44h 41m (2,635 mi) via Alaska Hwy—Part 2, Canada
An eagle crouches on a frozen deer carcass, tearing into winter’s remains alongside the Icefields Parkway.
This 232-kilometer stretch through Alberta links Lake Louise in Banff National Park to the town of Jasper. The route cuts through high alpine passes, waterfalls tangled in ice, and turquoise glacial lakes.
Before leaving, we did the math twice to make sure we had enough gas to get from one end to the other. The fuel gauge holds it breath.
Near Jasper, a husky stands alone on a frozen lake, its grey-blue coat almost stitched into the ice. I scan for the owner, assuming someone must be ice fishing nearby. But there is no owner, because that is no dog.
“Wolf!” I yell. “Grey wolf!”
By the time the Wolf and Sasha turn to look, it is already gone. The lone predator vanishes back into the spruce-rimmed ice.
We turn off onto a dirt road toward the gas station in Nordegg, where fuel is prepaid in liters and the numbers spin too fast for me to translate.
Antlers over Shell—
sun pools in the roadside mud
like spilled copper light.
A sign for Sunchild First Nation slips past the windshield. Up here, the history of the land’s original peoples feels less entombed than it does back home—not battlefields sealed behind museum gates, but living communities patchworked into the contemporary landscape. Here, there are bridges over roads for wildlife to safely roam.
Deer ricochet wild
through twilight on the Range Road—
tails strike like matches.
Nearly every truck carries Starlink on the dashboard now: white squares tilted toward the heavens, harvesting signal from the open sky. They tether the isolation of rural Alberta to invisible constellations of machinery overhead.
Somewhere beyond them drifts Artemis II, carrying human beings farther into space than anyone has traveled in half a century. Another last frontier. The news says the toilet onboard isn’t working.
Oil wakes early—
breakfast starts before daylight
for the gasfield men.
The Days Inn in Drayton Valley feels like one of those hotels where it is always nighttime: labyrinthine hallways, no windows, doors opening onto nowhere.
I am starving, so I fill a Styrofoam bowl with Froot Loops from the breakfast buffet, which has already been carefully laid out, and quietly steal tomorrow morning’s milk. It is nearly midnight. A stuffed dinosaur and a scattering of Hot Wheels lie abandoned on the ancient carpet, its pattern faded by decades of boots and winter salt. The man at the front desk wears a turban and speaks with a kindness that makes the whole strange place feel briefly less lonely.
A laminated note in the bathroom politely asks guests not to wipe soiled hands on the white towels.
In the morning we take the truck to Young’s Garage to check the engine light that flicked on somewhere in BC. Nothing serious. Still, the Wolf asks the mechanic about the shocks—his pet obsession for the last thousand miles, the thing I’d started to think he was harping on just to needle me. But he’s right. The shocks had been installed backward in Denver and one had rubbed a small hole into the driver’s side wheel well. I stand there feeling vaguely indicted while a gentle mechanic with a husky mix pads around the shop floor. An hour later, the shocks are set properly and we are back on the road again. The Wolf grins.
Oil and natural gas country is vast—the overlooked middle of things. These are the places no one photographs: logging roads disappearing into spruce, mining towns held together by diesel and shift work. In Dawson Creek, the sign marking the start of the Alaska Highway sits awkwardly inside a roundabout. We circle twice so the Wolf can lean out the window and snap a photo.
The Peace Region stretches north in long industrial corridors. Heavy machinery rusts beside gravel lots. A frozen lake with a single bench faces the ice as though someone once intended to stay awhile. At the roadside café in Pink Mountain, Wi-Fi costs two dollars.
A heavyset man opens his laptop with the resignation of someone settling in for the entire afternoon. The Wolf buys a “Feces of the Wild” sweatshirt for his fourteen-year-old nephew back home in New York.
Billboards for Jesus reappear for the first time since Montana. We fill the truck from freestanding fuel tanks on the honor system: two Canadian dollars a liter. Somewhere far away, the war in Iran grinds on. Up here, the pumps click slowly beneath a white northern sky.
Gas plants in spruce woods—
no pumps for a hundred miles,
only extraction.
This is a land that gives more than it keeps: oil, gas, timber hauled south in endless quantities while the towns themselves remain sparse, provisional, half-lit at the edges of the boreal.
More darkness. More oil and gas plants. The horizon collapses into plowed snowbanks and the double yellow line. Headlights appear ahead, bright enough that I dim my beams. I’m going nearly seventy, so they must be too. I wait for them to pass. The lights neither brighten nor approach. Minutes seem to stretch. Distance itself feels distorted by the dark.
Frozen rivers wait—
beneath the ice, water breaks
through paused movement’s skin.
Sometime after eleven, I pass an oil tanker. He doesn’t like that. The truck swings into the left lane and accelerates uphill, but I keep my foot steady and hold my line. Eventually he drops back behind me. The small contest sharpens my attention while the Wolf sleeps beside Sasha, whose curled like a comma, in the passenger seat. I put on early ’00s alternative, inch the volume louder, and sing softly to myself. They don’t stir.
Finally, Fort Nelson appears on the horizon blazing like New York City. The lights are shockingly invasive. Until now, we were the light pollution.
The next morning, a woman smoking outside a gas station near the Yukon border comes over to explain the pumps. Inside, the shop feels preserved from another decade: boots drying beside a woodstove, a cast-iron skillet blackened with use, the air thick with cigarette smoke. Five-dollar stickers of bears and Klondike men curl for sale on dusty shelves beside ancient bags of chips.
On the television, Artemis II bobs in the Pacific off San Diego, the capsule bright against the water like a red-capped mushroom.
Warnings about bears line the boardwalk at Liard River Hot Springs Provincial Park: electric fences, stories of an infamous mauling, repeated reminders not to linger alone. For the first time on the trip, I carry bear spray on my hip.
The Wolf does not bathe. He stays behind to walk Sasha, perform burpees against a picnic table, and talk with a young man living out of his truck with a whitewater kayak strapped to the roof. He is heading north to guide in Seward. “It’s the season for migration,” the Wolf says later. “For salmon and guides.”
The water is impossibly soft and clear. White stones feathered by sulphur mark the mouth of the spring—the seat of the kami.
Floating there, I feel more Japanese than usual. I think:
Heaven is onsen—
everyone I love drifts
beneath rising steam.
Clouds pass overhead while I listen to my heartbeat moving through the water, through my body, into the pool itself. Snowmelt rinses through my hair. I never want to leave.
Google often enough mistakes the entrances of unmarked oil and gas plants for commercial gas stations.
We turn into one at dusk, just after nine. The pavement gives way to a kind of lunar mud tundra, and the truck lurches forward with a grey Ford pickup close behind us. Ahead, a row of industrial cylinders points toward the sunset like rockets on a launchpad. Across from them stands a line of prefab grey double-wides: workforce housing at the edge of the world. Outside each unit sits a pickup nearly identical to mine.
The Wolf says:
“We could be them too—
same truck in the parking lot,
same mud on the doors.”
I reply:
“No, we barely pass.
They wake up here every day.
That’s the difference.”
Another wolf just outside Teslin, just before the hill leading down to the grated bridge over the endless lake:
Wolf beside the road—
sunset holds it one moment,
then forest takes it.
In Teslin, a chain-smoking Irish woman in a nightgown, pink fleece vest, and pink rain boots stands outside the motel office, already upset about Sasha barking.
“The guy who stayed in your room last night went out,” she says. “His dog barked and barked. I cannot do it again.”
All night, Sasha is quiet but semis idle outside the shabby motel beneath a flickering neon Bigfoot sign. Eventually the engines flatten into white noise, as steady as surf.
By morning, we are hungry again. Another heartland breakfast: eggs for me, eggs and sausage for the Wolf. Overpriced, perfect.
Whitehorse at last. A northern metropolis with almost no visible trace of the gold rush except in the names preserved by those who still care to remember it. The city feels unexpectedly modern and streamlined: one broad main street lined with gift shops, outfitter windows, and a kayak store overlooking the frozen Yukon River.
Rainbow flags hang soft—
espresso and pastries glow
under yellow lights.
Something in the Wolf brightens here the same way it did back in Montana at the sight of Custer’s battlefield. The old mythology catches him again—only this time it is less about cowboys and cavalry than the North itself: stampeders, bush pilots, river men, adventure novels with cracked spines and maps tucked into the front matter.
“Adventure novels start here,” he says, grinning like a little boy.
He wants photos with the murals and the prospector-and-dog statue, eager to gather evidence that we have crossed into the territory of legend. The bust of Jack London, though, he can do without.
From Haines Junction we turn onto the Haines Highway, a road driven like a wedge through white into blue.
Mountains cup the truck—
small toy beneath avalanche,
held in icy palms.
At Chilkat Pass, men sit in camping chairs beside their grandsons while fathers launch snowmobiles directly into the slide paths. Black labs roam loose across the parking lot, greeting Sasha with the casual confidence of locals: Where are you from?
Then comes the descent into treeline. The U.S. border crossing. The ICE agent waves us through with barely a glance. Suddenly the speed limits are in miles again instead of kilometers. The pavement roughens. Potholes bloom in the road. Public trash cans disappear. Signs begin appearing for the eagle preserve and rafting companies.
Whales somewhere offshore.
Juneau ferry docks at dusk.
Totem greets us: Haines.