HOW TO DRIVE the Alaska Highway [Part 1 - Basics] presented by Yokohama Tire

welcome back to the road shows me on this a very special episode i'm on the road i'm in dawson creek northern british columbia and this is the world famous alaska highway so i know tons of people have done videos showing you what the highway looks like and what it would look like if you went on your own trip but i'm going to take it another step and i'm going to teach you everything you need to know to drive the alaska highway so we'll go over road conditions weather the best time of year what you need in a vehicle and all of the kind of roads that you want to [Music] explore so i'm not sure if you guys know but about 12 years ago i actually stood in this very place the first time i ever drove the alaska highway so i was just a tourist i drove all the way up to the arctic ocean then i turned around and i drove all the way down to argentina at the end of that trip i'd fallen in love with the north and i actually flew from argentina all the way back to whitehorse in the yukon and i live in whitehorse now so i've driven the alaska highway 8 or 10 times the entire thing i've driven it many times in the summer i've driven it a few times in the dead of winter i've driven it in this jeep i've driven it in previous vehicles and so i've got a lot of experience driving this highway so if you've ever wanted to drive the alaska highway and trust me you really should i always say that all americans should make the effort to get up to alaska it is such a beautiful part of your country that you really need to check out and all canadians should really make the effort to get up to the yukon the northwest territories and alaska as well because a lot of people drive through the yukon and they don't realize just how beautiful it is so obviously there's still a pandemic going on i can't actually drive into alaska right now but i can drive all over the yukon and i can drive you right up to the border of alaska and i can teach you everything that you need to know to make your own trip so come along with me on this journey it's going to be a few videos i'll teach you what you need to know and i'll show you some beautiful places along the way so a couple of things to get out of the way before i go any further i just want to say ah the pandemic is still going on and i am not encouraging anyone to drive up this year in 2020 on the alaska highway uh in fact lots of people can't unless you live in alaska canada won't actually let you drive from the us so what i'm saying right now is i'll teach you everything you need to know you can plan and prepare and fingers crossed in 2021 or in the years after that you can come up here and you can have that adventure up into alaska that you've always dreamed about and so here i am dawson creek this is the official start of the alaska highway i've already driven almost a thousand miles from the u.s canada border to get to this point and this is officially where the highway begins and from here you know it goes all the way up through northern british columbia the yukon and then into alaska and soon after you get into alaska you can kind of fork into either anchorage or fairbanks but we'll go over all the different roads later on for now i just want to say i'm here in dawson creek and the first place i'm going to tell you to visit is right here where i'm standing this is the visitors center behind me and i know visitors centres are really touristy but actually this one is brilliant you can get a ton of information about all the different roads about all the different things you're going to see on the way the alaska highway really is famous for a reason and you don't want to just drive past everything that's wonderful so my advice is make sure you stop here in the visitor centre say hello the people are super friendly grab a couple of brochures for bc for the yukon and it'll give you something to read while you're trying to wind down the miles because if nothing else the alaska highway is really long in this video i'll go over the basics of driving the alaska highway and i'll get a bunch of common questions out of the way things that you really need to know before you leave home and then in the next video i'll cover what your vehicle needs are to drive this highway successfully and then in future videos we'll go over different routes and some more advanced topics so for now let's get into the basics and while i'm talking i'll throw up footage of me driving the highway and you can see the leaves are turning it's already full up here that's because today is september 9 so i'm already quite late in the season when you come for your alaska trip this is about the time of year you're going to be heading south not heading north when it comes to the basics of driving the alaska highway first question everybody asks is what time of year should they visit you probably want to avoid winter for your first trip so it's really simple you want to be up here june july august so the days are going to be really long it'll be warm during the day you know up to 70 80. alaska's even been having record highs in the summers it does get up to 100 way up in fairbanks so june july august it won't be below freezing overnight unlikely anyway it probably won't snow and even if it did it wouldn't stick and during those months that's when you're going to see the most animals that's when you're going to be able to go camping and hike to all the glaciers and all of those sorts of things so if you aim for early in that window in june there still will be snow on the mountains and some of the lakes may have ice on them depending on how far north you go and as summer winds on obviously that snow is gonna melt and then if you stay late august into september like i am right now you're probably gonna start getting snow especially on the mountains so how late can you stay well into september i'm expecting it to be below freezing overnight especially if i go up towards the arctic circle on the dempster or the dalton highway and if you're staying to october you're definitely going to get snow and it's definitely going to be below freezing overnight it may only be very like only a few degrees above freezing during the day so staying into october starts to be wintry and you're probably going to enjoy camping a lot less something else you need to consider is the mosquitoes if you're coming up to alaska in the summer so all of the rumors you've ever heard they're absolutely true the mosquitoes up here can be absolutely horrendous so think of the worst mosquitoes you've ever seen in your whole life now times it by at least 10. when i was on the dalton highway i was driving through the brooks range which is kind of like the last mountain range before you get to the arctic ocean and i've been told there's really great hiking in those mountains so i parked my little jeep it had a soft top on it and i was getting some things organized inside the jeep and i thought oh that's strange it's raining even though the sun's out and it turned out the noise i was hearing it wasn't rain it was mosquitoes hitting the soft top of the jeep there were so many of them and they were so loud i thought it was rain and that's not even the worst mosquitoes i've ever seen in the north so be prepared definitely bring good strong bug spray deep works the best even though it's not great for your skin and you really want to have clothing as well that's going to protect you from the mosquitoes so you've got to have long sleeves long pants i have a bug face net not the most stylish thing but it brings a lot of sanity when the mosquitoes are horrendous and whatever your camping setup is as well make sure you've made it mosquito proof especially your sleeping area next thing to cover is which road should you take when you're driving up to alaska and you know i often hear people say oh i'm going to take all of the back roads well i'm going to tell you a little bit of truth there actually aren't any back roads there are in fact only two ways to drive to alaska there is the alaska highway which is what i'm on right now the world famous highway and then there is a second highway that parallels it only for probably about a thousand miles maybe even not that much it's called the stuart cassier highway and it runs inland uh a little closer to the coast in this section of northern british columbia and then just a little bit into the yukon and so the two roads they are very different i'm on the alaska highway right now and this road gets a lot more traffic especially the trucks uh in a year when there would be tourists there are a lot of rvs there are a lot of kind of grey nomads who were retired who are exploring alaska i'm actually i'm behind a truck right now looking to overtake this is a very industrial road you see a lot of oil and gas you see a lot of logging a lot of heavy machinery that's always moving at a very slow speed so the alaska highway very busy but it is paved the entire way so make no mistake about it you could drive this road in a honda civic that wouldn't even be difficult i personally have driven it in a rust bucket subaru i drove it in the summer and the winter in that car and you know the road surface is not something you need to worry about whereas the stuart cassier highway that is kind of rip seal gravel so it's really good quality but not paved for a lot of it and it's slightly different it's kind of more in the trees more in the forest so you don't often get the same views that you get on the classic alaska highway and you know you also miss out on all the famous stuff and so as i drive up here i'll show you some of the features of the highway that i love and so if i was giving advice to someone if this was the first time you've ever driven up absolutely drive the alaska highway drive the one you'll never forget it and i really do think too you should drive up if you just fly to alaska or if you take the ferry you don't get a sense for how far it is it's really really mind-blowing that you can spend five six seven days driving eight to ten hours a day the entire time you are driving dead north on the compass that's how long it takes to get to alaska it is incredible you always have the moment where you look at the map and you think something's gone wrong this can't be right i i've driven off the edge of the map or the edge of the world or something this is just unbelievable but actually it's true that's how far away alaska is and even the yukon and i feel like you should experience that amazing sense of awe and then that way when you get there you've really earned it and you can really say you know wow this is incredible how far away it is from the rest of the world and then when you come back down again there's a couple of different options and i'll go over those a bit later but my advice take the alaska highway it's famous for a reason another question that people ask all the time is how remote is the alaska highway and yeah it is really remote you can expect to drive many many hundreds of miles without cell phone service so don't think that you'll be able to just call if something goes wrong but that being said there is a lot of traffic on this highway especially in the summer i would be shocked if you could go half an hour without seeing a vehicle right now the days that i'm driving i'm seeing a vehicle every one to two minutes in fact when i need to overtake slow trucks it's quite difficult to find a gap where there is no oncoming traffic so it's remote but there is quite a bit of traffic and there's actually an unwritten rule in fact it might be a law in the north in the winter when you see a broken down vehicle you always stop to offer assistance especially in the winter you know at -40 it can be life or death up here if you see a vehicle in the ditch so what that means is if you do break down you want to make sure you have some food some drinking water some warm things to sleep in if you are forced to spend the night in your vehicle but chances are someone's going to come along within half an hour an hour and at least they're going to drive to the next town and they're going to call someone for you so while it is remote and you should be a little bit prepared don't imagine that you're driving to mars and that you're never going to see another vehicle those days at the alaska highway are long gone it's much busier than that now as you're watching this footage too you're going to notice this is only a two-lane road this isn't like an interstate in the u.s and so typically the speed limit is either 90 or 100 kilometers an hour let me just check my speed which is uh 50 or 60 miles an hour so that's it that's the maximum is 60 miles an hour and keep in mind too that this road passes through all of the towns along the way and the speed limit's going to slow you down i'm just watching there's a piece of machinery here on the side of the road i've got to watch out for and so this is a very unpredictable road there is a lot of wildlife to contend with the road conditions vary greatly even in the summer you're going to come across what's called frost heaves which is sections of the road where the pavement's crumbling really badly and you want to slow down a lot and something else you really need to watch out for is construction on the road so the running joke is that canada only has two seasons that's snow and roadwork and so if you don't see any snow on the ground you can reasonably expect that there's going to be a lot of road work so while there's no snow around they tear up a lot of the highway they resurface they do line painting there is always construction i've driven through maybe 10 or 12 of them already and the highway gets reduced down to just one lane so there's flag people with stop signs you come to a complete halt for maybe 10 minutes at a time so what i'm trying to say is while you're driving this highway be prepared if a moose jumps out in front of you that moose weighs well over a thousand pounds you do not want to hit that moose even herds of caribou aren't rare there are a lot of bears around as well as all heavy machinery on the road regular traffic all the construction but even in the summer don't underestimate this highway because the speed limits are quite low you also need to budget quite a lot of time to drive the highway and one benefit of the summer is that the days are so enormously long you could easily do a 16 or 18 hour driving day and you still won't even need to turn on your headlights so you can cover a lot of distance in a day but remember your average speed at best is going to be 40 miles an hour maybe 50 miles an hour so it's gonna take you quite a few days to drive up to alaska don't plan this trip like you plan driving an interstate in the us where you can kind of set the cruise on 80 miles an hour and just bank off doing that the whole time that's not what the alaska highway is like at all so when i said there's a lot of wildlife on this highway i was not joking i was hoping that i would bump into these guys they're always around here somewhere so i'm a little bit north of lyard hot spring and check this out so obviously i'm driving in the driver's seat these are the bison that live up here so these guys are heavily protected and every time you drive the highway you are going to come across these guys often they're actually on the road especially in the winter they love to lick the kind of salty stuff that's on the road but even in the summer it's not uncommon at all to come around the corner and have 20 or 30 of these things right on the road so you've already seen me come across a couple of caribou i've seen a few black bears at a distance though the camera probably didn't pick them up but you can see wildlife is a real thing on this highway there they are there this guy might cross the road sooner or later if you do stop for wildlife make sure you get well well off the driving lane trucks are going to come through here they're not going to slow down and put your four ways on or at least put your turn signal on so other vehicles know what you're doing it's really dangerous when you stop for wildlife and it's always worth putting your four ways on two for other vehicles coming towards you or give them a flash of your headlights so yeah when i said lots of wildlife i really meant it so i hope this information i've been sharing is helpful uh and i hope it answers some questions or some concerns that you guys have about driving alaska highway but as always i'm doing this to help you guys get out and have your own adventure so please if you've got any questions at all anything you've ever wondered about driving the highway please leave a comment below and just ask i'd love to film another video and answer all of your questions so if this has been helpful definitely hit that thumbs up button subscribe to the channel as i said next video i'll go into what i think some essentials for your vehicle are to drive the highway and then as i get further north i'll start covering more of the side roads you can take and we'll get out on some more wild adventures so until then i've already bumped into two people on the highway who recognize me from uh from my youtubes so maybe i'll see some of you guys up here in the meantime have fun out there

Channel: The Road Chose Me

Views: 37,386

Rating: 4.9550323 out of 5

Keywords: Overland, travel, 4x4, camping, how-to, DIY, global expedition, overland education, Alaska, Alaska Highway, AK, AK Highway, Alcan, How to Drive to Alaska, How to Drive the Alaska Highway, how to drive the alcan highway, drive to alaska, alaska highway basics, the basics for the Alaska highway, Basics of driving Alaska Highway, Drive to Alaska, How to drive to Alaska, Driving the Alaska Highway

Id: TnxwKAyPhlU

Length: 17min 34sec (1054 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 14 2020