Four wheels, 7000km and a cat called Cairo. Lisa Maloney navigates the Alaska Highway with the furriest of companions. Photo / Getty Images
Four wheels, 7000km and a cat called Cairo. Lisa Maloney navigates the Alaska Highway with the furriest of companions.
My travel companion wouldn’t get his tail in gear.
I mean that literally— my road-trip buddy had a long, fluffy black tail — and figuratively, because said tail was still sticking out of his travel carrier, waving a languid refusal to join the rest of him inside. He’d also left a tattered, shredded roll of toilet paper in the bathroom of our rural Alaska motel, a fitting send-off to the big adventure we’d just shared.
But I digress: This story doesn’t start with my young cat, Cairo, flicking his tail on a motel room floor, half-in and half-out of his carrier. It starts with me packing him into that same carrier as we flew from Anchorage, Alaska to Memphis, Tennessee — about 10 hours in all — on a mission to pick up a car and drive it home.
Cairo tended to pine for me when I travelled, so taking him with me felt like the kindest option. Tucked under the airplane seat in front of me, he seemed content to have not been left behind.
But we both struggled when we hit the 33-plus degrees and 90 per cent-plus humidity of a summer heat dome in Tennessee. Somehow I’d thought it would be a good idea to car-camp our way north, but it quickly became clear that we wouldn’t make it outdoors in that heat — especially not Cairo, who lives zipped into a dense fur coat that’s roughly the colour of a solar panel.
Cue immediate reshuffle of travel budget and plans: Anything I might’ve spent on extras was now going toward air conditioned hotels.
The heat dome over the continental United States was so large and pervasive, we wouldn’t really escape it until we hit Canada. Even there, temperatures were higher than usual and the weather correspondingly violent. We crossed from the state of Montana into the Canadian province of Saskatchewan with thunderstorm and tornado warnings at our back, and an almost Canada-wide mobile phone outage ahead of us.
We didn’t realise there were tornado warnings in front of us, too, until mobile service was restored and my phone shrieked an emergency alert. Tornadoes nearby. Take cover.
Where do you go for cover in the flat land of prairies that is Saskatchewan, with the upside-down bowl of a deceptively blue sky above you, ominous dark clouds clustered all around on the horizon? I’d found all that openness calming and enthralling at first, but now it was a wide-open bowling alley with Cairo and me as two pins, unsure which direction the bowling-ball tornadoes would come from.
Vehicles zipped past us, traveling so fast on the highway in both directions that I couldn’t tell which direction prompted nonchalance and which, if any, prompted panic. Or maybe for the locals this was just a normal day, and they didn’t bother to turn around until they saw a funnel cloud coming right at them?
I figured backtracking the way we’d just come must be safest, and snagged one of the last few hotel rooms in the last city we’d passed, Saskatoon. Apparently, everybody else had the same idea, too. I spent the rest of the evening watching weather updates and searching the Internet for what to do if a tornado strikes your hotel. Not much, apparently, aside from getting into a safe-ish space like the bathtub and finding some religion.
Cairo, who clearly didn’t know the word “tornado,” spent his evening batting around a giant, multicoloured ball of yarn before collapsing in a cuddle puddle for one.
With tornadoes in the daytime forecast for several days, we got up early the next day to make it across that hypnotisingly beautiful stretch of prairie before the sun had spooled up to maximum power.
By the time we hit Dawson Creek in British Columbia, the official starting point of the 2300km Alaska Highway, we’d already traveled some 4100km in about 10 days. Cairo was a champion traveller, thanks to a combination of luck, his intensely adventurous personality, and all the practice road trips we’d done before leaving home.
I had bribed him shamelessly with treats in hopes they’d help him form a positive association with his travel carrier, and now he was so comfortable in it that about half the time I unzipped the side door of his carrier to check on him, I’d find him deep in contented sleep.
The rest of the time, though, I’d look down and see the bright green globes of his eyes watching me through the mesh, curious and calm. If I opened the carrier he’d chirp with intent, excited curiosity, hurrying to the car windows to take in everything he could.
I still have a picture of him with his front paws on the centre console, looking alert and excited as he absorbed the sights and sounds of the Dawson Creek parking lot and its sign that declared “YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE WORLD FAMOUS ALASKA HIGHWAY.” I was angling for a good photo of the sign; he was taking in absolutely everything.
Heading deeper into British Columbia, then on to the Yukon Territory, meant we’d left the Saskatchewan prairies behind. The ground wrinkled and folded around us as it rose in hills and mountains, sometimes with an abrupt cliff just beside the road.
The Alaska Highway is a major trucking route, serving not only Alaska but all the communities scattered along its length like beads on a string. So it’s almost never closed. But nature closed it for us during my trip, as torrential rainfall caused a creek to escape its banks and take a big chunk of the highway with it.
There was only one possible detour around the closure — the Cassiar Highway, which merges back into the Alaska Highway once you cross into the Yukon Territory. But the Cassiar is even wilder and more remote than the Alaska Highway, dotted with small communities that were still asking outsiders to stay away due to Covid. So I trusted that the road crews would have a temporary fix in place by the time I hit the gap in the Alaska Highway, and they did: A long, winding stretch of dirt and gravel before we found our way back to pavement.
Having Cairo along naturally limited the activities I could do and buildings I could enter. A lot of places don’t welcome pets for obvious reasons, and it was still too hot to leave him in the car on his own. But we did get to drink in the vast wilderness on either side of the lonely highway, and the wildlife that flowed back and forth near the road like a natural tide.
By the time we reached the Canada/Alaska border we’d seen more black bears than I usually see in a year, a cluster of rock sheep, dozens of bison, a red-tailed hawk, one elk, and a herd of horses with cowbells strung around their necks—all without leaving the car.
In some cases, the wildlife was actually in the road, like the bison I encountered coming around a blind corner past Muncho Lake. No wonder they say you should only drive that stretch of road during the day. Even with headlights on, that massive animal would have blended right into the night.
But all the large wildlife we saw from the car was outnumbered by something tiny: Mosquitoes.
Cairo loves few things more than walking on a leash and harness, as long as his emotional support human is on the other end of said leash. So when we grabbed one of the last campsites near Watson Lake in the Yukon, I thought it’d be a good idea to explore together. It only took a few minutes for us to retreat back to the car, both of us swatting at the swarming mosquitoes, who seemed only barely bothered by the mosquito repellent I’d put on.
We quickly shut ourselves back up in the car, where I pulled out what may have been my best purchase of the whole trip — a $3 fly swatter — and went to work on the mosquitoes that had followed us in. Cairo hid in the footwell, snapping at any bloodsuckers that came close. I smashed a few dozen of the little buggers before the car was clear of their infuriating whine, and Cairo and I could both get some sleep.
We’d covered a lot of territory just to reach the Yukon — but we weren’t going to make it back across the border into Alaska without passing one more big obstacle: The stretch of road between Destruction Bay (in Canada) and Tok (in Alaska), which is filled with so many potholes that it is notorious for devouring tyres, bending trailer tongues, and overall smashing the unwary traveller’s vehicle like a toddler throwing a tantrum with toy trucks.
Sometimes, all you can do is blast some Metallica out of your car speakers and go for it. Cairo was oblivious, snoozing contentedly in his carrier as usual, while I wove such a meandering path back and forth across the road, driving around the holes instead of into them, that my car’s safety systems warned me to take a break. Obviously, it thought I was either driving drunk or on the verge of sleep.
That roadway moonscape was on the Canadian side of the border. Once we crossed into Alaska, the road conditions looked vastly better... until I’d come zipping around a blind corner to spot a massive, axle-busting pothole smack in the middle of my lane, with nothing but my reflexes and quick judgment to gauge the best course around it.
All of which brings me back to Young’s Motel in Tok, Alaska: The endpoint of the pothole driving course and the place where Cairo’s tail lingered obstinately outside his carrier, flicking idly back and forth as I talked to him. Truthfully, I wasn’t in any more of a rush than he was. And as eager as I’d been to chew up the kilometres between us and home every day, I didn’t want the adventure to end.
But eventually, Cairo pulled his tail into the carrier, settling in comfortably for the final leg of our trip. I knew he’d nap most of the way once we hit cruising speed on the highway. But of course, I wouldn’t. One of us had to keep a lookout for more potholes, and since I was the only one in the car who was tall enough to see over the dashboard, it would have to be me.
GETTING THERE
Kiwis will most likely fly to Alaska, sans pets. Fly from Auckland to Anchorage Airport with one stopover with Air NZ, Qantas, United Airlines and Alaska Airlines.
DETAILS
The chef chats to Herald Travel about unforgettable foodie experiences in Aotearoa.