To be clear, the Alaskan Highway used to be extremely rough. When it was originally created, there were boulders in the middle of the road that you'd have to negotiate around, and the whole stretch was unpaved. Much of it is now paved, but the constant swelling of the road during the harsh winters allows potholes to cover about 95% of it (gravel and paved portions alike). When I was driving it, there were numerous repaving projects in different places along the highway, where the pavement had been scraped off, and it was bare gravel.
Driving on loose gravel can be slippery, but I've had lots of experience driving on it - even potholed gravel roads - on this trip. Often you can find a line that avoids most of the potholes. Having wide tires makes it harder to fully avoid them, but can allow you to go over some small ones. Unfortunately, combining rain and loose gravel does make the road about as slippery as any you'll ever drive on, so you do have to be very careful when negotiating around bad spots in the road.
On my drive into mainland Alaska from Haines, I had already driven roughly 320 miles of these conditions, when I approached the Enger Creek culvert. There was a large pot hole right in front of where the guard rails start over the culvert, so I tried to avoid it by going to the right, since the shoulder is pretty wide in that part of the road. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I think I just barely missed clearing it, so my driver's side front tire got caught, and on the looser gravel near the shoulder, the rest of my tires couldn't hold traction, so I started spinning toward the guard rail on the opposite side of the road. I steered toward the rail, trying to regain traction, but because of all the potholes on the road, there wasn't enough surface for my tires to grip. I hit that rail at an angle on the nose of my car. Bags flying all over my car, I continued my counter clockwise spin back to the guard rail on my side of the road, also managing to hit it on the nose of my car. From here, I was spun back around clockwise, and finally came to a rest, sitting sideways in both lanes at the other side of the culvert.
I gathered my wits, and got out of the car to see how it looked. I heard a hissing sound coming from the front, but didn't know exactly what it was. I saw a few pieces of my cowl and the styrofoam bits that broke off my bumper in the road, so I picked them up, but I knew I needed to get out of the road, so I dropped them by the railing, got back in and drove off to the side, where I parked in a turnoff about 100 feet away. I put on my raincoat, gathered up the pieces I left by the railing, set them on the top of my car, then popped the hood to check out the engine bay. Everything looked mechanically fine. Even the windshield washer fluid reservoir was fully in tact, so I knew the radiator was probably undamaged.
The hissing continued, so I bent down near the side of the car, and determined it was coming from my front tire. I checked the air pressure, and it was at about 26psi. At my lastoil change, the guys there forgot to top off the air in my tires, and when I was in Juneau I checked my tires, and this one was at about 28, and the others around 30 (I like to inflate them to 34). I was going to stop to put air in them then, but it was Sunday, and the garages were closed, and I didn't want to pay 50 cents or a dollar at a gas station, so I decided to wait until I could get to a shop that was open. Being down 2 psi from a couple of days before, it was a significant leak, but it was slow enough that I figured I could drive the rest of the 8 miles or so to Beaver Creek (the western most community in Canada).
After evaluating my car, I got my camera out to document the event. Several people passed me on the road while I was picking up the bits of my car and documenting the accident. Of the 15 or so vehicles, only 1 stopped to offer assistance. I didn't really need any, but it would have been nice to have more stop. I did notice that all of the vehicles also going westbound went to the eastbound lane to avoid the pothole instead of the shoulder, so that appears to have been my fatal mistake.
Video Post Crash Pt2
When I got to Beaver Creek, my first stop was a gas station, and the attendant there told me the closest shop that could fix my car was in Anchorage or Fairbanks (each roughly 350 miles away). I was headed to Anchorage anyway, so I bought a can of fix a flat (the stuff that rarely does any good), and went outside to put it in the tire. Once I sprayed it in, I drove around to the side of the building to fill my tires, and topped them all off to 34 (topped off the spare to it's recommended 60).
When I put air in the bad tire, I instantly saw the green liquid from the can ooze out from between the rim and the tire, telling me I'd likely gotten debris between them, which was the cause of the leak. I drove across the street to the visitor center, and the guy there told me there was a shop just down the street that could help me with the tire (wish the gas station guy had told me about them). For $20 Cn, the guys at the shop cleaned off the rim and reseated the tire, and it has been fine since.
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