HIGH ROAD TO ALASKA

Like the Klondike Gold Rush hussy who became a genteel Seattle matron, the Alaska Highway is trying to outlive a bad reputation. Mention this 1,500-mile road linking central British Columbia to Fairbanks, Alaska, to seasoned northern travelers, and they’ll spin tales of seemingly endless dust and mud, washed-out bridges, pitted windshields, 100-mile stretches between gas stations and sparse, crowded campgrounds.

Maybe they’ll even drag out their gruesomely illustrated bumper sticker, “I Drove the Alaska Highway.”

The knickknack shops still sell those bumper stickers, but the highway isn’t as intimidating anymore. All but 28 miles of road is paved--

after a fashion.

In a few stretches it’s as roomy as a two-lane Interstate 5. And while some sections, with pavement contorted and shattered by frost heaves, still require travel at 50 m.p.h. or less, windshield and headlight protectors are not as essential as they once were.

Careful drivers, traveling slowly and giving a wide berth to oncoming traffic, report no more dings than might be encountered on, say, a truck-laden California freeway.

It’s still not a road for high-strung sports cars, however. Construction zones can be nasty, nearly all side roads remain unpaved and automotive repairs can be erratic and expensive.

Although the highway can be driven in three or four marathon days, allow extra time for dawdling. The road still cleaves an untrammeled wilderness hundreds of miles wide, climbs over the Rockies, bridges fish-filled streams and skirts Tahoe-size lakes with nary a water-skier or casino.

Roadside lodges, about 20 to 50 miles apart, remain individualistic, mostly rustic operations. They are often unruly conglomerates of campgrounds, motels, service stations and restaurants serving everything from greasy hamburgers to great sourdough pancakes.

As major thoroughfares go, the Alaska Highway is relatively youthful. It was born violently, an offspring of war. Until World War II the wilderness of northern British Columbia and the Yukon Territory was accessible only by dog team, horse, stern-wheeler and the occasional bush plane. Pearl Harbor changed that, making overland access to strategically important Alaska crucial.

Trainload of Troops

On March 2, 1942, a trainload of troops arrived at the railhead in Dawson Creek in central British Columbia to begin building a road to Alaska. All told, 11,000 troops punched the road north in a nine-month agony of sub-zero temperatures and mud so pervasive that even bulldozers mired in the goo. Often following routes suggested by trappers, Indians and prospectors, the soldiers bulldozed three or four miles a day.

The route was dedicated Nov. 20, 1942, and military supply convoys--with bulldozers sometimes pulling the trucks through quicksand-like sections of “highway”--traveled north intermittently that winter.

Improvements have taken place regularly since then. In 1943 more than 70 private contractors were hired to upgrade the route to an all-weather road, and in 1948 the highway was opened to the public.

This summer, Public Works Canada will continue its upgrading program, and travelers can expect to encounter those 28 miles of unpaved road at the Trutch Mountain bypass near Ft. Nelson, according to Kris Valencia, editor of the northern travel guide, “The Milepost.”

Grain elevators, tidy farms and lush hayfields characterize the first straight, smooth miles of highway out of Dawson Creek, an oil, agriculture and railroad town. As one swoops north, aspen and birch forests cloak the gently rolling hillsides.

Ft. Nelson, a fur trading post in 1805, lies almost 300 miles north of Dawson Creek. There sprawl motels, gas stations, restaurants and a golf course.

North of Ft. Nelson the road gradually ascends the spine of the Rocky Mountains. Massive gnarled peaks, dusted with fresh snow even in summer, vie for attention with sparkling rivers tinted with just enough glacial silt to give them a startling aquamarine cast.

The highway passes through Stone Mountain Provincial Park, with its wild sheep often visible on scree slopes, then through Muncho Lake Provincial Park where the park’s centerpiece, seven-mile-long, jewel-blue Muncho Lake, laps at the edge of the highway.

About 25 miles north of the lake, Liard Hot Springs Provincial Park, with its shady campground and hot springs, has lured road-weary travelers since World War II construction days. There, too, travelers catch the first glimpse of the Liard River that the highway follows for about 140 miles. Whirlpools and rapids whip the ordinarily slow-moving watercourse to a thundering froth near Fireside, a community largely destroyed by a 1982 fire that incinerated hundreds of thousands of acres of British Columbia forest.

After a few more hours of travel the highway crosses into Yukon Territory, so wild that bears are as numerous as the 24,000 human inhabitants. It’s a land littered with mementoes of the Gold Rush of 1898. Of the hundreds of thousands who struck out for the gold fields near Dawson City, only about 40,000 reached it. Most returned south rich with stories, not gold.

Relive that gold rush through two side trips. The Carcross Highway provides a 99-mile, partiallypaved link between Whitehorse and Skagway, embarkation point for the miners’ perilous overland journey. Just northwest of the capital city of Whitehorse the often muddy Klondike Loop leads 324 miles north to colorful, lovingly preserved Dawson City.

In the Yukon Territory town of Watson Lake the Alaska Highway Interpretive Center, opened in 1984, offers free museum displays and a slide show about the construction of the highway. In front of the museum bristles the Sign Forest, started in 1942, when Carl Lindley, a soldier working on the highway, nailed up a sign heralding his hometown of Danville, Ill. Travelers still add to the collection of hundreds of often-humorous signs.

From Watson Lake the highway winds west, crossing and recrossing the British Columbia-Yukon border and following the eastern shore of 86-mile-long Teslin Lake. Then 867 miles north of the Yukon River’s starting point the highway crosses this mighty watercourse, which flows from that point almost 2,000 miles to the Bering Sea. There, near Whitehorse, it is a smooth-flowing, clear stream tamed by a series of dams.

But in 1898 Whitehorse Rapids and Miles Canyon proved tragic obstacles to some of the hordes of wealth-seekers bound for the Klondike on a flotilla of 7,000 homemade boats and rafts. Within a few days after the spring ice went out on the Yukon, 150 boats were lost and 10 men drowned.

River travel is easier these days. Modern voyagers can embark, for example, on the 60-foot Anna Maria for a 460-mile voyage between Whitehorse and Dawson City, with 20 ports of call en route.

Whitehorse--18,967 Yukon souls strong--today offers many of the amenities of civilization, with jet airline service, several first-class hotels, boutiques, art galleries and restaurants. Our favorite stop in this spunky northern city was the 210-foot Klondike, a stern-wheeler dry-docked since 1955 on a bank of the river. The ship plied Yukon waters from 1937 to 1952, hauling supplies and ore from Dawson and Mayo to Whitehorse.

Recently, Parks Canada restored the vessel to its 1930s frontier opulence. On our free half-hour tour, a humorous young French Canadian led us through the ship, pointing out cords of wood stacked for the ravenous boiler, facsimiles of Depression-era Shredded Wheat boxes, and staterooms with rumpled woolen blankets, all topped by a wheelhouse glittering with brass.

Also in Whitehorse is the MacBride Museum, crammed with Yukon memorabilia that includes Sam McGee’s log cabin, made infamous in a Robert Service poem and moved to downtown Whitehorse from the shore of Lake Laberge. Each summer evening the Frantic Follies stages a series of vaudeville skits and dances.

The Yukon Gardens, opened to the public in 1986, provides a 22-acre look at both wild and domestic plants that thrive in this extreme climate. And a half-hour drive north of Whitehorse, on the road to Dawson City, visitors can help feed reindeer at Northern Splendor, a reindeer farm that opened this year.

About 60 miles northwest of Whitehorse we skirted the edge of Kluane National Park, an 8,500-square-mile maze of glaciers and high mountains, 20 of them topping 12,500 feet. Mt. Logan--at 19,520 feet Canada’s highest peak--crowns the lot. The most rugged country is far west of the highway, but we took a few moments to walk the shores of Kluane Lake, the Yukon’s largest.

On slopes above the lake we could just make out the white dots of grazing Dall sheep. At the south end of the lake we stopped for a stroll through Silver City, an eerie, abandoned collection of tumble-down log cabins. Once a base for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the buildings also saw use as a fox farm and as barracks for World War II construction workers. Near one of the cabins I found a clump of rhubarb and pondered its origins and ability to survive the harsh Yukon winters.

Frost heaves bent and cracked the next 200 miles or so of the highway. We had to drive slowly. Considering the climate, it’s a wonder that the road exists at all. The coldest temperature in North America--80 degrees below zero--was recorded in this region on Feb. 3, 1947, at the Indian village of Snag.

In Beaver Creek the 174-room Westmark Inn caters to bus tours, offering high-quality accommodations from mid-May to mid-September. Expect to pay $128 Canadian for a double room.

The highway is wider from the Alaska border to Tok, a small town that owes its existence to the highway and does a classy job of serving the traveler with gift shops, sled dog demonstrations and several campgrounds and motels. First stop, however, should be the recently built Tok Visitor Information Center Museum, with its wildlife displays and competently staffed trip-planning center.

Northwest of Tok sprawls Delta Junction, noteworthy as the center of Alaska’s burgeoning agricultural industry. A good highway, with glimpses of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline and sweeping vistas of the snowy Alaska Range, leads to Fairbanks. Although that busy city of 60,000 marks the end of the highway, it’s only the beginning of a new series of adventures.

Alaska often overshadows its neighbor, Canada, but in some ways it’s for the best. The result is an unspoiled vastness in Canada that some wags say is like the Alaska of a generation ago. The streamlining of the Alaska Highway through the heart of this wilderness lures ever greater numbers of visitors to the north. Despite this, the Yukon and northern British Columbia retain their friendliness and continue to offer solitude to those who seek it.

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Careful planning and preparation are essential before heading north. A 546-page guidebook, “The Milepost,” is the best for northern highway travelers. It’s available for $14.95 (plus $3 for tax, postage and handling) from Box 4-EEE, Anchorage, Alaska 99509.

For more travel information on Alaska, contact the Alaska Division of Tourism, P.O. Box E, Juneau, Alaska 99811, or call (907) 465-2010.