Day 3 – Up the Cassiar and the Alcan to Whitehorse
Feb 20th, 2008 by admin
Today is a long day – 750 miles. We leave New Hazelton for Whitehorse at 7:00 and head up the road for the Cassiar. Just as the sun is starting to come up we cross onto the Cassiar and head for the only TSD of the day in Dease Lake. We stopping at a restaurant in Dease Lake, Mama Z’s, that supposed to be great. Onward.
Dick is leading and we start picking up speed as we head up the road. The surface is dry and clean so before long we’re doing 80. At the turn off for Hyder/Stewart we stop for a bio break. After we restart, the road is snow covered and a bit icy but the sky is clear and it’s going to be a beautiful day.
As we move along, Dick still leading, we’re doing 80 on the snow. There’s no traffic at all and the cars in front are calling oncoming traffic for us so we really start moving. Stay on line, DON’T turn in early, hit the apex, think pure thoughts on track out. The road is snow over ice pack and there are snow banks on the sides. Let’s boogey.
Dick’s a great snow driver and I’m getting the car back under me on snow (regular rally driving at the school is helping – no late hands) and at noon we roll into Dease Lake. The lunch is a buffet that’s as good as advertised and at 1:30 PM we start the TSD.
It’s a short 10 miler with a bunch os CAS changes. How difficult can this be? What we failed to notice until we started the TSD was how close some of the CAS changes were. Big number changes in short distances. So short that you can’t get the numbers in quickly enough. Very sneaky. The experienced people would catch that right away. We didn’t. Oh well, we had to do better that the first 2 days.
We wait for Dick at the end of the TSD and start on the remaining 400 mile transit to Whitehorse. Dick takes the lead and soon we are passing the earlier rally cars. The scenery is beautiful and the sky crystal clear. So Dick’s got us up to 85-90 and the miles (and other rally cars) are clicking by. We run like this for the rest of the run up the Cassiar. I haven’t had this much fun since yesterday running down Punchaw Road.
We join up with the Alcan just west of Watson Lake. It’s a high speed convoy to Whitehorse until a local complains about us and we slow down a bit. It’s been a long day but we finally at the hotel.
A qucik dinners and some beers. Just as we’re leaving, Revere comes by with timing sheets. What?!! This right? We score a total of 8 points. On day one we scored over 200 points in 2 TSD’s. On day, we scored about 150 on 2 TSD’s. Today, 8 on 1 TSD. We may be getting somewhere. Man this is harder than it looks.
C8-)