2020… what a palaver that was! Who’d have thought, as we celebrated entering 2020 a year ago, that the world would look like this today. We’re lucky that we have been safe and suffered no more than a bit of disruption to our overlanding lifestyle, but it’s been a roller-coaster year. So we thought we’d end the year with a little round-up of our overlanding 2020 – Covid style!
But it started so well!!
One year ago, there we were… seeing in 2020 with bubbly in the warmth of Tucson, Arizona, blissful in our ignorance of the year ahead. Even as we headed north up through California, our time in Joshua Tree, L.A. and Yosemite was ‘ops normal’. In San Francisco things were still fine, but news was just leaking about a mystery virus spreading from China. It looked a bit worrying in some places, but “no problem here in the USA with the Chayna Virus…” they said. So on we travelled… north into Oregon and Washington State… all still fabulously normal.
2020 before the ‘rona virus kicked-off… Overlanding USA
Then on 1st March with our US visas almost expired, we crossed into Canada at Vancouver. ‘How long would you like to stay in Canada?’ asked the nice chap at immigration. ‘Oh, just the six months will be fine thanks… we’ll be in Alaska by the summer’. With the benefit of hindsight 20/20 vision… what the jeezes were we thinking???!! 🤣.
Just days later, the ‘rona virus was progressing its own global tour and copied our idea of heading into Canada. So like most of the world, Canada did the sensible thing and started locking-down.
Staying Home
All over the world, overlanders like us were rushing in mad panic to either ship their vehicles home from their travels, or find safe park-up places for their vehicles so that they could fly back to their home countries on the last few available flights. From the fortunate safety of Canada, we felt eternally grateful to be where we were. We had no intention of abandoning our Cuthbert and flying for 14 hrs in tin-can with 400 potentially infected co-passengers. Nope. We planned to follow the prevailing global advice: stay home. Our home is where we park it, which at that particular time happened to be in Whitehorse, Yukon (click here for the nitty gritty)
We ended up staying in The Yukon for around 14 weeks. Contrary to popular belief, Whitehorse was really a tip-top place to be for a spring/summer Covid lock-down. The locals were extraordinarily friendly and helpful. And as the internal Yukon restrictions were relaxed but the borders still closed, we had the Yukon’s tourist spots pretty much all to ourselves! Nobody else was driving the Dempster Highway, nobody else was checking out the Klondike goldmines, nobody else was flying out to the Kluane Glaciers. The Yukon turned out to be one of our greatest joys of 2020. But our greatest disappointment of the year was without doubt, our dismal failure to reach our target destination for the year.
Covid rules relaxed: overlanding the fabulous Yukon Territory
Not a year for achieving targets
After five years of driving from the most southerly point on The Americas (Tierra del Fuego in Argentina) we were heading to the most northerly point, on the Arctic Ocean. Unfortunately, the antics of a certain Mr C. Virus had other ideas for us. The Canadian Northwest Territories locked-down and prevented us from completing the iconic Dempster Highway to Tuktoyaktuk. And the US border closure prevented us from even starting the equally iconic Dalton Highway to Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s Arctic. We had to console ourselves with making it as far as the Arctic Circle within the Yukon, where we had to turn around. Not our original plan, but who did achieve their plans in 2020, eh? It turns out that 2020 just wasn’t much of a year for achieving targets.
Over the rest of the summer the US/Canada border remained closed (and indeed still is at the end of the year) but the Canadian provinces gradually opened up for internal travel. Okay, we thought… let’s hit the road again! Leaving the Yukon, we set off to explore British Columbia, the Rockies, Alberta and Vancouver Island. Each day we counted our lucky stars that we’d been able to stay with our truck.
Awesome Alberta and The Rockies
Told you so…
Into the early autumn things were looking good and we’d seen a lot of western Canada. But if we’re all honest, we’d surely have to admit that way back in the summer we were indeed warned by our respective national sciencey-expert-geeks that the autumn/winter would bring a second, even more fierce, wave of the ‘rona virus. And guess what? They were right. In Canada the combination of Thanksgiving, Halloween and colder temperature forcing people indoors, has led to a massive resurgence of the virus. It’s back with a vengeance and the tight restrictions are back too.
Both BC and Alberta have travel restrictions in place and our overlanding has been put on hold (again). It might, under other circumstances, be an absolute bummer to be forced to stop for a while but actually it rather suits us. We get to ski. Ski lots!! Unlike the situation we read of in European ski resorts, the Canadians have a superb grip on their ski hot-spots. Masking, distancing, reducing numbers etc are being enforced and we feel totally safe here in Big White.
Tyre decision
Other than skiing over the winter so far, we’ve done a bit of (very) local exploring down forest trails and testing Cuthbert in extreme snow/ice conditions. We’ve also taken a rash (some may say ‘daft’) landmark decision with our tyres!
Yes, we’ve decided to reduce the spare Michelin XZL 255/100 R16 tyres that we carry from two down to one. For the last 7 years we’ve been schlepping two spares around the world, giving us warm fuzzy reassurance on rough roads in extremely remote places. In fact, we’ve never needed more than one at a time and we’ve been impressed by Michelin’s global assistance in getting new tyres to us wherever we have needed them. Now we’re in North America, we don’t really see a reason to be hauling an extra 40kg around on the roof. So we’re down to one spare now, and Cuthbert looks a bit odd to us without the spare XZL perched on the front right corner of the roof.
HNY 2021
So we have a very snowy start to 2021. Who knows when the restrictions will be lifted and we’re able to travel again? In the meantime, we’re getting on with the serious business of skiing our socks off and waiting for the ‘new normal’ to kick-in.
Happy New Year everyone!!🍾✨🎉
