Mustang vs the States: leg four

The greatest distance for the fewest amount of states. Tom Ford and Charlie Turner leave America in search of another bit of... America

Turns out that the first thing you notice, when settling into the cabin of a car that's been occupied solely by adult males non-stop for the past few hundred hours, is the smell. The kind of latent musk that seeps from pores fed with a drive-by diet and watered by sticky caffeine sweats means that this Mustang is not somewhere I'd like to put someone with a fragile immune system. Because they would die. The outside is much the same, now a scuffed and muted ruby, the front scarred with legion insectile suicides and the passenger's side plastered with stickers from every state - a graphic diary of success and inexorable, grinding distance. There aren't many places left to fill: 45 flags already decorate the Stang's flank. But we're nowhere near done. America is - as we have been discovering - really quite distressingly big, and to tick off the next in the series, most of our road miles won't even be in the USA. Editor-in-chief Charlie Turner and I will be driving all the way through British Columbia in Canada to the US state of Alaska. And then back down the same road to Las Vegas, Nevada, via Oregon. With no time to waste, we salute Ollie and Justin, and head out from the shadow of Seattle's Space Needle. We've got a ferry to catch, and exactly 1,001.5 miles between us and it.

This feature originally appeared in the December 2014 issue of Top Gear Magazine. 

Words: Tom Ford and Charlie Turner

Pictures: Charlie Turner and Rowan Horncastle

Mustang vs the States: leg one

Mustang vs the States: leg two

Mustang vs the States: leg three

Mustang vs the States: leg four

Mustang vs the States: the final leg

It's good to get going. The Stang still feels strong and vital despite the abuse it's probably suffered in the hands of most of the TopGear office up to this point. Yes, the clutch and 'box are probably more vintage than they were just a scant few days ago - and that diff thumps like a truck - but the interior is holding up impeccably, and the engine purrs away up front like it's just getting into its stride. Unfortunately, we aren't getting into ours - Seattle traffic means we spend the first couple of hours of our journey heading north staring at an endless sea of crimson brakelights. It's 3pm.

We track north out of Washington State on I5, burbling gently through Mount Vernon and Bellingham before striking out on minor roads to hit the smaller Canadian border at Sumas, a tactic we thought might save some time. It doesn't, and we grind to a halt in border traffic for nearly two hours. After a chafingly dull wait, Charlie turns his ineffable charm on the female border guard, inevitably leading to us being hauled up for a detailed search and interview. This bit doesn't go well.

"Is it a coincidence that your name is Tom Ford and you're driving a Ford car from Ford Motor Company?" asks the customs officer suspiciously, managing to look in two directions simultaneously. "Well, I'm not an incredibly wealthy gay fashion icon!" I blurt. The customs officer looks confused, and then a bit angry. We are delayed further.

Eventually, among a furrow of suspicious looks and a surprisingly coquettish smile from a burly uniform, we are released into Canada and turn right onto the Trans-Canada Highway. We run through Chilliwack and turn leftish at the town of Hope, before relaxing and settling into a mile-eating lope, but despite the Stang's obvious abilities in the marathon sphere, we aren't going to get as far as we hoped. Charlie books us a hotel "not too far away", and not one of those "nasty chain hotels". I trust him. Four and a half hours later and a fuel stop away, we are driving down a dirt road somewhere north of a place called 100-Mile House, in the pitch black, slaloming cows.

"Cow," intones Charlie as we slither around a huge black bovine shape lying in the carriageway, as if identifying that it was not, in fact, a dragon. It's getting creepy, we're deep in a BC forest, and the hotel is, according to the directions, some 15km from the nearest road. Phones have stopped working, but it's late, we're out of options, and we need to sleep. We roll into a ranch, lit by the soft, warm glow of 40-watt bulbs, and a lovely lady called Myrna ushers us into a small log cabin with bunk beds. We can just make out the glittery expanse of a lake a few hundred yards away, and the cabin is warm and smells of pine. Exhausted, pleased that we're not going to be murdered by banjo-wielding woodsmen, it feels like heaven as we fall into bed. Early next morning, it turns out that it doesn't just feel like heaven.

It actually is.

John and Myrna Barkowsky have run this place, called Spring Lake Ranch, for over three decades. It's a place you can rent a cabin, but also used to, and sometimes still does, function as a refuge for troubled teens. It's also idyllic enough to make your teeth ache. It sits on a goodly expanse of picture-perfect lake, and there are ducks and eagles and horses and deer. The ranch cats are as attentive as spaniels, and if you leave a Mustang still for long enough, John will brand it. As we discovered. Apparently, anything bearing his mark, he technically owns - a practical joke followed by the kind of generous laugh that makes Father Christmas seem like a withered old curmudgeon. Myrna cooks us breakfast, and we head off a whole lot brighter than when we started. But we have to go. The road does not wait.

Next up is a place called Terrace. It's supposed to be an easy 600ish-mile 12-hour stint, but turns into much more, mainly because of logging trucks, low speed limits and scenery that causes you to involuntarily slow down, just to take it all in. There's not exactly much to do for a passenger: navigation consists of hooking one left from the '97 onto the I16 at a small town called Prince George and tracking the scenery. There is a lot of scenery. Gorges with wide rivers looping through the bottoms, capped with the dancing froth of whitewater rapids. Many, many trees - mainly spruce and cedar and northern hemlock - ranked and endless, and unnamed mountains stoic against a steel-grey sky. We track through Houston and Smithers, stopping to look at the world's largest fly-fishing rod (surprisingly big, joyously pointless), past the Babine Mountains and Seven Sisters. Every corner brings a fresh, horizon-wide vista, and there are no big towns - just little hamlets, utilitarian and haphazard. It's a beautiful, wild place, even now, but even though you start the day awed, the scale and beauty is a little eroded by the sheer expanse and endlessness of the drive. Imagine the Highlands of Scotland to 200 per cent scale, and then stretched over one hundred times the area. After a couple of days, you tend to want to see something other than a tree.

We sleep in Terrace, which turns out to be a practical, unpretentious town, and then head to Prince Rupert the next morning. It's an easy drive, but as we near the coast, the mist rolls in and lurks in unlikely places, making it feel more than a little spooky. At one point, the road dips and then rises in the distance on a long straight - and simply disappears from bright sunshine into a vague opaque blur. Like driving past the edge of reality. We arrive in PR, and wait for the ferry across the bottom curve of the Gulf of Alaska to Ketchikan - we will next see land in our first sticker-state. More waiting, then through the US border control - we're heading back into United States territory, so I force Turner into silence with a few sharp prods - and then we're on the boat, along with just five other cars and 24 other people, on a ferry that can cope with 750. It means there are few witnesses to what happens next, when the humpback whales start leaping out of the water and slapping their immense tails against the sea not 100ft from the boat. We can see that this is a sizeable pod from the blowhole spume trails, but several adults are showing off, leaping about like animate rocky islands. It's humbling to see, though I keep expecting David Attenborough's voice to murmur explanations. It's a bit disappointing when it never happens.

We arrive in Ketchikan, on Revillagigedo Island on the southern portion of Alaska's - ahem - ‘Inside Passage' region at night, and apply our singular sticker from the past 1,500 miles. It feels like a frontier, even now. Possibly a little touristy - the main sources of income these days are commercial fishing and the wallet-lightening of cruise liners - but small and pretty and exciting. A staging post for adventures. Next morning, and at a loose end until the ferry back in the evening, we decide to visit Gravina Island in the Alexander Archipelago, upon which is built Ketchikan's local, decent-sized airport. Unfortunately, due to some rather haphazard planning, the bridge that was supposed to connect the Revillagigedo ‘mainland' never got built, seeing as it would have restricted access to the financially important mega ships. So the airport is isolated a five-minute ferry ride away, surrounded by a half-formed and then hastily aborted road network. Basically, Gravina is like a giant rally stage - huge, wide gravel roads through ancient, stunted forests, with roads that simply... stop. The Mustang is most excellent fun here, mainly because it's a 5.0-litre, rear-wheel-drive Mustang on deserted gravel roads. There may have been incidences of stonechips. There were certainly incidences of sideways. Almost worth the trip on its own.

After playing for a while, we seek out some of Ketchikan's usual domestic transport - floatplanes. There are hundreds of these pontoon-pointed seaplanes constantly buzzing overhead - used like taxis and entirely common - but to an Englishman, utterly romantic. Charlie seriously considers a change of career to piloting a De Havilland DHC-2 Beaver, and then revises his opinion when informed of the danger. It reinforces the notion that we are on the edge of an expanse - where the only way to get where you want to go from this point on takes more than a car. Appropriate: the Tongass National Forest to the north stretches to a place called Yakutat Bay for 17 million acres. Back to the mainland, and a few hours before the ferry back, we drive around the bottom of Alaska, through Alice-in-Wonderland chromium-green forests, marvelling at rivers full of salmon. Until that is, you realise that they are all dying after spawning, and the entire place stinks to high heaven of rotting fish. Attenborough's dulcet tones again fail to make an appearance, so we head back to the ferry.

The boat back to Canada takes a while. It is glass calm on the water, and no lights to see, other than those we bring. If I didn't know better, it would feel like we were on a spaceship, gliding through the void. There are bunkbeds again and no windows. The less said about that, the better. A repeat of the America/Canada border for a few hours, and then the cold, hard realisation of what's been in the back of our minds all along - we are about to reprise the entire journey, a day later. Pat Devereux happily texts us to joke that to get to our rendezvous in Nevada in time, we will have to average some 40mph, even when asleep. It doesn't help. What follows is a gravelly eyed lesson in déjà vu. Back down through Prince Rupert and Terrace, Prince George and the rest. We are making progress, the Mustang howling down through the gorges day and night, feeling like a low-flying aeroplane. The big, sweeping curves suit it, the speeds brisk but safe, just how the V8 likes to play. You can feel the new independent rear suspension soaking up bumps that would have disturbed the old car, and there's a new fluency to the way the 2015 carves, but with this heavy 5.0-litre - there's a lighter four-cylinder with 300+bhp due for Europe - it feels like an evolved Mustang rather than a revolution. Still, a V8 Mustang on these roads is exactly what's called for. Fitness for purpose. Eventually we make it to the US border, back at Sumas, after a blur of road and the barely touched blandness of roadside motels. We sail through the border in 10 minutes - a shock - and note that in 2,500-odd miles, we have added but one sticker to the Mustang's tally.

We whip down through Washington, clipping Oregon on the I84 for another state, eventually stopping in Ontario just outside Idaho. At some point during the evening, I allowed Turner to drive, which resulted in us having a roadside conversation with a very polite policeman at around 11pm. This would be, in the entirety of the trip, the only traffic stop, and the new Mustang's first ever. Bleak looks were exchanged. Next day encompassed Idaho, turning due south at Twin Falls and heading into Nevada (our 48th state), where the land slides gently into the desert and we briefly detoured to the Extraterrestrial Highway on the 375, looking for aliens. We found none, though there were a couple of flashes of white, just in the edges of our vision - but, then, we were a bit tired. The rest can be encompassed in the halo of two Stang headlights, a flat parabola of vision that lit nothing but highway. A time-lapse of life that ticked off the twin axes of time and distance. Right up until Las Vegas popped up out of the desert like a vomitous neon fountain, and I knew we were nearly finished.

After so much contemplation of nature, Vegas, with its fizzing, fluorescent heartbeat and endless wash of all-consuming humanity, is a shock. Strip clubs and gambling. Mega hotels and plastic. Life and death in the course of a weekend. We celebrate our epic stint to bag the fewest states by having a quiet few drinks. Unfortunately, the drink in question is Mescal and, like many lost weekends, the ensuing unquiet chaos is best never, ever spoken of again. Next morning, we meet a staunchly sober Pat, and send him on his way for the short drive to California, and the final stage of our United States of Mustang. Good luck, Pat. You get the glory ride home. You just need to make it to the finish line now. No pressure.

Click through the gallery for more images from this leg, then hit the blue words below for the next one. 

Mustang vs the States: leg one

Mustang vs the States: leg two

Mustang vs the States: leg three

Mustang vs the States: leg four

Mustang vs the States: the final leg