February 22, 2026 – johnboystravelblog

September 13, 2025

This is the last installment documenting my day-long drive from Whitehorse, YT to Tok.

After driving through the worst part of the Alaska Highway I finally reached the border between Canada and Alaska.

There were only two vehicles in line ahead of me, and it didn’t take long to be on my way. The only thing I had to surrender were my mandarin oranges, though my banana and apples were apparently acceptable. The customs agent confiscated a plant from the car ahead of me.

I commented in an earlier post that the first part of the highway once I got into Alaska was pristine, but it didn’t take long for that to change. Roads this far north are a challenge to maintain. The majority of the roads in Alaska were fine, but it is wise to always be alert for changing road conditions. The US didn’t have little roadside signs warning of bad spots, but there were sometimes permanent signs warning of a “Rough Road” ahead, which generally meant those spots were pretty bad. And potholes were definitely a problem in parts of Alaska.

Here are some of the things I saw as I continued on to Tok.

I was still driving northwest, and the highway had changed numbers from Hwy 1 in Canada to Hwy 2 here in Alaska (though I am still on the “Alaska Highway”). I will talk more about other Alaska highways in my next post.

I had driven past the mountains I had seen earlier in the day and now, when I looked left (south), I could see tall mountains way off in the distance (behind lower hills and mountains in the foreground). I don’t really know for a fact but I believe I was seeing the tall mountains in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. If that is true then I estimate they are about 180 air miles away.

It had also become overcast. I still had about 2 hours of driving to get to Tok.

It was starting to look more ominous on the horizon ahead of me.

There was one place where I once again had to stop and wait for a Pilot Car. I was bracing myself for a long construction zone (the sign had stated the distance) but fortunately, once we got moving I learned that they had just completed an area of new construction and were just painting lines – so we had to weave back and forth to avoid fresh paint and the machinery being used.

Even though I had gained an hour at the border (Alaska has it’s own time zone, which is one hour ahead of Pacific Time) I was starting to get nervous about making it to Tok before dark. You can see the headlights of approaching vehicles in the second photo below, and it did start raining shortly after I took these photos.

I finally made it! My Airbnb hosts were out of town but had given me instructions for getting to my room which was separate from their living quarters. There isn’t much in Tok but I grabbed something to eat and unpacked my stuff for the night. I will have another long drive (with numerous stops for photos) getting to Anchorage tomorrow.

September 13, 2025

This is part three of my drive from Whitehorse, YT to Tok, AK.

After driving around the base of Sheep Mountain I would continue about 30 miles alongside Kluane Lake. Large mountains would dominate the area left of the roadway, some of which had snow cover and/or glaciers so there were clouds hugging the tops of them. I also suspected there might be more mountains on the other side.

This is also the stretch where the condition of the Alaska Highway would go downhill in places. I had been warned when I was in Watson Lake that this portion of the highway would be slow going. In addition to the aforementioned dips, humps and places where the surface of the road was patched, there would also be stretches which were gravel, in some cases where the highway department had ripped up the pavement completely and was laying down a foundation for new pavement. There were also many spots where the road would alternate between paved and gravel in rapid succession (why I don’t know). For the most part, this stretch of road had little or no warning about bad spots. I had to drive extremely slow in many places, and if a vehicle came up behind me I generally pulled over and let it go on ahead.

Here are some of the things I saw on this stretch of road:

This was one of the places where I had to stop and wait for a “Pilot Car” to follow through a long construction zone. Up ahead you can see that the road changes from paved to gravel, and in some places would be mainly dirt. I had commented earlier in the blog that Canadian roads by and large didn’t have potholes, but after driving this road back east about a month later I take that back. These unpaved stretches did, in fact, have potholes and some places it was very slow going, even without an escort.

That is me following the Pilot Car (truck). While in these gravel zones large tandem construction trucks would occasionally whiz by at full speed, kicking up rocks. Sometimes they were overtaking us and sometimes they were going in the opposite direction.

I had had been warned not to follow other vehicles too closely but there was nothing I could do about vehicles going the other way other than hope they would slow down. I also tried to pull as far right as I safely could, but if I was stopped waiting for an escort vehicle I was a sitting duck. I did end up getting a crack on my windshield on the way back to Canada.