Chapter 55 - Whitehorse to Anchorage
June 22, 2000
6/1/00 Greetings from Whitehorse, Capital of the Yukon Territory. We're staying at Hi Country RV Park because it advertised "24 hour Internet connection". It turned out to be the biggest and most complete of the RV Parks in the Whitehorse area, and it's a good thing we arrived early. It was nearly full when we got here, and by late afternoon all of the sites with hookups appeared to be occupied, mostly due to the presence of two caravans.
A caravan is a (usually commercial) tour group of RV's. The entire itinerary is pre-arranged by the tour leaders. Generally two individuals or couples are paid to handle details and problems. One leader actually leads - the first RV to leave a camp, the first to arrive at the next one. Another is the "tailgunner", always the last to leave and available to help anyone who has problems along the designated route. Generally, everyone stays in contact via pre-arranged channels on CB or FRS radios. Participants are given printed copies of detailed mile-by-mile travel and sightseeing directions, and usually have some freedom to travel at their own pace or stop at their own preference of tourist attractions along the way. In the afternoon of each travel day, everyone arrives at a specified RV Park. Optional group side-trips are pre-arranged - via boat, bus, car pool, or whatever. It's an easy and almost risk-free way to travel, requiring little individual planning or initiative but still in the comfort of one's own RV.
One large caravan here is entirely German-speaking Europeans, driving small rented Class C motorhomes and accompanied by bi-lingual leaders. This RV Park seems to cater explicitly to European visitors, with French and German speaking staff available in the office.
Internet connections have gotten to be easy again, now that I've figured out how to make my computer automatically dial calling-card calls. But the Canadian number for the Escapees calling card doesn't work in the Yukon, and I was reduced to using the backup AT&T calling card, which is much more expensive. Our ISP doesn't have a Canadian 800 number, and had local numbers only in the major Canadian cities. Whitehorse doesn't count as "major", even though it is the territorial capital. AOL users will be happy up here - their Canadian 800 number works in the Yukon. (The bad news is that it costs $16/hour everywhere in Canada).
While in Whitehorse, I signed up for a Titan Global Communications Card. I had to wait a few hours to get the account established, after a brief phone call. It's very convenient in that they have an 800 number or a local number almost everywhere in the world, and calling this number connects me directly to my existing ISP with no extra steps and no need to change ISP. I'm not sure exactly what I'll be paying, but setting up the account is free, there's a $3/month charge only in months when the card is actually used, and usage costs seem to be in the range of $.06 to $.25 per minute depending on calling location. Their directory of access numbers for the world is built-in to the Titan dialer, so it only takes a few mouse clicks to get on-line from anywhere.
Whitehorse is very interesting. It is relatively young, since most of its history begins with the Klondike gold rush of 1898, when Whitehorse was a staging point on the route to the gold fields, further north near Dawson. The construction of the Alaska Highway during World War II created substantial growth, and the next major growth spurt wasn't until 1953, when Whitehorse became the Territorial Capital. The cold, relatively dry climate helps preserve wood and metal items, so that artifacts from the gold rush era are plentiful, fill several small museums, and figure prominently in the décor of the town. Artifacts from the construction of the Alaska Highway also are common. Our campground has a row of World War II military vehicles sitting beside the driveway.
Gold mining is still active in several gold fields scattered between Whitehorse and Dawson - and there are apparently still quite a few individuals making a living from small placer mining operations. The miners are common enough to be a recognizable and often humorously caricatured group - big and burly, full-bearded, strong-willed and individualistic. Sort of like lumberjacks in the Paul Bunyan era in the U.S. Like any caricature, I expect that it is often wrong, and that there are plenty of skinny meek-mannered miners.
Part of the charm of the place is in the strong contrasts among the many "colorful characters", the relatively conventional-looking local government office workers, and the typical camera-toting tourists (speaking several languages).
The Macbride Museum is small but interesting. It spans a wide range of topics concerning the human and geological history of the Yukon, but concentrates on the gold mining era. Sam McGee's home has been moved there. Sam was a real person, a long-term resident of the area, and a friend of Robert Service. However, he had little in common with the character by that name in the Robert Service poem. Service simply liked the sound of the name and asked his friend for permission to use the name in the fictional story.
We were curious about the Yukon Arts Center, and found an attractive modern building on a bluff with a panoramic view overlooking the city and the river valley. Most of the building is occupied by a theater, where a Shakespeare play was in rehearsal by a local group. One wing of the building houses an art museum, which was almost entirely devoted to several traveling exhibits of contemporary Canadian artists.
We drove out to Miles Canyon and hiked along the riverbanks. At this point, the Yukon Rivers squeezes through a narrow passage hemmed in by high rock walls, forming difficult rapids. It was a challenging barrier along the original Gold Rush route. Many lives were lost running the rapids until the Canadian Mounties instituted a licensing system which allowed only expert boatmen to run the rapids, and requiring most passengers to walk around. Today, a dam downstream has raised the water level and the rapids are mostly gone.
6/2 Helen spent a successful day at the Yukon Archives, finding documentation on an ancestor who was a very successful gold miner in the early days of the Klondike gold rush, and then a hotel owner in Dawson City. We'll probably hunt up his original claim when we get to Dawson City, and go stand on it. The hotel burned down - we can't go visit it.
6/3 Two small museums today: Beringia is a natural history museum. Beringia is the name of a region extending from central Yukon west through portions of Alaska and the Bering Strait into Siberia, distinguished by being dry and not covered by glaciers during the last ice age. It is believed to be the corridor through which several successive waves of humans and animals moved from Asia to North America during a period of about 30,000 years. The museum explains this migration with interpretive displays, simple dioramas, a few skeletons of extinct animals, and several impressive "stuffed animals" - very clever and realistic simulations of extinct animals. An 18-minute video also traces the geological and biological history of the area.
Many of the fossils which support this view of history were preserved in permafrost and were found by gold miners in the Dawson City area. Gold mining continues to be a major source of fossils for the research community. A few extinct animals from the Beringia period have been found almost intact - still with skin and flesh - because of the permanently frozen soil. Several previously extinct plants have been successfully grown from 20,000-year-old seeds found in the stomach of one of these frozen animals.
The Museum of Transportation is a collection of artifacts and storyboards presenting the history of human transportation in the Yukon - by water, rail, dogsled, and early automobile. It's a low-budget operation, but very interesting. Aviation is covered mostly by photos and storyboards, with only one complete airplane and a few bits and pieces. Flying was extremely dangerous, and most of the early planes had a short life. One well-known bush pilot was described as "one of the few who survived to retirement age". A few early vehicles are on display - including a fascinating 1910 heavy truck with 4-wheel-drive and 4-wheel steering. A well-preserved 3/4-ton 4-wheel-drive Dodge "Suburban" was also on display.
After hearing for months about the dangers of rocks thrown by large high-speed trucks on the gravel roads to the north, I finally added one small defense. A local hardware store provided a yard of "hardware cloth" (a heavy 1/4"-mesh steel screen), which I cut to fit in front of the radiator, behind the grille. I also added a layer of aluminum window screen, attached to the hardware cloth, to catch bugs. Quick and easy (and invisible). We could continue driving with a cracked windshield or headlight, but a hole in the radiator would spoil our day (and probably spoil the next week or two).
6/4 We left Whitehorse this morning and soon turned north onto the Klondike Highway - a modern paved highway, but much less traveled than the Alaska Highway. This road was built around 1900 as a supply route for the many mines between Whitehorse and Dawson City. In that era, it was traversed by horse-drawn passenger or freight wagons, which stopped three times a day to change horses and let the passengers eat, sleep, and warm up in one of a chain of 50 roadhouses along the way. We stopped at the ruins of one such roadhouse. The modern road uses a somewhat different route and only overlaps the original road in a few places.
This is probably the least-populated road we've ever driven. Over the 325 miles between Whitehorse and Dawson City, we saw perhaps three villages (the largest having a population of a few hundred, the smallest being just a name, with no visible buildings). Each of these communities does have gas and diesel fuel, so that's not a concern. Outside these villages, I remember seeing only two or three individual buildings along the highway. Along the way, there are several dead-end spur roads leading east to mining operations and tiny settlements.
The road loosely follows the Yukon River, sometimes adjacent to the river, but more often up on the hillsides. Low, rounded mountains define the horizon. We're hemmed in by spruce/aspen forest, with no fences and no evidence of logging or agriculture. At several points, we drove through mile after mile of dead fire-blackened forest in various stages of regeneration. The aspen quickly colonize a burned area, forming a dense waist-high ground cover after about five years. The spruce come later, in the shade of the aspens, and eventually out-grow and displace the short-lived aspens, forming a climax forest of pure spruce (except in wet bottomlands, where we occasionally saw willow thickets).
Midway in the trip, we began to see a white horizontal streak of earth in the road cuts, near but not at the surface. We later read that is it ash, deposited over a wide area in 700 A.D. by an unidentified volcano somewhere in Alaska - perhaps now buried under a glacier.
The highway is excellent - generally smooth with adequately wide lanes. Traffic is almost non-existent. Three or four big trucks passed us southbound during the day. We shared the pullouts with a few other RV's, and saw a few "local" cars and pickup trucks.
We stopped for the night at Moose Creek Provincial Park - wide level gravel campsites nicely spaced out in the woods, all the free firewood we can burn, a hand pump for water, and no other services. For C$8.00/night (US$5.60), who can complain? (Two weeks later, we stayed in an RV Park where a small bundle of firewood cost $5.50!) The only catch is that a one-night camping permit has to be purchased in advance at a Visitor's Center, government office, or one of a handful of private businesses (and the nearest may be 100 miles away). Yukon has had so much trouble with thefts from the self-registration lockboxes that they no longer accept money at the campgrounds. They have established a $500 fine for camping without one of these permits. This is causing much difficulty for tourists who didn't bother to read the literature provided at the Visitor's Centers, and on signs at rest stops along the highway.
To celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary, we went out for dinner at the only restaurant for many miles - the Moose Creek Lodge, on the highway a few hundred yards from the campground. For dinner, we each had a large, surprisingly good cheeseburger and fresh-baked pie with ice cream. This turned out to be an interesting place to visit. It's in a very old log cabin, with floors so uneven that you can lose your balance walking across a room. Small rooms, low ceilings, tiny windows, a patchwork of many generations of cement chinking trying to seal up the cracks between the logs, and a tin roof (it rained briefly while we were eating - rain on a tin roof is an experience not to be forgotten. A tin roof, of course, is actually thin corrugated galvanized steel sheets, containing little or no tin.)
The grounds were interestingly decorated with rustic sculpture. We saw a large moose, a beaver, and some birds, all assembled from appropriately shaped pieces of burl-deformed spruce or aspen trees. (A burl is a plant "cancer", forming a (sometimes very large) knob of uncontrolled and chaotic growth on the side of a tree trunk.)
One of the small old log outbuildings has been carefully furnished like an early trapper's cabin. It was quite depressing to think about spending a winter in that tiny space. The gift shop has a selection of attractive bowls, locally carved from burls.
6/5 On to Dawson City. The road remained good all the way - a couple of short stretches of smooth gravel, but otherwise smooth pavement. Dave saw a black bear in the ditch beside the road, but wildlife in general seems very scarce compared to further south.
Quote from a local brochure: "Dawson City, like most of the Yukon, is underlaid with permafrost - permanently frozen ground. The town is located on swampy ground with poor drainage at the confluence of two major river systems. Because of this, the building conditions are some of the worst in the world."
"When the upper portion of the permafrost thaws during the summer months, the ground shifts and building materials lose their support. It can cause walls to crack and buildings to lean dangerously. Permafrost is also one of the reasons why the streets of Dawson aren't paved. Rocks are continually forced to the surface during the freeze-thaw cycles. Repairs would have to be made year-round, and the costs would be prohibitive."
"Most of the buildings and homes in Dawson sit above ground on thick wooden pads, set on gravel beds. In between the gravel and the floor of the structure is an all-important crawl space, to ventilate building heat away from the ground. Permafrost also affects Dawson's water supply. The water temperature is so cold that if left standing in pipes, it would freeze solid. For this reason, Dawson's water and sewer systems are constantly kept moving."
"The potable water is pumped to two reservoirs where it is chlorinated and heated to 41 degrees F. before entering the system. The city's water pipes are also wrapped with heat tape and then enclosed in an insulated pipe - at double the cost of water systems in the south. The city's water mains flow in closed loops to prevent freezing. In the winter, all the residents of Dawson turn on their "bleeder" systems which flush water through household pipes at the rate of one litre per minute into the sewer system, to keep the pipes from freezing."
6/6 We're camped at Bonanza Gold RV Park - tucked into a corner between Bonanza Creek and the Klondike River. The campground is modern - with full hookups including cable TV and a complete Internet-connected computer available in the office for $5.00/half hour. Some campsites are wired for phone, although only 4 lines are available to be patched to the campsites. I negotiated a flat $5.00 charge to use only the computer phone line in the office, with my own ISP and an 800 number, for Email as often as I like for the few days we're here. Can't complain about the price: the extra phone line costs her $52.00/month.
The first really major gold find in this region was on Bonanza Creek just a few miles upstream from the campground. The entire valley turned out to have significant amounts of gold, and the big dredges have churned up the entire valley floor, some of it three times over the years, each time with progressively better recovery technology. The RV Park is on previously dredged gravel, now bulldozed smooth. The gravel glitters in the sunlight due to mica, schist, and white quartz crystals. All around us is a wasteland of piles of gravel with water-filled depressions in-between. Pieces of huge mining equipment have been abandoned, more or less randomly among the piles of gravel.
Dawson city impressions: Wide smooth streets - but they are all dusty gravel. National Parks money is gradually restoring the more significant old buildings, and some are spruced up to look quite fancy. It's a race against time - other buildings are tilted at a crazy angle by the permafrost, and look like they will fall down any day. Pleasant waterfront with views of the Klondike and Yukon River. Several lookout points on the mountain behind the city. Boardwalk sidewalks. The Dawson General Store is a fairly complete grocery store, with a bakery. We bought some excellent fresh-baked french bread. The photo shop has a one-hour photo machine. It's been broken for a few days. They are expecting a technician to fly in from somewhere down south to fix it, but not for another week or so.
It's 78 degrees this afternoon, and a bright sun is beating down on the trailer (shade trees are almost unheard of up here). Fortunately, there's a light breeze blowing or we'd be running the air conditioner - rather surprising at 64 degrees latitude in early June.
We visited the historical archives in the Dawson City Museum, and found several references to Charlie Worden and two of his brothers (Helen's distant relatives). The mine he co-owned employed 35 men all year, for several years. The house he owned was listed in a buildings survey in 1979. Then, a few years later, an update to the survey noted that the building had fallen down and was then demolished. There are many vacant lots in town - presumably other buildings that fell down or burned.
A local advertisement says: "Play golf 24 hours a day at Canada's most northerly golf course." Indeed, when we went to bed last night, well after midnight, it was still broad daylight. The sun disappeared behind a mountain at about 11:30, but was still illuminating the mountain tops to the east until considerably later. It's hard to get enough sleep - we don't really want to go to bed and waste the daylight and nice weather.
There's no bridge across the Yukon River here. We went down and looked at the ferry dock yesterday. The free government ferry runs more or less continuously - not on a schedule, but back and forth as traffic demands. The ferry "dock" is a pile of gravel pushed into the river, with the fast river current constantly eating it away. A bulldozer is parked nearby to push more gravel to the shore to replace the erosion, or to change the height of the ramp as the river height changes. The boat looks long enough to handle our rig - but just barely. A big sign up on the riverbank says - Warning: damage to low slung and long vehicles possible. We take no responsibility". That's us - low slung and long. If we can't make it across on the ferry, it's a 700-mile detour via the next crossing south - back down at Whitehorse. But the bulldozer has been doing its job and the ferry ramp is currently quite level, so I don't expect a problem.
While we were at the dock, the ferry lifted its hydraulic ramp and began to back out into the river, then stopped, reversed its engines again, and pulled back into shore. Two blocks up the street, a small RV was coming toward the dock. The ferry waited, and the RV was waved on board. How's that for customer service?
6/7 We took a 60-mile drive through mining country - up Bonanza Creek, up El Dorado creek a short distance and back (a dead end), then over a 3500-foot-high mountain ridge and down Hunker Creek to the main highway. These creeks were the richest in the early days of the gold rush, and are still being actively mined. The roads are passable, but not fancy - built and maintained primarily to support the mines. This particular route is also promoted as a tourist route, and has a few interpretive signs along the way. Dredge #4, the biggest bucket dredge ever built, sits about 5 miles up Bonanza Creek. It began operation in the 1930's. It originally worked in other areas along the Klondike River, but then spent many years working its way up Bonanza Creek, starting at the Klondike River and processing essentially all the gravel (and a few feet of bedrock) of the entire valley bottom. It had progressed five miles up the creek (at half a mile per year) before being shut down by declining gold prices. It was abandoned and sank in its pond in 1960. The National Park eventually re-floated the dredge, moved it onto a permanent gravel pad, and is now in the process of restoring it as a museum. After sinking, the boat, with its entire contents, froze solid (surrounded by permafrost), effectively preserving everything below the water line. The machinery looked like all it would need to begin operating again is a little oil.
This floating dredge is a self-contained monster. It digs up gravel and soft bedrock with a chain of huge buckets at the front, to a depth of up to 50 feet. This material is dumped into a huge rotating separator, and the fine material is washed down a long ramp where the heavy particles of gold are trapped by on the bottom, and the lighter material is washed out the back onto a conveyor belt which stacks the processed material far out behind the dredge. It floats in a pond about 300 feet long that it digs itself. The pond gradually moves up the valley, as the dredge nibbles away at the leading edge and fills in the trailing edge. By pivoting the entire boat around an anchor point at the back, the bucket chain can move from side to side, digging a pond up to 500 feet wide. Early dredges were steam-powered. This "modern" dredge uses electric motors - the largest being 300 horsepower. The electricity was generated at a hydroelectric plant on the Yukon River 30 miles away, transmitted to the boat over high voltage wires.
This was the third time that most of this material had been processed for gold, using increasingly effective techniques over the years, so there was very little gold left. The huge volume of rock processed only resulted in a few pounds of gold per week. The gold from this area is about 85% pure, the major impurity being silver. We were surprised to hear that the large nuggets of gold were sold directly to the jewelry trade. The fine gold flakes and dust were locally melted into ingots before shipment.
We were able to see the approximate area where Helen's distant relatives staked their claim and got rich, but we couldn't drive quite all the way there (the road forded El Dorado Creek, which was running strongly enough so that we didn't attempt to cross). There was little hope of identifying the specific spot, since the subsequent dredging has terraformed the entire valley floor, and the stream has been moved around as needed, to supply water to the mining operations. The valley floors, and some of the flat benches up on the sides of the valleys, are a mess - torn up by mining, with relatively little reclamation work. Even so, the area looks better now than it did in photos of the gold rush days. Back then, massive amounts of wood were burned to melt the permafrost to enable the miners to dig, and the entire area was denuded of trees. Now, the forests have grown back and the hillsides are green.
Mining is still very active throughout the region. As we drove, we saw many sites where work was underway. The economy of the region derives from mining, tourism, and very little else. Gold prices are too low to make it profitable, but the mines have to be kept operating at a minimal level in order to retain the government mining leases. Much of the work is small-scale - sometimes just one individual or a family, operating a modest sluice box with a couple of pieces of power equipment to dig the "paydirt". The entire Yukon produced 101,000 ounces of gold in 1998 (the most recent year for which data has been processed). At about $300/oz, this is 30 million dollars, or about $1000 per Yukon resident. In the peak year of 1900, production was about 10 times this amount - one million ounces.
6/8 Hooked up the trailer and headed for Alaska. We had to wait for half an hour or so at the ferry (it only holds about 8 cars). A huge tank truck was ahead of us, filling over half the space on one trip, and a couple of RV's filled much of the space on another trip. We took up almost half the space when we finally were loaded. Getting on and off the ferry was simple - the ramps were level and the space was adequately wide. The ferry pilot messed up his landing as we arrived at the other side. The river current sweeps rapidly past one side of the landing area, but the protrusion of the gravel "dock" into the flow creates a big reverse eddy through the area where the boat actually docks. So a foot or two sideways makes a big difference. The ferry got its bow a bit too far upstream into the fast river current, and was rapidly turned out and away from the dock by the current. The pilot powered back out into the river, aligned the boat for a new approach, and tried again. The deckhand standing next to us looked over, shrugged, and said, "well - he's got to miss once in a while".
The 55-mile Top of the World Highway from Dawson City to the Alaska border is one of the more scenic drives we've done. It's a two-lane paved road with wide gravel shoulders, no sharp corners, and no unusually steep grades - a fine, easy, road except for a few patches of smoothly graded gravel where repair of winter damage had not yet been completed. This road is not open in the winter - opening about May 1, depending on the weather. The road climbs from about 800 feet at the Yukon River to 3500 feet at the mountain pass near the border. Along the way, a few gravel side roads lead off to mining areas - most notably on 40-Mile Creek, which was prominent in the early gold exploration period. We stopped at nearly every pullout along the road, and often had spectacular views out over several ranges of rounded spruce-carpeted mountains in the foreground, to a backdrop of much higher snow-covered mountains in the distance.
The border crossing back into the U.S. was uneventful - a couple of casual questions and we were on our way. The agent didn't seem interested that we had a few bottles of wine over our limit - I imagine the paperwork to collect the small duty is more trouble than it's worth. At the border, the road deteriorates immediately, becoming gravel with narrow shoulder, occasionally a bit bumpy.
Thirteen miles after the border, we turned north on the Taylor Highway at Jack Wade Junction. This is also a gravel road, still not fully repaired from the winter frost heaves. There are no very sharp turns or unusually steep grades, and in general the road is wide enough to be comfortable. Except for the rough surface, It's a considerably better road than some of the California State Highways we've driven. There is one fairly short portion in the middle of the route where the highway becomes very narrow - down to a single lane in a couple of short stretches. Coming into one of these narrow areas, we met a pair of huge widebody Prevost tour busses coming down as we were going up. Fortunately, the tour busses all use pilot cars, which drive well in advance of the bus with a big warning sign. So we had adequate time to pull to the edge of a wide spot in the road and stop before the busses came past. They were traveling much faster than we were. Apparently, their tandem axles, huge tires, and soft air springs allow them to mostly ignore the bumps. Meeting a widebody RV at one of these spots could be interesting - but we suspect that most RVers will be poking along slowly, just like us, giving adequate time to find a wide spot to pass.
We've heard mixed reports about this road from RVers, and there seems to be a prevailing attitude that it is not suitable for big RV's. We disagree. Once we wrapped our mind around the concept of driving 25 mph for several hours, the road became easy. We could occasionally get up to 40 mph on smooth stretches, and were occasionally down to 15 mph through areas of unrepaired frost heave - but 25 mph is a good planning number.
Long stretches of road, both before and after the border, are above the tree line, in interesting alpine terrain. We saw no wildlife except a couple of marmots (at least we think they were marmots - we don't have a guidebook for this region). Wildflowers were plentiful. In a couple of spots, bright yellow arctic poppies, two-tone blue lupines, and pale blue jacob's ladder were mixed together, densely carpeting a rocky hillside along the road.
It's 61 miles from our turn at Jack Wade Junction to Eagle. It took us about 3 hours, including brief stops at numerous turnouts.
Our bathroom door fell off somewhere along the way, ripping the hinge screws out of the wall. This it the third time this door has failed either due to the screws pulling out of the wall, or the hinges fatiguing and breaking. It's a heavy door with a large mirror on one side and a full-length wooden towel holder and magazine rack on the other side, and the hinges are the tiny decorative kind usually found on small kitchen cabinet doors - dumb design. This time, I'll have to find some heavier hinges and bolt them all the way through the wall. Meanwhile, the door will travel in the middle of the bed.
Eagle is a tiny place on the Yukon River, with many of the buildings dating from the original settlement around 1897, built as a supply point for the steamboats which ran between Dawson City and the Bering Sea. After decaying for many decades, it is just at the beginning of acquiring a veneer of tourist glitz, due to a recent flow of tourists, via excursion boats from Dawson City and tour busses. Few tourists stay the night - there is one shabby motel, one café, and one small no-services BLM campground. The motel also has three or four small scruffy-looking RV parking sites with full hookups and a gorgeous view up river. We chose the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) campground and had an interesting challenge fitting our trailer into one of the small sites. There are a couple of sites that would be very easy to get a big rig into - but they were the only sites occupied (by tenters, of course).
BLM has stabilized and renovated Fort Egbert, an early-1900's fort built to bring law and order to the region, and also several other buildings in the town. The Fort also supported a 1500-mile-long military telegraph line linking Alaska to the south, and closed when radio communications replaced the telegraph. Neither the buildings nor the historical events by themselves are particularly interesting. But it's easy to look past the few examples of recent touristy stuff and see a very rural village that has had very little change. Very few such places still exist. The real reason for our coming here is the trip itself - the scenery along the way, not the destination.
6/10 We retraced our path from Eagle back down to Jack Wade Junction, making better time than when we came up this road (mostly because we didn't stop as often). From there, we continued south on the Taylor Highway - more gravel road, with frequent frost heaves and potholes. This section doesn't seem to have received much maintenance yet this spring. We stopped briefly at "Beautiful Downtown Chicken", a short detour off the highway to the east. It's a cluster of three picturesque old buildings housing a gift shop, liquor store, and café. What's left of the original town of Chicken is on private land just west of the highway - a cluster of abandoned buildings which can be visited via private tour. We didn't. Tradition says that the original occupants of the town wanted to name it Ptarmigan, but couldn't spell it, and settled on Chicken instead. (A common name for Ptarmigan is "Prairie Chicken").
While we were here, the famous "big red bus" pulled in for a brief stop. We've encountered this contraption at least twice before (and described it in an earlier report). The rear portion of the bus has a fold-out tent on one side, and a three-deck arrangement of tiny sleeping cubicles for about 25 people. The front half has large windows and seating for the people. A complete field kitchen folds out of storage compartments. Each time we've encountered this bus, the passengers have been speaking German. Other people have mentioned seeing this thing, all over the western U.S. and Canada - so we suspect there is actually a fleet of them. It may be the cheapest way to tour North America - but those sleeping compartments look very claustrophobic, and you'd better hope that your neighbor doesn't snore.
Chicken is notable mainly as the place where the pavement starts again. From here south to Tetlin Junction was good paved highway (with the usual stretches of gravel where the road was being rebuilt). A week after we drove through here, unusually warm weather and heavy rains accelerated the snow melt on the mountains, and a flooding stream washed out the road just south of Chicken. A landslide buried another section of road. Many tourists - in busses, cars, and RV's - were stranded in Eagle and Chicken. The tour bus companies were flying their passengers out. The road was re-opened (one lane only) after about 4 days - fast work.
At Tetlin Junction, we rejoined the Alaska Highway and the parade of RV's bound for Fairbanks or Anchorage. On the detour up to Eagle, we saw very few other vehicles and hardly any RV's. On the Alaska Highway, there is plenty of traffic - and 80% of it is RV's. Most of the RV's we see up here are quite small - many slide-in truck campers and van conversions, with the rest mostly small class C motorhomes (bread truck conversions) and fairly short trailers. There are a few larger motorhomes, but very few of the expensive models. We haven't seen a bus conversion or a high-end diesel pusher yet.
Tok is at the junction of the roads to Anchorage and Fairbanks, and advertises that every tourist who passes through here will return. It's largely true - the only way into or out of Alaska by road goes through Tok. It's not much of a town, but has most of the things needed by travelers - several RV Parks, motels, RV repair and service businesses, gas stations, and gift shops, and one each of the other needed businesses - grocery store, post office, liquor store, visitor center, etc. I was surprised to find a reasonably well-stocked hardware store, where I bought new hinges and bolts for our bathroom door. We chose to stay at Tok RV Village - right in the middle of town - since it had full hookups, advertised Internet hookups, and was close to groceries, visitor's center, etc. Apparently, most other people chose this same place. All the full-hookup sites were full, and a large number of electric/water sites were also occupied. On the way out of town, we saw a couple of other places that looked nearly empty.
This RV Park is a very Internet-friendly place. They had small desks with dedicated phone line plugs accessible 24 hours a day at two different points in the park. I spent quite a while on-line, celebrating being back in the USA where we have an inexpensive connection to our ISP. We noticed that the craft shop across the street from the Visitor's Center had a computer and a phone plug-in available at $2.00 for 10 minutes or $3.00 for half an hour.
Catching up on our Email, making some arrangements for when our visitor's arrive in a few weeks, and assorted other chores, made us decide to extend our stay here for another day.
6/12 Up at 4 AM, on the road at 5 AM! People keep telling us the way to see wildlife is to get on the road at dawn. This the earliest we've been up in a long time, and is about as close to dawn as we're likely to get - the sun is already up. We even hooked up last night for a quick get-away. As it turns out, the only wildlife we saw during the day's drive was a few hundred snowshoe hares along the shoulders and a suicidal ground squirrel running in circles in the middle of the highway.
No specific goal in mind today. Somewhere in the lakes and tundra along the Denali Highway, we expect to find a boondocking spot with a mountain view. We headed up the Alaska Highway to its official end at Delta Junction, then turned south on The Richardson Highway.
Along the Richardson, we paralleled the Alaska Pipeline for many miles, passing near two of the pumping stations. Where the pipeline crosses the Denali Fault, we stopped to get up close to the pipe and to read the interpretive signs there. The Denali Fault is one of the chain of faults where the Pacific and North American Plates are grinding together, and has the potential for major earthquakes. For a substantial distance near the fault, the pipeline supports are mounted so that they can slide on long horizontal rails on top of the ground, allowing the ground to move up to 20 feet laterally without rupturing the pipe. The pipe is also designed to withstand a 5-foot vertical ground displacement. For a substantial part of its 1200-mile length, the pipe is above ground on special supports designed to keep heat from flowing down the supports into the permafrost. If the permafrost melted around the pipe supports, the soil would become soupy and the pipe would sink. The supports are actually hollow heatpipes containing a phase-change material, which is a one-way heat transmitter, allowing heat to flow up out of the ground under some conditions, helping to keep the permafrost permanent. In other areas where the ground is suitably stable, the pipe is buried. The oil flowing in the pipe (a million barrels per day) is hot - 150 degrees F. at the wellheads at Prudhoe Bay, and 100 degrees at the terminus at Valdez. If ever allowed to stop flowing and cool, it would become too viscous to pump. I hope to discover when we tour the pipeline terminus at Valdez, what provisions they have made to heat the oil and start up the flow if it ever has to be shut down.
These roads all go through wide river valleys, with parallel mountain ranges generally visible on both sides. Twice during the day, the highway climbed through a mountain pass to make the transition into another valley. These passes aren't a big deal - around 3500 feet elevation, with the valley floors generally above 2000 feet. The roads are well-designed - no steep grades and no sharp turns. But 3500 feet is above the tree line, giving us vast views of taiga and tundra with white topped mountains beyond.
We never seem to run out of spectacular scenery. The Richardson Highway is paved and generally smooth and traffic is almost non-existent. I doubt if we saw more than a dozen other vehicles on the road all day. On several occasions where the scenery demanded attention and no pullout was available, we simply stopped in the middle of the road - never inconveniencing another vehicle because none came along while we were stopped. We are driving fairly slowly, and stopping at nearly every pullout. Helen is going through our film supply at a furious rate.
About half way between Delta Junction and the Glenn Highway junction, we turned west onto the Denali Highway. For miles before and just after this junction, two glaciers were in view to the east. We stopped to top off the fuel tank at the store/restaurant/gas station at the junction. I'm still nervous about diesel fuel availability on these sparsely traveled roads, and seldom let the tank get more than half empty. But so far, there hasn't been any reason to be so conservative. I doubt if we've yet driven more than 50 miles without passing a gas station, and they all seem to have diesel. The prices aren't as high as I expected - this stop was $1.769/gallon.
Just 22 miles along the Denali Highway, we came to an irresistible camping spot and stopped for the night. We've done 210 miles - a typical day's drive for us - in about 7 hours (unusually slow for us). On the other hand, we stopped at noon - almost a new record. We're in a BLM campground on the shore of one of the Tangle Lakes (so named because of their appearance from the air). It's indeed a tangle, with twisty fast-flowing rivers cutting through a random maze of glacial eskers, widening occasionally into lakes - ranging from tiny to several miles long. We chose a campsite on a flat-topped esker, about 30 feet above a noisy fast-flowing river, with a 360-degree view of mountains. The lake, still frozen except for an open patch where the rivers flows in, is spread out below us a few hundred yards to the east. Trees are few - we're at 2800 feet, not far from the tree line.
The campground is free and rather primitive - a few rocky, potholed dirt trails, campsites marked only by the presence of a fire pit and a picnic table, an antique hand pump for drinking water, a few garbage cans, and a couple of pit toilets. It actually feels somewhat luxurious because we weren't expecting to find a campground at all, intending to spend the night at one of the many spots where generations of fishermen and hunters have created unofficial campsites.
While setting up camp, we were startled to see a female moose, with a baby moose, less than 100 feet away. The river below us separates into two channels, divided by a narrow island several hundred yards long. The river is still swollen by snowmelt, and the current is very strong - probably too strong for the baby to swim. We suspect the baby was born on the island, and is trapped there until the river level is lower. No problem for the moose, - the tangle of low alder and willow scrub is providing both shelter and food, and the river helps hide and isolate them from predators. (We read later that only one out of four baby moose will survive their first summer). Having a captive moose family just outside our door makes the campground even more interesting. Mamma moose seems undisturbed by our presence - casually going about her business (of munching on tender young branches from the trees). Baby moose, small enough to walk between mamma's legs, is gamboling around actively, even dashing into water eddys where the current is mild, but seeming to always be within 50 feet of mamma.
While walking through the campground, I was attacked without warning by an Arctic Tern. I had inadvertently walked by its nest, a nearly invisible depression among the rocks. The bird dive-bombed me repeatedly, making a vicious clicking-chattering noise while passing close by my head, not stopping until I retreated to about 100 feet from the nest. This little bird is really intimidating!
There is a profusion of wildflowers - along the highways and in the campgrounds. Almost anywhere we stop, we've found half a dozen varieties with just a short walk. Some are inconspicuous, and others are big and showy. Jacob's Ladder, and Lupine are usually visible along the highway. A small but bright magenta azalea is less common, but beautiful.
6/13 Lazy this morning - not up until 6 AM. On the road at 7. Stopped to camp at noon, after covering only 58 miles! It was all gravel, with enough potholes and washboard to keep us moving slowly. When actually driving, we probably averaged about 25 mph. But we stopped frequently to enjoy the scenery and to look at wildlife. This road is very sparsely traveled, with generally good visibility, and stopping didn't seem to be a problem, even with shoulders being narrow or absent.
At one point, we stopped to watch a large female moose with twin babies - up on the side of a hill among low brush where we had an excellent view. Later, we passed another moose, alone.
We also spotted a nesting pair of trumpeter swans, and spent a long time sitting at the roadside watching, close enough so that we could nearly count the feathers with our 10x binoculars. The nest was sticking up out of shallow water about two feet - a mound perhaps 2 1/2 feet in diameter made of reeds and water plants. The huge bird (up to 8-foot wing span) nearly covered the top of the mound when sitting on the nest. It occasionally stood up, stretched, nudged the eggs with its beak, turned around, and sat back down. Later, it climbed down off the nest and swam around it, pulling more water plants from the bottom of the lake and adding them to the side of the nest. Finally, it swam away from the nest, then flew off, joining its mate, further down the lake. Perhaps 10 minutes later, they flew back together, one going back to nest-sitting the other swimming nearby. The sexes look alike, and we don't know whether male and female share the nest-sitting. Several types of ducks were also swimming around these lakes - always in mated pairs, never flocks.
A skinny long-bodied, short-legged animal ran across the road in front of us - perhaps a mink.
We camped in a large clearing south of the highway at mile 80.3. This long straight clearing looks as though it may have been an airstrip at one time - perpendicular to the highway, half on each side. It's an ideal boondocking site. We're well back from the highway, and have panoramic views of the surrounding mountains, the Susitna River, and a lake. We're just at the tree line, with an occasional spruce tree near by and a dense grove of trees down the hill from us. Hoof marks are all around us in the dried ground, and piles of scat are frequent - probably from caribou. The local caribou herd has gone elsewhere, however - we have yet to see one in Alaska. Yesterday we drove through an area where a large bison herd roams without restraint (and is hunted annually to control the herd size). We didn't see them either.
Clouds thickened all morning, and by the time we settled into camp, it began raining. Good timing! Later in the afternoon, the clouds broke up again, and we enjoyed sunny scenery until bedtime.
Dave hiked a loop out across the taiga for a couple of miles, just to see what it was like. Taiga is a Russian word for which English has no equivalent, and refers to a transitional zone between the boreal forest and the arctic tundra. It was (perhaps facetiously) translated by a tour guide as "land of little sticks", referring to the occasional diminutive trees. We've been mostly in this transitional zone for several days, sliding back and forth between forest and treeless tundra or equally treeless alpine terrain (similar to tundra, but generally not flat).
Walking on the taiga can be challenging. It is often wet, nearly always rough. Small hummocks, often just large enough to hold a small bush or two are carpeted with gray reindeer moss (actually a lichen). These hummocks are separated by crevices typically two feet deep and a foot or more wide. The bottoms of these depressions contain thick sphagnum moss, sometimes dry and feeling like an innerspring mattress under foot, and sometime wet and squishy. Lakes, ranging from tiny ponds to miles long, are frequent. The above conditions are similar to the vast expanses of unbroken tundra further north. Now we understand why travel is easier in the winter, when these areas are frozen solid and some snow fills in the foot-wide crevices.
Occasional areas that are slightly drier have a smoother surface without the crevices and may have spruce trees, ranging from tiny stunted dwarves to 30 foot high specimens that may be 10 inches through at the base and 500 years old. The bigger trees are at least 30 feet apart, even through the trees are narrow columns with branches rarely more than a few feet long. The tree roots seem to effectively suppress the shrubs (and other trees) within this 30-foot circle. These areas, small outposts of boreal forest, are park-like and easy to walk through, with a dry floor of relatively thin sphagnum and reindeer moss. The boreal or alpine trees have very shallow roots - often visible on the surface - and never have a taproot.
6/14 Another fairly early start, and initially another 50 slow miles of rough gravel, similar to the past two days. Not as much wildlife today - a distant moose, a trumpeter swan, a huge porcupine ambling slowly along the roadside ignoring us, the rear end of something large disappearing into the brush far ahead of us.
We finally saw some pingos - a unique feature of the permafrost terrain. These are frozen "fountains" of ice and soil, forced up by the immense pressure of the permafrost below, forming a roughly circular mound ranging from a few feet up to 50 feet high. There is usually a doughnut-shaped pond of open water surrounding the mound.
During the latter part of this drive, we kept looking west at each point where we had a clear view in this direction hoping for a glimpse of Mt. McKinley. It's still about 70 miles away, but it's four miles high, towers far above the surrounding mountains, and should be easily visible. The clouds don't cooperate.
We finally came to the George Parks Highway, a fine paved road extending from near Anchorage to Fairbanks, going through the edge of Denali National Park and Denali State Park about mid-way. The National Park Visitor's Center is only 30 miles north of us, and we still have plenty of time before we need to be in Anchorage, so we decided to go up to the park for a few days.
When we arrived at the Visitor's Center, the campgrounds in the park were all full (of course). We were told that the Park Service begins accepting reservations for the current year in February, and that Teklanika River Campground - 29 miles into the park, and the furthest point accessible to an RV, is fully reserved for the season within a few days! This in spite of the severe restrictions at that campground. There is a minimum three-night stay. A vehicle pass entitles a camper to drive to the campground, but the vehicles must then remain in that campground for the entire stay. A reservation at Teklanika entitles you to buy a shuttle bus pass good for the entire stay. But this pass is good only for travel to the west - further into the park. Travel east - to the store, Visitor's Center, or out of the park - is discouraged and requires purchasing a separate bus ticket, if available, from a limited number allocated each day.
The Park as a whole has only one dead-end road to the interior, 90 miles long. Private vehicles (except for those few campers going to Teklanika) can drive only the first 14 miles, which is paved. Beyond that point, the road is gravel. Shuttle busses, primarily for hikers and backpackers, go the entire distance (a 13-hour round trip), with the freedom get off and re-board, in either direction, at stops along the way.
We purchased tickets for a 7-hour wildlife tour bus early tomorrow, then drove a few miles further north (outside the park) and found that the commercial RV Parks were close and had plenty of space. The first place we stopped was not modem-friendly, so we went on another few miles to Denali RV Park, where we got a full-hookup campsite and a convenient modem connection in the office.
6/15 Up at 4:50 AM to make a 5:50 bus departure in the park. The wildlife tour goes leisurely out to mile 53 (or mile 66 on days when Mt. McKinley is visible). The bus stops in the road whenever anyone yells "stop" - which was fairly frequently. With 36 pairs of eyes searching for wildlife, and the bus often up on a hillside where we had a long view, we saw quite a bit. Small herds of male caribou were frequent. We had one rare sighting of a herd of females with calves. The females retire to a very remote part of the park to give birth, and generally remain there for a month or more until the calves are strong enough to run with the herd and escape predators. The calves we saw were apparently about a month old.
These animals can be called either caribou or reindeer (we've been confused about this). "Reindeer" is the common name for any members of the genus Rangifer of large northern deer, which includes several species in Northern Europe as well as North America. The name "caribou" applies to any of several North American reindeer species. Both sexes look alike and have large antlers, covered with black velvet at this time of year. The older animals have absolutely huge antlers. Interestingly, the males drop their antlers in autumn, right after mating season. The females keep their antlers all winter, dropping them right after the calves are born. So judging from the usual pictures, Santa's reindeer were all female and Rudolph was misnamed.
Dall sheep were also fairly common on the steeper slopes, some groups with numerous young. These are impressive pure-white animals. Both sexes have horns - the female's horns being fairly short and the male's horns growing longer every year until they curve back 360 degrees or more and are several inches thick at the base. Seen up close, they looked a bit ragged, with their very long thick winter fur beginning to shed in clumps. The driver commented that yesterday, the tour watched a sheep give birth on a cliff ledge above the road. The whole process took about 15 minutes.
We also saw: arctic ground squirrel, red squirrel, hoary marmot, long-tailed jaeger, several golden eagles, mew gull (which nests here), northern harrier (or "marsh hawk". This hawk can hover, and even fly backwards, so the Harrier airplane is well-named.)
We didn't see any moose (unusual), and only saw one grizzly bear, at a considerable distance. Our timing was wrong by a few minutes - the bus behind us reported a grizzly sow with two cubs crossing the road just in front of them.
This fact may not fall into the 'wildlife' category, but the tour guide told us there are no worms in the soil here. Decomposition of organic matter, of caribou antlers for example, takes two to three times longer here than in more temperate climates - three years instead of one.
The annual weather cycle for Denali is interesting. Late September, October, and November bring nearly all the snow that falls. By December, the nearby seas (Beaufort, Bering, Pacific Ocean) are frozen over so that there is little evaporation - and the air becomes too dry to snow, despite temperatures well below freezing. The snow that falls in November lasts until spring. April and May have the most clear days with reasonable daylight - the best time of year to see the mountain without obscuring clouds. By June, the ice pack is melted and the air has moisture that forms clouds over the peaks. Total annual rainfall, including snow, is about 12", qualifying it as a desert. But you wouldn't know by looking at it. Where the slope isn't too steep and bare rock isn't jutting out, the mountains are thick with brush (4' willow, alder, and birch) and the ravines and lower valleys are filled with white spruce/aspen forests.
The wide bottoms of the lowest valleys are all gravel, with small water channels braiding them in June. It's hard to imagine how the valleys got so wide with such small streams, until we remember that the glaciers cut these valleys, not the current streams, and while the glaciers were melting, the streams would have been rivers.
Changeable is the byword for the weather in June. On the same day we have had dark clouds with a cold misty rain, and brilliant sun with a blue sky. If the sun is shining, don't count on it lasting. Few days have had more than a few hours without a change in the weather. When the sun shines, it has a lot of warmth, even though the air temperature has not gone high. When it is cloudy, it is chilly. Although the residents are wearing shorts, we won't be. Perhaps July and August will be better.
When it is cloudy, all the vegetation is dark brownish green, the lakes and streams steely gray, and the distant snow covered peaks are lost against the gray sky. When the sun comes out, the scenery is a tapestry in greens, punctuated by tan, red, and black where there is bare rock or gravel. The spruces are dark spiky green, almost black, the aspen and brush is rounded, mounded brighter green, and the near peaks are smooth light gray-green due to the reindeer mosses. Small blue kettle lakes and metallic streams add contrast, the distant peaks gleam white against the blue sky.
Some mountains are so close they seem to loom overhead, and others are picturesque distant jagged white peaks with glaciated valleys.
6/16 Dave decided to go climb a mountain in the park this morning. Mount Healy really isn't much of a mountain, but then I'm not much of a mountain climber either. The trail starts conveniently at the hotel parking lot at 1700 feet altitude. The official trail ends at an overlook at 3400 feet, about 5 miles round trip. But an informal trail continued on up - probably all the way to the real peak at 5800 feet. I stopped at a subsidiary peak somewhere around the 4200-foot level, adding another couple of miles to the trip. There were some interesting patches of wet trail along the lower and flatter portion. A couple of inches of earth had dried and hardened on top of a thick layer of soupy mud, presumably on top of frozen soil. The hardened crust had frequent cracks. Stepping (carefully) at one firm-appearing point on the trail would cause mud to ooze up through a crack several feet away. It also looked as though some folks had broken through the crust, probably resulting in a boot full of mud.
The trail climbs through rapidly changing foliage - initially quaking aspen, then a band of white spruce, then a band of dense alders, then more spruce mixed with paper birch, then shrubs of willow and dwarf birch. The upper portions of the trail are in true alpine conditions where the only plants are tiny - rarely extending more than an inch above ground. Lots of lichen, and occasional plants which are low mounds with almost microscopic leaves and flowers. The views across the valley to the Alaska Range were spectacular - definitely worth the trip.
When I stopped at an overlook near the highest point of my hike, I spent a few minutes standing quietly, sighting across my compass, trying to get an accurate bearing on a distant mountain peak almost hidden in the clouds. While standing there, very still, concentrating on my compass, I became aware of a grating noise, and then a tugging on my shoe. I looked down and discovered an Arctic Ground Squirrel chewing on my shoe - apparently after the salt from my sweat. No damage - the leather and nylon is pretty tough.
On the way back in the afternoon, traffic had backed up along the main park road, just a few hundred yards from the highway. A moose was ambling along the ditch beside the road, methodically stripping leaves off tender young willows, totally ignoring the traffic. Kind of amusing, after yesterday's 7-hour wildlife tour where we didn't see a moose all day (and some of the people on that tour had *never* seen a moose).
6/17 An evening drive up the National Park Road (the 14 miles we're permitted to drive) yielded an highlight: a daddy fox, trotting along the edge of the road toward his den after a long day of hunting, carrying a big snowshoe hare in his jaws to feed mommy and the kits. Cars were following behind for a while, with people leaning out to snap photos, then edging out into the opposite lane and passing. The fox was obviously nervous, and kept looking back at the following cars, but was apparently in a hurry to get home and unwilling to travel through the dense brush with its awkward load. Half an hour later, on our way back, we met the same fox, still trotting steadily up the road, still carrying the hare. It must have covered several miles.
We also saw a few caribou, but little else. Later in the evening, we walked the short Horseshoe Lake trail, enjoying the scenery and the spring flowers.
6/18 We hitched up and drove leisurely south toward Anchorage, enjoying the scenery. The highway is usually in a broad valley, with mountain views in several directions. There are several pullouts in Denali State Park, which provide opportunities for spectacular views of Mt. McKinley. The clouds again blocked our view. Our bus driver on the National Park tour said that the mountain was visible only about one day out of ten during the summer. We've only looked on 5 days, so I guess we've got to come back here for five more days this summer.
The first significant driving mishap of the Alaska trip: Helen saw an art gallery as we passed it. Dave made a wide U-turn into a pullout to go back, misjudging the steepness of the little slope from the road down to the level pullout area. One of the skids under the back end of the trailer frame dug deeply into the asphalt shoulder of the road, bringing us to an abrupt stop, with one trailer wheel on that side completely off the ground.
It's a good thing that we carry an ample supply of short pieces of 2x6 lumber - generally used to level the trailer on sloped campsites. Using a small hydraulic bottle jack under the frame on the low side, I lifted the trailer wheels enough to allow placing several boards under each wheel. Removing the load distributing bars from the hitch dropped the front of the trailer and the rear of the truck, taking weight off the trailer skid and providing more weight and traction for the rear wheels of the truck. This, and the limited-slip differential, was enough to allow me to drive forward, spinning the wheels and throwing gravel, but dragging the skid of the trailer off the asphalt and continuing into the pullout. No harm done to the trailer, but I offered a silent apology to the State Highway Department for the deep gouge in the highway.
During the half-hour we spent doing all this, several vehicles, both tourists and local residents, stopped to offer help. In this part of the world, with poor roads and long distances between services, people still have old-fashioned attitudes about helping each other when problems arise. Comforting! And after all that, the art gallery didn't have anything interesting.
We stopped at South Rolly Lake Campground in Nancy Lakes State Recreation Site. The few campsites right along the water were all occupied, of course. We found a site slightly up the hill from the lake that had a limited view of the water through the trees - quite attractive. This site provided our first exposure to the full force of Alaska mosquitoes. Although they didn't seem too bad as we walked around outside (no worse than a June night in our back yard in suburban Rochester New York), the mosquitoes congregated densely at all openings to the trailer, perhaps attracted by light or the heat. There was such a high density of them crawling around the windows and vents that hundreds found their way through tiny cracks and through the miniscule vent holes at the bottom of each window. By the time we went to bed, it seemed like there were more mosquitoes inside than out, and we were tempted to open up and let them escape. We spent a miserable night in bed, hiding under the covers, faces and hands covered with DEET - which kept them off for a few hours, but didn't quiet the incessant whine just above us.
6/19 Today's drive fairly quickly got us back to "civilization" - much higher population density, occasional cabins along the road, much-reduced mosquito population, and gradually increasing traffic as we approached the Mat-Su Valley area.
Just north of Wasilla, we stopped at the Museum of Alaska Transportation and Industry, which should be a "must-see" on any trip through this region. It is underfunded and somewhat run-down, but has a corps of enthusiastic volunteers who have restored many ancient engines and vehicles to running order. All through the history of Alaska, transportation has been the major issue in settlement and development, so this transportation-oriented museum provided us with a much more meaningful view of this history than have various other museums.
The museum has a huge collection spanning early dog sleds, boats, snowmobiles, tracked farm and transport vehicles, airplanes, construction equipment, trains, etc. Some of the artifacts have been restored to like-new condition. Others have been restored to the weather-beaten condition typical of when they were last in regular use. Many items are decrepit - essentially in the same condition as when they were discovered. We got a personal tour from a full-time volunteer who is a snowbird - an RVer who considers Anchorage his home, but spends his winters in the southern United States. He's also a steam train enthusiast who tours with a scale-model working steam locomotive in the back of his pickup truck. He told us that RVers were welcome to park overnight on the Museum grounds, and might even be able to get electricity (and suggested a donation to the museum in return).
We left the museum early in the afternoon. Nothing more tempted us to stop along the way, so we went on all the way to Anchorage, stopping at Anchorage RV Park, which appears to be the best place near town and calls itself the "Alaska's Premier RV Park". That's not saying much - the Alaska standard isn't very high. No one can afford to invest a lot of capital in a tourist facility that only gets used for three months a year. At least it's modem friendly, and the sites are fairly large. We have a green strip perhaps 10 feet wide and 75 feet long on each side of our gravel RV pad. It's been left unmowed - which initially made the area seem rather shaggy. But then we discovered that this strip is a riot of flowers. Out my window is a profusion of prickly rose, chiming bells, ground dogwood, and lupine. Fireweed is also growing vigorously, and will bloom later in the summer.
We've noticed that in many of the drier areas, the predominant groundcover is bright green horsetail, ranging from six inches to a foot in height depending on growing conditions, and often quite dense. It makes a surprisingly attractive ground cover - a good replacement for the grass we'd expect to see in more hospitable conditions.
We'll be in Anchorage for a week, catching up on mail, trying to get rid of the mud and dust from hundreds of miles of gravel roads, and waiting for friends to fly in to join us for the next leg of our travels.