{"id":3367,"date":"2013-07-30T07:02:11","date_gmt":"2013-07-30T07:02:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/?p=3367"},"modified":"2013-07-31T07:29:05","modified_gmt":"2013-07-31T07:29:05","slug":"30-july-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/?p=3367","title":{"rendered":"30 July 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been looking forward to today since I decided to ride the Dempster Highway<\/a>\u2026and I wasn\u2019t disappointed! The intention for today was to ride from Dawson<\/a> to Eagle plains, a 400km ride. I figured this would be a good distance for a dirt road ride because along the Dempster which is 780km long, you either stay in Eagle plains or you push on to Inuvik as there are no alternatives for fuel or accommodation, that said however, I got to Eagle plains by 13h30, feeling fresh, loving the views and the riding and made a last minute decision to push on to Inuvik!<\/p>\n

\"Days<\/a><\/p>\n

Days ride\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

\"SAM_4114\"<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n

One would think I would have learnt not to do this by now, by the time I got into Inuvik 780km and 10 hours of dirt road since I left Dawson, I was frozen to the bone not to mention starving and exhausted but feeling great for the accomplishment. The ride through the Northern Yukon and the state of the Northwest territory has been magnificent but the highlight was definitely the area from Tombstone Park up to the Arctic circle and thereafter, although beautiful, not nearly as dramatic!<\/p>\n

Crossing into the Arctic circle means crossing into a zone where on the summer solstice (21 June) there is 24 hour daylight within the zone from latitude 66.33N. Equally, that means that on the winter solstice, the same zone experiences permanent night time. Today, sunset is 01h00 and sunrise is 05h00 although it doesn’t actually get dark but just a version of twilight!<\/p>\n

\"SAM_4122\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Although its the middle of summer, there\u00a0are still ice sheets on the lakes!!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"SAM_4142\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Two moose lake, you can see the big guy in the water in the top right of the photo!!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"SAM_4133\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And the one of two moose, moose\u2019s or meese?!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"SAM_4155\"<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"SAM_4170\"<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n

Insofar as the the reports about how tough the road is, well, its a dirt road, and a well maintained one at that. Naturally, it has some rough patches but nothing that cant be dealt with by ensuring that the bike has the right tyres and pressures for the terrain, that being the case, its a piece of cake even when you hit some wet patches of \u201cgumbo\u201d because of rain!<\/p>\n

\"SAM_4188\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"SAM_4196\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"SAM_4198\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"SAM_4201\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There were 2 ferries on route to Inuvik, the peel river and the Mackenzie river\u2026this is the one over the Peel river.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"SAM_4206\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cOur lady of victory\u201d church in Inuvik which shares a name with the real name of Notre Dame in Paris. This church was entirely built by volunteers back in 1958.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"SAM_4207\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Typical Inuvik houses\u2026also known as smartie box houses!!<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m now a day ahead of schedule so if its raining when I wake in the morning, Im going back to sleep, otherwise I\u2019m heading back to Dawson for a rest day on Thursday!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been looking forward to today since I decided to ride the Dempster Highway\u2026and I wasn\u2019t disappointed! The intention for today was to ride from Dawson to Eagle plains, a 400km ride. I figured this would be a good distance for a dirt road ride because along the Dempster which is 780km long, you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theamericas"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pXwN4-Sj","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3367"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3370,"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3367\/revisions\/3370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}