Thomas’ Bear Story (by Peter)

Seeing as Thomas' story of our collision with the bear is either the highlight or lowlight of our trip (depending on one's perspective), I will not steal his thunder by revealing any details, but I will give you my personal reaction to our little incident on the Alcan Highway.

As much as one prepares for a 13,000 mile road trip of this nature, and builds in all the redundancies one can think of to assure a failure-free trip, how does one account for a collision with a bear?  After the collision I did notice how many semis and pickup trucks have a “cattle guards” or “brush guards” mounted onto the front of their truck.  We obviously didn’t.

Amazingly the air bags did not explode.  We still don’t know why.

If the bear had been a couple of inches taller than the front bumper of the truck, vital parts of our truck would have been demolished and we would have been stranded.  Upon inspection we discovered that our truck has four radiators – one each for cooling the engine, the transmission, the power steering, and I can’t recall the fourth one.  Damage to any of these radiators would have stopped us in our tracks.

The next morning when I fired up the truck at six in the morning I was nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs watching the heat gauge rise on the radiator.  If we had even so much as a minor leak, we would have lost fluid while parked overnight.  It was with a great sense of relief that I watched the heat gauge settle in at the same spot and stay there.

Before purchasing our 2007 Dodge 2500 Cummins 5.0 turbo-diesel, we did a lot of research on the ideal pickup truck for this trip.  It has performed for us flawlessly.  It has not missed a beat, knock on wood – not even a flat tire.