should be alot of space there. You should be able to see clearly through to the engine. I hope that gives some indication to just how caked up this is.

So I got out my trusty victorinox and patiently attempted to contort my hand and arm in such a way to allow me to chip away at this stuff. This stuff is HARD. It's not quite as hard as cement, but almost. You chip at it with a blade and all that happens is a bit of dust comes off. You drill with the knife to cut a little hole into it and sometimes larger chunks come off. I worked on this for half an hour after which time I had made virtually no progress. I simply couldn't put enough force on the knife from that angle to get through the muck.

"Damn.", I thought, "I'm going to have to unpack everything, pull out the tools, and see if I can remove the rear wheel.". I was tired. Really tired. I took a break, had my remaining water and then thought, "Time to man up."

I pulled off all the gear and got under the seat to pull out my tool roll. "I have never used this toolset before to remove a wheel. As a matter of fact, I don't think I've ever need to make a repair on my bike using it before", I mused as I looked at my tools. The extension for the tire wrench had not been removed since the day I put it in the roll, 18 years ago. It had become fused with the roll.

It took 20 minutes to get the damn tire wrench extension out of the tool roll. It was glued in there pretty good. Without the extension there was no way to remove the tire.

Next, and I was starting to really hurt from fatigue, was removing the saddle bags. This was an operation that I had performed so often, it's like taking off shoes. It's something you don't think about or consider. Calcium chloride had built up to such a degree it took me over 20 minutes just to get the damned bags off.

I was really hurting now. It was all easy work but I was so tired.

I pulled off the little cover over the rear wheel bolts, dirt and dust getting all over me. I thought about how someone who was squeemish about their new $1400 leathers might be much more frustrated. "I bought this Transit Suit to wear to protect me, not to look good in.", I reminded myself as I get more and more covered in dirt, dust and calcium chloride. It got all over everything. Me, my hands, my gear, my clothes.

Using the extension and the tire wrench went to loosen the wheel bolts.

"Ummm, duh.", I thought. What problem could I possibly have encountered?

Wheel bolts are on pretty tightly. There's alot of torque on those bolts so when you go to remove them the wheel spins.

I put the engine in gear and thus the engine spins.

I put the bike on the sidestand. The whole bike moves.

What I usually do is have someone step on the rear brake, but inconveniently no one was around and the little Kamikazees were no help, being too occupied trying to achieve their warriors dream of ritual suicide.

"Ok, this could be interesting. Thwarted.", I thought as I imagined how long I could be stuck here. "How to push the rear brake pedal down?", I pondered. I couldn't tie it to anything. Maybe I could use a rock. Then it hit me.

Gas can! I hung the two gallon gas can full of fuel off the rear brake lever and it worked like a champ.

I got the rear wheel removed, but I had forgotten that you had to loosen the rear brake caliper to get the wheel completely out. Looking at how encrusted it was, it would take me hours to clean up enough to a point where I'd be comfortable taking it off. I pulled the wheel aside to see if I could get a better angle on the lower clutch lever.

Using the trusty victorinox swisstool and contorting myself from the right side of the bike, I started slowly chipping away at the rock hard muck. Pick, scratch, hit, pry, drill, scrape, scrape scrape to clear way the chips and dust. Repeat process.

I don't know how long this took. Probably three quarters of an hour before I got enough of the muck scraped away to let the lower enough to engage the clutch. I cleaned it out a bit further for good measure figuring I had more of the muck to travel through and I didn't really want to do this again.

At least it wasn't raining and it wasn't cold. I was out in the blazing sun but with the breeze it didn't get too hot.

As I re-mounted the rear wheel I wondered about torque settings. I could just hear Duncan asking "So Yermo, what's the torque spec on those bolts?". Defiantly, I tightened them tigher, probably tighter than spec but not too tight. The rear tire will need to be switched out in Washington State anyways so I'll address the torque setting then.

I packed some of the gear back on the bike and took a photo. No trucks had come by for some time.

And this was the photo I stopped to take originally. Over two hours had passed. I was really tired and what I had failed to notice was how dry the air was and the toll the sun had taken on me.

The shot wasn't that good. But it was good that I had the problem here at a pulloff rather than going up the middle of the pass at speed shifting between gears. That could have sucked.

I went over the pass, tired out of my mind and continued on. There weren't any shots I hadn't already taken. Atigen Pass was not quite as impressive the second time through. "It's just another beautiful pass.", I thought as I struggled to stay awake.

The road wore on but I was making good time. The clutch continued to work. The Dalton was not the road everyone said it was, but the risks were there. They were mundane risks. Fatigue. Dehydration. Mechanical failure. They were the usual risks.

But it's a good road. And by this point, despite being crazy tired, I was enjoying it. It felt right to be on this road.

The last 50 miles were hell. I started getting so tired I could no longer see straight. Innuits are said to have 200 words describing snow. I probably have as many to describe pain and fatigue.

I was horizontal hold lost hurting tired. I get so tired sometimes all my joints ache and my eyes lose horizontal hold. It's like they oscillate turning everything into a blur. Every once of my being wants to shut down. My body screams to let it sleep. I get to so I can't even form sentences any more and short term memory goes out the door. I shake my head violently trying not to close my eyes. Vision restored for another few moments. I tried to stretch, tense my muscles. I thought about stopping, I really wanted to stop, but I was concerned about bears. Grizzlies to be specific. I knew I would just fall asleep right on my bike and I would be easy pickings for the beasts. I soldiered on. It was a risk either way.

But it sucked, only because I was beyond the point of exhaustion.

I arrived at Camp Coldfoot about 3 hours later than I had expected. It was evening now. I parked my bike, got my room key, carried my gear into the room and promptly passed out, muck covered and boots still on. I don't know how long I was out, but it was a while.

After some time I woke out of one of those feverish sleep you get after you've overexerted yourself and every muscle and joint in your body just aches. Your hands and feet swell up. A callous had split open on my right hand and in general my right hand hurt like crazy. It ached just moving my fingers. My feet had swollen in my boots so they hurt. My back was in agony and every joint creaked.

So I got up and dragged my hurtin' worthless sorry carcass across the parking lot. There were no motorcycles. No busses. Just trucks. All the tourists were gone. I continued the slog to drag my carcass into the cafe and sat down at the bar still semi asleep and having trouble thinking. After quite a while, a different bartender than the one from the one the other night showed up, a hurried man with a curled mustache. I ordered a wine. He looked at me as if I was crazy and I said "man, if I could have a beer I would. I so want a beer but I'm sick so I can't, but I can drink wine and you don't have whiskey". "Fair enough", he replied.

I sipped my bad merlot and contemplated the ride down here when a man sat down next to me. He was watching the bartender. Some kid worker type playing cards at a table behind us shouted at the bartender rudely for another round of beers and the bartender jumped, leaving us, to bring the kid out his beers.

"Punk kid. That's just rude.", the guy next to me said. "He should get up and get his own fucking beer from the bar. He's just a punk kid. It's disrespectful." We got to talking about respect, courtesy and good manners. He was a bitter man, I would guess in his 50's. We talked about this work. He was a trucker working for one of the companies involved with the Alaska Pipeline.

"Maintenance. These fuckers aren't doing the maintenance that needs to be done.", he complained as I thought about the tour and impressions I had. "So much isn't being done that needs to be. As the oilfield is depleted, more and more sand is sent down the pipeline causing it to corrode. There's also this bacteria", he went on. "Like idiots we bought all the steel from Japan and it's cheap grade. I guarantee you it's not 3/4" any more. It's corroded. It'll bite them in the ass eventually. We just had a couple hundred thousand barrel spill up here not long ago, and that was just a small one."

Then he asked about where I was from and I told him about me being on a cross country trip. "Then I need to chide you about riding. You riders never pay attention. Make sure when you pass a trucker, to first be visible in his rear views. I had some idiot just blow by me and you know, we use the whole road as we're driving. I went to dodge a big hole and nearly ran the fucker off the road.".

I told him about my riding style, "Yea, if it had been me you would have seen me in your rearviews until we made eye contact, and I would have waved as I passed by. I'm the kind of guy when I see a trucker in the right side of a left hand turn lane I stop behind his tailer and prevent traffic from bunching next to him. Then after he's made the corner, because we know they have to cut the inside lane and would normally have to wait for all these cars to pass probably causing him to miss the light, then I go. I always enjoy the four way blinker thank you I get."

"Well, that makes you more considerate and more aware than about 99% of people out there", he replied.

"The way I see it, I'm a tourist out here just screwing around, you guys are the ones working, so I try to give extra consideration", I said. "That's smart", he said "you never know how many hours the guy has been working. After about 9 hours you get really tired". We talked for a while longer. He mentioned he was in his pickup truck and had given a guy who was broken down a ride. "15 miles out of my way and then 15 miles back!", he exclaimed. "I went out of my way. Gave him a ride. Dropped him off and the rude fucker didn't even say thank you! That just gets to me!". I told him one of the things I had been thinking about on my trip was how kind words, courtesy, nice gestures seem to have much less of a lasting effect than one rude event. "Yea, I know. When someone does something you expect, when they are courteous it's what you expect, so you think for a moment, 'that was nice', and move on. But when someone is an asshole, it sticks with you like a thorn in your back. That's probably why I'm still angry about this rude fucker three years later". Uncomfortably he got up and left.

I found myself thinking about the things I cannot let go. They are of a much greater magnitude. In some cases they are things people did with malice to hurt the ones I care about. They put real effort behind it, in some cases decades, in other cases years. I keep thinking about whether or not to write about it.

One spent a year and half going after my mother and me to do us harm after my sister was killed in an auto-accident. She got the absolute cheapest rental car imaginable because he complained so much about the money. He didn't want her to get a rental car at all. He wanted her to rely on my mom, my 70+ year old semi-disabled mom, to drive her around. I had offered her my car, a solid Mercedes. They had a combined income in excess of $250K/year and lived as if they made $40K.

After Gesa was killed in the horrific half on halk head on collision and her daughter in the rear child safety seat suffered a broken neck and other traumas, he filed a legal action against my mom. When that didn't work, he would call and threaten her, "You will never see your granddaughter again.". He wanted to be paid. He wanted part of my fathers estate, money from my mom, money from me. He was the one that left us holding the bag with over $13K of funeral expenses he had promised to pay back. That's what life insurance is for, asshole.

This was the man who prevented my mom from having any time at all with her granddaughter at the funeral and who tried to sneak her out during the reception without even saying goodbye. If it hadn't been for my friends, my friends who mean so much more to me than family ever could, my mom would not even had the 15 seconds to say good bye.

What kind of human being does that?

So, distraught, she would drink and then she would fall down and hurt herself, sometimes very badly. Sometimes very very badly. I call her every day, but I don't see her all that often. Unless she called me to pick her up off the floor when she couldn't get up herself, she wouldn't tell me what happened. "Why didn't you go to the emergency room!", I would yell after seeing her bloodied and blackened face. Yea, Nightmare, and this was only a very small part of it.

I was left having to pick up the pieces time and time again being terrified wondering what I could do. Powerless again. And this was in combination with everything else that was going on at the same time.

All my mom wanted was to see her granddaughter again. Using the tools of patience and sacrifice, I worked on it doing what little I could. I was careful to do everything very correctly, as I always do. It took a year and a half, to just this last August, to get him to stop and, at least, partially see what he was doing made no sense. "Evil is blind. Evil makes excuses", Kyrin would say. Yes, this was evil incarnate. "But you don't know how hard it is. I'm the one suffering.", he would complain having absolutely no compassion or insight into the pain of others. Evil not aware of what it's doing and making excuses.

The attornies and accountants would call me and warn that he sounded like he was out to do me physical harm and that he was out to do as much financial damage as he could. He actually came do DC specifically to go after my mom. At one point even I thought he might become physical.

I made no threats, no violence and took no legal actions in response, just in case you were wondering. I confess, that I can squelch any feelings I have and do what's "right", makes me feel impotent at times. There's a powerlessness to it. You feel so weak.

I find myself wondering what guys like Phil would do in situation like this. He's an ass kicker and fixer. I don't think the evil fuck would have faired as well if I had been more like Phil. But I'm me and I don't know, or maybe I've unlearned, how to be like that.

My niece, the poor child only 3 years old, had suffered enough and her father was too fragile and mentally ill to handle any kind of direct effort. I just carefully used words to get through his delusion. It took a lot of patience and time and enduring alot of abuse.

This was all after I moved heaven and earth to help him when my sister died, because he was too much of a weakling to do anything himself. He asked me to do /everything/ including all the funeral arrangements, all the coordination with his parents and getting them into the country, all the legal investigations into his options with regard to the driver that killed my sister. I stepped up. I was asked to. He was supposedly family. What else was I going to do? There wasn't anyone else. My mom was in no shape to do it. So I did it, again. Friends came out of the woodwork to help. Everyone pitched in. Then he pulled the rug out from under me. I was left having to apologize to everyone, including a close friends father would had been so kind to help us with the injury and insurance angle of things.

I commented to my mom at the height of his misbehavior, "You have 6 portraits of him up here in the house, but not a single one of me. Given how much he's tried to hurt you and how much I've tried to help you all these years, does that make any sense?". "But he's got my granddaughter.", she would reply.

Donna and others say I have to forgive the evil fuck for what he did.

That will never happen.

Stewing just like the angry trucker who had just left, I thought my time will come. Eventually that door that was closed to allow me to do what I did will open again and the pain will come out. It may be years from now, but I know it's coming and I am not looking forward to that day.

I turned my attention to the TV. There was some kind of outdoor life show on. It was a hunting show. So much of life up here in Alaska seems to be focused on killing critters. The show showed some clean cut clearly city slicker looking guy who was all excited about ending the life of some large critter. They showed how they went out in the woods with their scent blocking clothes and other advanced gear.

They stalked a critter and the footage of this huge bull moose with just impressive antlers walking out of the woods was just incredible. It was a magnificent beast. I wish I could see a moose like this in the wild. They made a few attempts on the thing but it would sense something and move off.

Then they finally got an angle on it. I thought they were going to use a bow, but used a rifle instead. The guy pulled the trigger and you saw the moose flinch and run off. I thought it would drop right there, but I guess it was a bad shot so the moose, that magnificent beast, suffered needlessly.

That image will burn in my mind for some time. Such a magnificent critter. There's something magical about the remaining large Beasts in the world. I think the world was better off with the beast alive in it than having it's antlers mounted on some wall somewhere.

Conceptually I have no problem with hunting, but sport hunting just for trophies; wasteful hunting seems like a crime to me. The tour guide up in Deadhorse said the caribou population has exploded and the herd was in danger of collapse because it's consuming up all available food. "Another analogy for humans.". In this case, hunting caribou, to save a herd makes sense and is necessary, absent enough predators to keep things in balance.

But this moose. It was huge and impressive. "Moose numbers are in decline.", someone said.

A guy sat down next to me, a bear of a man with scraggly beard and crooked teeth. I think he said his name was James. He had a calm demeanor about him, a kindness. No anger. He said, "Yea, watch to see if they can haul that thing out." "So how much does a beast like that weigh?", I asked. "About 2500 lbs", he replied, "They'll have have to quarter it up to get it out, if they get it out at all. We get alot of guys coming up here to shoot moose and they shoot them too close to water. A bullet in the gut is hot and the moose will run to the water to cool off. Once it does that, there's no getting it out." "Wasteful.", I said. "Yea.", he replied.

I was really bothered by the scene of the moose being killed. There was no respect. No apologizing to the animal. Nothing ritual about it. It was just pulling a trigger and putting an end to some beast. "That's not the way it's supposed to be.", I thought.

The bartender walked in and switched the channel to the "Ice Road Truckers" show. He had been interviewed for the show some time before and, as he explained it, they had asked for his consent. He said he would give it if he got a copy of the raw footage. They never provided that but went ahead and aired the footage anyway. He was none to pleased.

James exclaimed while laughing, "Aww, man, I don't want to watch work!".

It turns out James was an ice road trucker, although he wouldn't call himself that. He was a trucker. He hauls stuff year round. Sometimes he hauls things on ice.

I asked how realistic the show was. He replied, "Not that realistic really. Sure, stuff like that happens but what they show in one show might happen in 5 years."

These are professional truckers after all. These guys know how to do this job.

James said he had seen some of those guys around. "They hauled in a bunch of guys from Canada and the lower 48 just to make trouble. I think they want the accidents and the mishaps. It makes a better story."

There was a scene on where some guy is driving through a blizzard. "And so and so is driving through a Phase III", the announcer said. "That ain't no phase III. You can see 5 reflectors. That's hardly a Phase I. That's what I call good driving weather!", James said while chuckling.

The the next while he talked about what conditions on ice were really like and some of the mishaps and challenges he's faced. In a phase III, it's blowing snow so hard you can only see your reflection in the windshield. There's no progress. Sometimes they'll go behind construction equipment like a grader. "They can pull some serious weight", or something like that he would say. He talked about going up Atigen Pass and having a truck come down the hill too fast on the ice and start to jackknife. He recovered before they passed each other but they were so close the mirrors smacked. He talked about being in blizzard conditions in a convoy of trucks where visibility is so limited you can hardly see one reflector. "It's the last guy in line that's screwed. By the time the convoy moves he's the one furthest behind and they stop being able to see the truck in front of them. I've seen guys run off the road in those conditions, but there was nothing I could do so I kept driving", he would explain. I asked about what happens to those guys. "Well, they have heaters. The old guys would keep parachutes that they would strap over their rigs. They'd crack the windows and run camp stoves until someone came to pull them out.".

He said -25degF was good driving weather. "The ice isn't too brittle.", he would say. "Get to -50defF and it cracks".

We talked for a good long while. He talked about the company he works for. At one point, this bear of a man asked me why I was on for such a long ride. "I'm out here, Away, trying to get my head screwed on straight.", I replied. I figured he would be dismissive but surprisingly he said, "Yea, I can understand that. I did the same thing for year. I went out and hunted and fished. Then it came time to get back on with things."

He asked me about being on the road on the motorcycle. "Not too bad. It's not all that", I would say, "I thought this was going to be a real challenge." "You're about 5 years too late for that. The road is in the best shape it's ever been. It's that show and the tour companies. It's brought alot of attention to the road.", he explained.

I mentioned the one section of deep gravel. "Yea, there's 2 mile that can be challenging", he said. I asked where 2 mile was, was it a 2 mile hill? He explained that he meant mile marker two. You'll see that terminology used all over the place, even on maps. "At 25 mile turn right" kind of thing.

He was on the night shift so had just gotten up but it was his day off. He was bored. I should have asked whether or not he'd be open to talking more, maybe showing me the rig he drives and giving me more of an insight into this life. but I was exhausted. I had some dinner and went back to my room and promptly collapsed.

I like Camp Coldfoot. It's got that kind of staging area feel to it. You have the feeling you can glimpse into other lives very easily by just sitting at the bar.