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We were not alone when we left the MG meet in Monterey – we drove towards San Francisco with Allan and Linda Chalmers and with Rick and Judy in their TCs, following the coast road north through intermittent sea fret and clear spells. We stayed the night with Allan and Linda, a wonderful MG couple that we have met before on an MG event in New Zealand. We drove some of the steepest streets of San Francisco with them, and around the base of Golden Gate bridge. Remember Steve McQueen in the film Bullet? Well, we didn’t drive quite as fast, and all four wheels stayed on terra firma, but it was fun. We were also impressed by the clapboard architecture of San Francisco, and especially by the variety and quality of restaurants.

Still on the food and wine theme, we said cheerio and headed for the Napa Valley for some wine tasting and gourmet food before getting down to the serious business of driving into steadily cooler temperatures through northern California, Oregon, Washington State and into Canada. We intended driving through the redwood forests that line the entire coastal road through northern California and all the way through Oregon as far as Washington state, but like a lot of other travellers doing the same thing, we soon got fed up with the cold sea fret and lack of visibility. We stuck to the coastal redwoods for a couple of days and gave up and headed inland via Crater Lake in Oregon for some sunshine. This is where we were formally introduced to the Oregon mosquito. You could saddle them up and enter them in the Kentucky Derby. They have a serious attitude problem.

Oregon is varied with dense forest, the mountainous Cascade Ranges and the glorious Colombia river on the border with Washington State. We particularly liked the fruit growing area around the Hood River region. Washington State starts a lot drier, but soon gives way to forest. We didn’t know what to expect when we crossed into Canada. We had chosen a quiet place to cross, it took all of two minutes and we were through. This time we did at least have a stamp in our passports. Canada has a lot of trees, more trees and some more trees. I don’t know why the flag of Canada is red and white with a red maple leaf; it should be dark green with a paler green leaf motif, for that is the colour of Canada. It was on our way to Cache Creek on the northbound Caribou highway that Bob spotted a possible problem with the water pump. We pressed on another 30 miles, but it was obvious it was getting worse.

Allan Chalmers had given us the name of an MG parts supplier in Vancouver. We intended turning around and backtracking to Vancouver, but we thought, hold on, we are in the land of Fedex - what are we thinking about. We rang Octagon Motor Group, yes they had a part but couldn’t recommend Fedex. It was a Saturday and Fedex don’t work on the weekend. Instead they would send the new water pump by Greyhound bus. Buses run every day all along the route we were travelling; if they could get the package to them before 4pm, we would have it first thing next day. Good old Greyhound and a great business idea. All we had to do was backtrack as far as Cache Creek and wait for the bus next day. It turned up on time but it took several hours to fit, like TC water pumps usually do.

It doesn’t take long to realise that Canada is an oil producer, and a major gas producer. We drove through dense forests of dark green spruce with black trunks, ghostly white trunks of birch with grey/green foliage, an under storey of bright green grass with wild flowers of yellow, purple and blue. Reds sedges and blonde feathered grasses grow on boggy ground, interspersed with shades of grey boulders and gravel soil. Tree clad mountains, some bare and snow capped formed the backdrop

We continued the thrash north along the Caribou highway towards Prince George and Fort St John where we picked up the Alaska highway, popularly known as the Alcan highway. It starts just south of Fort St John at Dawson's Creek, heads north to Fort Nelson, northwest to Watson's Lake, west to Whitehorse in the Yukon and on to Fairbanks in Alaska. We drove the Alcan as far as Whitehorse, along with huge semi-trailer trucks and equally huge RVs and countless motorbikes, all of us plying the same route north to Alaska. At one scenic viewpoint, two couples from the RVs came to introduce themselves, seeing as we had leapfrogging each other for days, and would continue to do so for more days to come. We had the odd sighting of wildlife – black bear, bison, Dall mountain sheep, moose, elk, caribou and porcupine. We even spotted an Arctic fox, already growing a white winter tip to its tail.

The Alcan is mostly good, but with usually a couple of major roadwork hold-ups each day. In places it’s roly-poly from frost heave and tends to throw you around the carriageway. As the temperature dropped steadily, so the nights got shorter. Broad daylight at 2am feels a bit weird. We ended up wearing all our cold weather gear with side screens up on the TC and eventually, even the hood went up. We were not particularly impressed by Whitehorse, the weather was dreadful, but we decided to deviate from the Alcan and head up the Klondike highway to Dawson City and we were so glad we did. We loved it, it’s a real frontier town with original timber buildings distorted by the permafrost melting underneath them, timber boardwalks instead of pavements to avoid walking through acres of mud, and newer timber buildings in the old style.

We ate out to celebrate our wedding anniversary, a wonderful meal in a cranky restaurant packed to the gunnels. I had the elk steak. I would call it "gamey". Bob stuck to something he could recognise. Dawson City has a great choice of hotels and restaurants and is obviously quite a tourist destination, presumably because of its association with the Klondike Gold Rush. Gold is still produced here by Placer Mining. We had to cross the Yukon river by ferry to join the Top of the World highway that would take us to Tok in Alaska where we would rejoin the Alcan westwards. The Top of the World highway is a gravel road, a mud bath when we drove it and slippery as hell with deep muddy grooves but great fun to drive.

There is a border crossing on this highway at Poker Creek, a bleak bit of nowhere with a border post and a couple of immigration officials. We were asked for our passports and for our entry documents. What entry documents? When we crossed into Arizona from Mexico, we were surprised at how easy it was to get into the USA. We expected to be finger printed and photographed but there was nothing. We had even asked to speak to a supervisor to ensure that we were entering the USA legally. It turned out that we should have been "processed". The immigration officer was incredulous that we just drove into the USA without a murmur. He took our fingerprints, photographed us, we filled in forms, we got a stamp in our passport and a departure document that we have to forfeit when we leave. The stamp in our passport is really cool – a caribou in profile with Poker Creek in large letters.

Just as we were about to leave the border post, a guy on a BMW motorbike pulled up. He was tall with dark tousled hair and called Raphael from Venezuela. He had all the country stickers on his luggage carriers that we had and it turned out he has done virtually the same route as us and heading in the same direction. He said what a lot of other travellers have said; we should have driven through Colombia, perfectly safe with wonderful people. He couldn’t recommend we drive through his home country though.

Tok to Fairbanks is an easy distance, but not in the rain with one slow and one major puncture. We really had to get this sorted before the last push to Prudhoe Bay so we took the TC to a tyre specialist. We had a faulty valve on one tyre, the slow puncture and easily fixed, and a puncture on the other rear tyre tube. We have a spare wheel of course, but we’re reluctant to use it since the tyre diameter is slightly larger than on the running tyres. If we run on the spare on the rear for too long we could damage the diff. We had already done 100 miles on this spare and didn’t want to do any more.

Weather has a major impact on how we perceive places. When we drove the Camino Austral southwards we had fantastic weather. Travellers we met coming northwards all said the same thing – how bad the weather had been, no-one said how amazing the scenery was. We had formed this same poor weather dominated view of Canada, the Yukon and Alaska, it was all about the weather and not about the landscape. Cold, wet and fog do not do anywhere any favours. You also never see tourist brochures of anywhere taken in bad weather, it is always warm and sunny with the occasional fluffy white cloud, colours are vibrant and people smiling, even the tourist brochures of Fairbanks Alaska. It could have been worse, it might have snowed.

There is a distinct lack of accurate information about the Dalton highway that runs from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay, and a lot of it on the internet is out of date and wrong. Our main concern was the state of the surface. The best source of information turned out to be a Fairbanks Tourist information booklet on the Dalton highway. On reading the booklet we found nothing to dissuade us from driving it, despite the tales of doom from many locals.

Prudhoe Bay lies 500 miles north of Fairbanks. The first 80 miles are on the Elliot highway as far as Livengood, where you can get accommodation and fuel. The road is a standard tarmac highway. The road to Prudhoe Bay then becomes the Dalton highway, previously known as the Haul Road. Exploration companies struck black gold in Prudhoe Bay in 1969. The Haul Road was built to ferry supplies to the oilfields at the same time as the Trans Alaska pipeline was built to carry crude oil to the port of Valdez nearly 700 miles south. It is a public road built by national government funding and maintained by the state of Alaska. Some parts are tar sealed, some are very fine gravel and grit that is dusty as hell when dry and slimy mud when wet.

The first 170 miles from Livengood to Coldfoot were good, both tarmac and gravel and dry with a perfectly acceptable surface. Our lowest speed was 30mph, which is great for a gravel road, and sometimes 50mph, which is wonderful. The weather was with us, cold but sunny, the scenery very pleasant with rolling hills, fir trees and arctic birch. We crossed into the Arctic Circle and stopped off at Coldfoot to refuel. There is a very basic and very expensive "hotel" (I use the word advisedly) made from a series of portacabins strung together and not our cup of tea. The eatery serving café style food looked fine, full of truckers with steaming mugs of coffee and plates piled high with fast food. Apparently early settlers got cold feet at the onset of winter and scarpered, hence the name Coldfoot.

We had booked a log cabin accommodation at Wiseman about twenty miles north of Coldfoot. It’s a tiny settlement of log cabins on the banks of the river Koyukuk, nestling in the folds of the Brooks Range of mountains and with its own microclimate. The cabin was superb and exactly suited to the location. We were surprised to find flower beds, raised vegetable gardens full of green beans, broccoli, potatoes and other veggies that we would never have associated with the Arctic Circle. The raised beds meant that roots did not have to try to penetrate the permafrost that lies inches below the surface. All was green abundance, including the incredibly warm plastic sheet greenhouse heated only by the sun.

The family we were staying with, both Germans with two children, loved it here. The breakfast room walls were draped in animal pelts – a grizzly, a black bear, wolverine, wolf and others we didn’t recognise. Wolverines will never make it onto a Pirelli calendar. A huge stove/heater sat in one corner, everything was to hand and usually hanging from walls. Five huskies lived in raised kennels outdoors, birch sleds were propped up against walls, elk and moose antlers hung from timber exterior walls. We were in the wilderness, but so far, the elements had been kind. Log cabins are warm, too warm in fact which again came as a surprise.

Next morning started sunny and clear but cold as we headed over the Atigun Pass through the Brookes range, but the weather soon deteriorated to cold and rainy, which meant that the road surface changed from dry and dusty to slippery and slimy, rather like driving on ice and slush. Trees thinned out and vanished to be replaced by low bushes and then short grasses growing in boggy ground. We came across a herd of Musk Oxen grazing, all thickly coated in long woolly hair. Arctic ground squirrels were the only other things moving. Grizzly bears somehow manage to live on this Arctic tundra and to be honest, if I was a brown bear up here, I’d be more than just grizzly. We descended the steady fall down the North Slope towards the bleakest, most miserable looking place we’ve ever seen. This was Deadhorse on Prudhoe Bay, a sprawl of a mud bath industrial estate given over entirely to oil support industries. Huge trucks, tankers, forklifts and pickups zigzagged around. You could barely make out road markings.

We filled up with petrol from a heated shed with credit card payment equipment and fuel choice buttons; you just yank on the fuel hose outside and pump away. I suppose its to stop fuel and customers from freezing. We had booked our accommodation several days ahead, so we decided to head for the end of the road, take a photograph and hightail it for the warmth of a hotel room. At the end of a public road is a security checkpoint; only organised tours and oilfield workers are allowed past this point. We intended pulling up at the security gate, but the trucks just kept on coming. I got out of the TC with camera at the ready so that Bob could grab his opportunity, whiz into position, I would take the snap and that would be job done.

One of the security officers beckoned me over and told me to get myself into the security booth and to bring my and Bob’s passport with me. What? Like a good citizen, I did. They took our passports, took ages to thumb through them, them scanned them into their computer and printed off copies, all the while giving me a police style grilling along the lines of "where are you from, what are you doing here, why are you taking a photograph, you are not allowed anywhere near this security checkpoint, have you already taken a photograph?" It was turning unpleasant. I did my best to humour them; they were in a mood to confiscate my camera. I got out the security booth, got in the TC and we moved away. They said we had to go to the other end of town, wherever that was, before we could even think about taking a photograph.

200 yards down the road, we pulled up at a sign that confirmed that we were at Prudhoe Bay, got out of the TC to take a photo and stuff me, another security guy walked up to us. By this time Bob was fit to punch somebody’s lights out. The guy was friend not foe, he wanted to take a photo of us, then took a photo of both of us by the TC with our camera. We told him of our run-in with the security staff and he told us that they had absolutely no right to do that at all to anyone, they were employees of the oil companies and not employed by Inland Security, which is what they fancy themselves as. Organised tours go around the oilfields all day long and guess what passengers are allowed to take on the bus and use? Yep, cameras.

Whatever, we drove the TC as far as we could, photographed the event and found our hotel and photographed the TC in front of that as well. It was another row of portacabins strung together badly with poor facilities, but the room rates were up there with the Sheraton. Captive audiences and limited accommodation equals sky high prices. Prudhoe Bay is the most northerly point on the American continent that you can drive to, but despite being 300 miles within the Arctic circle, it isn’t the most northerly point you can drive to in the world. That honour lies with North Cape in Norway, 200 miles closer to the North Pole than Prudhoe Bay.

Deadhorse and Prudhoe Bay are dry areas – alcohol is not sold and is not supposed to be consumed. We smuggled a bottle of Famous Grouse whisky into our room and had a celebratory tipple. We were too tired to hoop and holler or feel anything really. The next thing we had to get our heads around was getting out of here and back to Fairbanks in one piece. The temperature dropped like a brick and the rain came down heavier than ever. Just as Mother Nature threw a wobbly when we left Ushuaia and Tierro del Fuego months ago, she also had a sting in the tail waiting for us when we woke next morning.