The summer of 1994 we were in college in Oklahoma, and to prove just how smart we were getting to be, a few of us thought piling in our cars and heading up to Alaska to work the summer in fish production would be a brilliant idea. My friend Jeremy had a bright yellow Corona wagon, so he and I and a beautiful young lady named Marisa shared it. A recently married couple and their sister who was aspiring to be a model drove a Chevy Lumina. Jeremy’s sister Charity and her new husband Bill drove their brand new Nissan pickup pulling a tent trailer. I’m probably not giving away too much by telling you now that not all the cars made it. But in fairness to them, it wasn’t the cars’ fault.
During an early leg of our journey I experienced one of the most frightening times I have ever had in the passenger seat. The beautiful Marisa had been sleeping in the back of the wagon almost non-stop since Kansas, and we were on her case to take a turn driving. Eventually we finally got her behind the wheel so we could get some rest.
I was in the passenger seat and Jeremy was in the back, who instantly fell asleep. But I could not get comfortable knowing she was behind the wheel. I tried talking to her but she did not want to talk. Pretty soon her head started bobbing and the car started swerving. Our conversation went like this: Hey wake up! What……. stop yelling at me. You were falling asleep. No I was not.
I tried to keep the conversation going, purely out of self-preservation, but Marisa was not participating. “Stop talking to me”, “fine”. Her head starts bobbing again, the car swerves, and I reach over and carefully guide the wheel. Hey wake up! I am. Stop it, let go, I can drive!
This went on for at least an hour before I woke up Jeremy and we voted her out of the driver’s seat. If she would have been a guy, we would have kicked him out right there. But she was good looking and female, so naturally we relented , and she took to the back again to keep up her beauty sleep for the rest of the trip.
We stopped over in Oregon on the way, and I was told that I should give the Toyota a tune up because I knew more about cars than anyone else. I didn’t know anything about cars, but I gave it a shot. In the end I ended up cross threading and stripping all the spark plugs. So I got some super glue and that held them in!
We finally set off on the road to Alaska with our freshly glued spark plugs. Marisa bailed on us and went back to Denver, but everyone else was still on board. At some point we made another brilliant decision, that taking the back way would be shorter. So we got off the Alcan Highway and took the Cassiar highway, at that time almost completely gravel with lots of one lane bridges and big fast semi trucks. In retrospect, getting off the main highway doesn’t seem like it was as good of a plan as it looked like it would be on paper.
It was warmish and very dusty on the Cassiar in summer. We were in the Corona, the last car in our little convoy, and Jeremy was driving. As we came around a long sweeping bend there was a bridge in front of us, my friend proceeded blindly into the dust cloud to find that the other cars had come to a near stop on the bridge. He applied the brakes but the metal mesh bridge deck was not conducive to sudden stops. We slammed into the back of the Lumina, which in turn slammed into the back of the tent trailer. The only three cars anywhere for an hundred miles managed to all crash into each other. Guess how we felt for pulling off that circus feat?
The Corona glanced off the trailer and hit the bridge side. Our 1950′s aluminum car top carrier went flying towards the river and then hit a bridge truss and landed in the road. Amazingly, my only glasses landed perfectly in the little glasses sized cubby hole in the dash! We found latter that our friends had slowed down because of pot holes, not to check our reaction times.
We assessed the damage and found that the Lumina had its back pushed in to the tire so that it would not turn. The tent trailer had a big piece of the corner missing. And our Corona was spewing antifreeze, one headlight was hanging on by the wires, and the fender pushed into the wheel, flattening the front tire.
We knew exactly what our real problem was: a sign just a short ways back said “No Service Next 375 Kilometers”. Our shortcut decision was now officially a Fail. I got the Corona off the road and took a look under the hood. The leaking antifreeze was only from a broken coolant reservoir. The fan was against the radiator, but neither was really damaged. The battery was broken and most of the acid had poured out.
Needless to say we had no tools or jack, but amazingly, there was an RV parked at a turn-off just at the end of the bridge. I was able to borrow a few basic tools from them. With the jack and its handle I was able to fix the fender and change the tire, plus push the front out enough to free the fan.
Meanwhile a pickup truck happened by (a very rare occurrence to see anyone at all, let alone an RV and a pickup in one day) and offered to help pull out the fender of the Lumina with his winch. He had to chain one end of his truck to the bridge and chain the Lumina to the other and use all the winch’s force. Still the tire scrapped, but not as bad. I duct taped the Carona’s battery and poured in river water, and duct taped the headlight. Like Red Green always says, “duct tape, the handyman’s secret weapon”.
I used an old bottle as a new reservoir and we were good to go. For the entire 300 miles up to the next outpost the tire on the Lumina smoked and the Corona ran perfectly.
We abandoned our first victim, the Lumina, at the outpost and called our poor insurance agent from their sat-phone. He was wondering how in the world he would get an adjuster up there from Oklahoma to look at the car.
While we were at the outpost, I met a beautiful red head working at the little roadhouse section. She told me the biggest city she had ever seen was Whitehorse, YU. She wanted me to take her to see LA on my way back from Alaska. I got her address and phone number and told her I would certainly do so, but sadly I never did (though we did write each other a bit).
That evening we set out for Whitehorse (another gazillion miles away) and drove through the night. I was piloting the Corona through the inky blackness watching the one taillight of the tent trailer/pickup in front of me while my friend slept in the passenger seat. The Corona was flawless hour after hour until… it wasn’t. It just stopped, all the lights went out and it gave up the ghost just like that. It was so dark I had to feel for the shoulder of the road, which was quite steep.
Once stopped I got on our hand held CB and called to the pickup far ahead. They had obviously turned their CB off. We sat there for at least a half hour before they came looking for us. When they did finally return, we all decided to spend the night there along the road. It was very cold and the wolves howled and chewed up something next to us in the blackness all night. Not one single car passed us as far as I know that whole long night.
In the morning I took a look a the Corona. But I really didn’t know anything about cars. So we decided we would all seven have to fit into the pickup somehow and strap what gear we could to the tent trailer (that’s how my friend lost all his underwear and socks). I had to leave behind my good old cowboy boots and some of my nice cast iron cookery. We left the stuff we were not taking in the Corona and wrote “Free Car” in the dirt on the back window. And that is how we left her. Dirty and yellow, used and abused, about 80 kilometers south of Watson Lake.
I’ve driven the AlCan, and your cars better be in pretty good shape to make that trip or you’ll be a nervous wreck the whole way. Stretches of a hundred miles or more where there is nothing but the one road you’re on. No gas stations, no signs for the gas sations that aren’t there, no fences, no driveways off the road, no people, no telephone poles, there ain’t shit out there. Still, it’s quite a trip!
Sounds like lots of outback Australia lots of scenery and nobogy for hundreds of miles
Some one probably threw another battery in your Corona and drove it away they were quite good cars head gaskets blow sometimes but generally pretty reliable
I have no doubt that if I would have known what I do today that car would still be on the road.
I have also driven the Alcan, not out of choice, but necessity. I would never do it if I didn’t have to and I would make sure I was well equipped with extra fuel and a whole retinue of tools. I did it in a long wheelbase Ford truck with 300 six and five speed manual. There was a hunting camper on the back and we made the trip with no incident. There were some excellent fishing streams on the way, too. We towed a U-Haul with all our stuff in it, heading to a new adventure, teaching in the North! I may also add that I was 26 years old at the time, and having grown up in the wilds of Soviet Bolsehviek Canukistan, I was well aware what I was getting into. At least I thought so. Well, I knew about the road. I didn’t know what was in store for us in Whitehorse. Make that 40 km outside if Whitehorse on a First Nations reserve. Why, you may ask, would I do this? Well, it had a lot to do with a busty, long haired hippie chick.
You see, the North in Canada is a repository of ne’er do wells, recluses, drunks, drug addicts and assorted bushwhackers who cannot survive in civilisation. They end up in places like Whitehorse because they can still ply their vices and get well paid just for showing up at a work site and putting a half-assed day in, which is inevitably half assed since it is either -40’C or summer. When it is cold, it is too cold to work and when it is summer, it is time to party. Or, more accurately, party more. I should know, since I immediately got a job doing the manifests for a transportation company. I don’t think anyone ever made it past lunch. Hardly the place for a granola hippie chick from Toronto.
I fit right in in no time; I started huntin’, fishin’, drinkin’, skidooin, and getting plasteredin’. Hippie granola woman was not to fond of such things and booted me out. The cause of this was I actually plugged an elk with my handy .308. Problem was I plugged said ungulate out of the kitchen window. Hippie chick was woken up by the blast (pretty loud since it was indoors) and ran in in her hippie-jammies (i.e. nothing) and burned her foot on the spent shell casing.
She then threw me out. Funny that. When I got back to the real world, I had to cut my hair and shave my beard, along with losing the huge beer gut I’d carefully nurtured. What’s more, I was heartbroken. But that is another story….
These days, the road is paved the whole way as there is a lot of activity in the north of Cancukistan for oil, gas and mineral exploitation.
Well Canucknucklehead at least I am not the only crazy one here. it took a Canadian to say what I was thinking at the time though “the North in Canada is a repository of ne’er do wells, recluses, drunks, drug addicts and assorted bushwhackers who cannot survive in civilization”. the same can be said for most of Alaska.
Too bad you didn’t swap the Lumina battery into the Corona. Interesting adventure for sure.
I bet the terminals came loose from your maori job of fixing them right at the start, someone probably just had a fiddle with them and drove away laughing.
I had a corona and the only problem ive had with it was just like yours, it cut out like a ghost at night, turns out the terminals on the battery had just rattled loose.
Awesome story though sounds like a good ol’ road trip
Maori job? You must be from NZ. In the US we can’t use the equivalent saying without getting in trouble lol