We'd been driving for 50 hours and 2300mi. Straight. We stopped for gas every 300mi and once to cook some hot dogs by the side of the road in British Columbia. Once we had to drive close to 50mi out of the way to get to a gas station before we ran out of gas. Most gas stations in this part of Canada are not open 24 hours, and many are several hundred kilometers apart (then you have to do the math to convert to miles). Add this to the fact that we have no working fuel gauge on the van and it's kind of amazing we were able to make the trip non-stop. My diet consisted almost entirely of Red Bull and Twizzlers. When we crossed the border into Alaska, Robert finally pronounced the drive over and we slept for 3 or 4 hours in Tok, AK (Tok rhymes with smoke as an informative local magazine pointed out).
We then drove over to the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park visitor center and got some maps and information about the road into the park. A daunting-sounding 60 miles or railroad-spike infested gravel which was supposed to take 3 hours. It turned out (like a lot of things) to be pretty tame, talked up probably to make the faint-of-heart (or faint-of-their-car's-suspension) think twice before driving it. We made it into McCarthy, an old mining town which was weirdly encapsulated inside this National Park created in 1980. About 30 or 40 people live there, some year-round, and there was also a good bit of private property along the McCarthy road. It was a mix of young hiking and rafting guides there for the summer, and fiercely independent (bordering on reclusive) old-timers who seemed to resent the added tourism the National Park designation had brought in the past 30 years.
We biked up towards Kennicott, where the actual mining operation used to be and hiked out to the Root Glacier. Cool, but having no gear, we couldn't climb much on it. Robert crashed into bed about 7:30, but I couldn't quite bring myself to. I stayed up until about 11:00, still light outside, but I was good and tired. We did some mild day-hiking the next day and it gave me absolutely no sense of the entire park. There were some spectacular views but this is the biggest park in the US. It's almost impossible to get a feel for it in a short amount of time and since there is only one road that barely makes it into one edge of the park, you have to do some serious backpacking to see most of it. I'll come back, I thought. I'd planned to get on a little prop plane the next day which could fly around to get a better feel for the Alaska Range and more of the park, but it rained, putting the visibility at next to nothing; not good for flying or sightseeing.
We started the next leg of our marathon drive, this time to Anchorage, where we ate dinner and then continued north to Fairbanks. On the way, we picked up a 59-year-old Indian woman from Barrow, the northernmost town in Alaska, only accessible by plane (or, as we later found out, by a 200mi ice road over the open ocean, but that was obviously only in the winter). She was interesting, and slightly crazy. It was dark and at about 2AM, I hit a porcupine. I swerved to try and miss it, made the tires squeal, threw Robert across the back of the van where he had been sleeping, and smacked right into the damn thing. It was huge. No serious van damage, but Louisa, the Indian woman, seriously wanted me to go back and pick it up so she could cook it. Finally we made it to Fairbanks around 3:30, and she about started screaming because I didn't know where downtown was and that was where she wanted to be let off. "You have to understand, Louisa, I'm from Virginia, and I have no idea where the hell downtown Fairbanks is from here!" Quickly turned into her screaming and crying and me yelling "If you don't calm the fuck down now! You're getting out of the van here!" This did not help. Finally we found downtown thanks to the direction of some guy wandering around the street at 3:30AM. Louisa got out. We headed to Wal-Mart and slept for a few hours before heading up towards the Dalton Highway.
If you saw that show "Ice Road Truckers," that's the Dalton Highway in the winter. It's a worse road in the summer because it's all gravel and dirt that can't be smoothed out as easily as an ice road can. There are some paved sections, but for the most part, it's a 411mi long gravel maintenance road to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS). Most of the traffic is trucks.
There are a few people in RVs or cars driving up to the Arcitc Circle and on up to Deadhorse (the closest to Prudhoe Bay and the Arctic Ocean that you can drive as a civilian), and by the end of the trip, you end up personally meeting most of them. The first day we drove, stopping along the way, once for a good long hike off trails, across rivers, and avoiding bears, and several times to look at the pipeline. You cross the Brooks Range driving north, and the Continental Divide goes thru here also. The same Divide we had crossed in Colorado a few months ago. Alaska's North Slope, north of the Divide, has zero trees. Just tundra and rocks. I looked at my GPS and realized I was driving faster than the sun was setting in the north. At this point, my competitive spirit kicked in and it became a race. 
Van vs. sunset. I was determined to get far enough north where the sun would just go around in a crazy circle, dipping to a low in the north and then going right back up and around again without touching the horizon. It did. Weird. This picture of the van was taken at 3:19AM, when the sun was at its lowest point in the sky.
I went for a run in the morning. My first (and for a while I think, only) run north of the Arctic Circle, and what would also be my only run in Alaska due to the extreme amount of driving, backpacking, and lack of sleep. Then we drove on up to Deadhorse and got on a bus with the other idiots who had driven up here to see the very un-spectacular Arctic Ocean. Since Prudhoe Bay is private property (owned for now, at least, by BP), we had to clear a security check the day before and be bussed around with an escort. We got to the Arcitc Ocean and I was the first one to take off my clothes and dive on in. It was cold. Not as cold as some lakes I've been in, but any way you slice it, 36 degrees is cold. I hadn't brought a town or a change of shorts, so I did end up shivering uncontrollably on the bus ride back, but maybe it was worth it. I've been swimming in 3 oceans this summer, and this one was by far the least pleasant. As a sidenote, gas costs $4.55 per gallon in Deadhorse, which is slightly confusing being located less than 8mi away from the largest oil field in North America. Less confusing if you think about having to drive a tanker truck up the Dalton Highway.
After this, we drove (without sleeping) to Denali in a straight shot. We got there at 9AM and slept until 2:00. I was exhausted and needed some good rest before our week-long backpacking and camping adventure in Denali. This was day 8 of the Alaska trip, and somewhere around 25 hours of sleep total. I figured I'd sleep in August.
We got our wilderness permits and a bear keg and hopped on the big green bus the next day. The bus is the only way to get around in Denali, you're not allowed to drive on the road. There is one 80mi long road servicing 6 million acres of park. Denali was pretty overwhelming also, but after spending some time there I got a small feel for it; more so that in Wrangell-St. Elias I thought. We were camping in Wonder Lake at a group campground the first 2 nights, the heading into the backcountry around Mt. Eielson for 3 days. We got some decent views of Mt. McKinley / Mt. Denali / the big mountain / the 20,000ft monster / whatever you want to call it the first few days, which is more than a lot of park visitors get. The clouds tend to clear in the evening and morning, just when the mosquitoes are the most terrible. You get used to bites after a while. After a long day hike alone, picking up some wild blueberries and singing and talking to myself all day to ward off bears, we rested up and headed off onto the trail-less tundra for our short backpacking trip.
I wish I had a month to hike around in Denali. Or at least a few weeks. Three days is enough to see a small part well though. And it's a much better way to see anything than by riding a bus around with a bunch of retirees from Florida. Being without trails is difficult for more than just not having a pre-planned route to follow. If you've never hiked on tundra, you should try it sometime. It's exhausting. It's basically thick layers of peat moss that sinks down a good foot or two when you step on it. Slow going. The best way to get around is to follow the gravel river bars, but that ends up presenting its own set of challenges, like wading thru glacial meltwater waist-deep and climbing thru dense willows and bushes on the edges of the riverbeds. The whole time you have to be forcing conversation so as to let the bears know you're coming. You end up talking about some weird stuff when you can't let a 5 second pause happen. All in all, though, this was the highlight of the Alaska trip. It was the part where I had enough time to actually take some of the surroundings in for a few days; the tundra forces you to slow down and enjoy it.
After recovering from our trip and taking a much needed shower at the campground in Denali (it had been 17 days since my last one... a record I hope), we headed to Talkeetna. We had planned to go rafting the next day, but there weren't enough people to fill up the raft, so I was able to conince Robert to go on a plane ride with me. We were 2 of 7 people in a small propellor plane, headed into the Alaska Range for an hour-long low-flying flightseeing tour. It was spectacular. This is the kind of terrain it would take weeks to get into on foot, not to mention a lot more technical ice-climbing and mountainclimbing experience than I had (none). I took 300 pictures in an hour. The 20 or so best I put on facebook, but I think I ended up keeping about 150 of them. Just ice, glaciers, snow, ragged alpine peaks, everywhere. It was an amazing place, and it made me wish I had the skills to get there on foot and see it up close. Maybe later. I'm compiling a lot of mental lists of things I want to do in the future; even a trip like this can't cover it all.After a weird but awesome night in Anchorage involving me getting a mullet haircut, singing karaoke, several bands, and a drag show, we drove down to Sewaed thru the Chugach Mountains, the southernmost mountain range in Alaska. I liked these mountains because they were mostly green and had some spotty snow above the treeline. We hiked around Exit Glacier for a bit, which is connected to the Harding Ice Field (bigger than the state of Rhode Island and some other states depending on who you talk to), and got right back into our super-driving routine, heading over to Valdez for a kayak trip the next day.
Valdez started out cloudy, which seemed to be the norm, but once we got out kayaks in the water it cleared up fast. We were kayaking in the Valdez Glacial Lake at the base of Valdez Glacier, in an around some huge icebergs that had calved off the face of the glacier and were now just floating around in the lake. We were able to hike around on some of these icebergs and paddle into caves in others. Really blue ice. A lighter blue than Crater Lake, but that same "oh wow, so that's what a pure-wavelength color looks like" kind of blue.
We had some extra time on the way back (we'd allowed ourselves an extra day to get back to Seattle before flying back to the East Coast) so we stopped by Skagway. Not much to report here, mostly a cruise-ship tourist town with a lot of jewelry and vaguely Alaskan trinket shops. We did stop in the town of Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon. I like it. It draws a strange breed of people I'm sure, but I like strange people anyway. Not that I'd live there... We also went further down the Alaska Highway and went in the Laird Hot Springs. That's a great place if you're ever in northeastern BC. It's 130 degrees at the source and there's a little cold waterfall feeding into it too so it cools off the further away from the source you get. Nice and relaxing. I got to the 130 degree part and threw my little rock onto the pile to prove I'd been there (some Canadian guy did it, must be the thing to do), but I only stayed there for about 5 seconds. 130 degrees is enough to "boil your kiwis off, eh?" as put by a guy from Ontario. "Don't go in there if you wanna have any children, eh?" Apparently in the winter the trees have giant icicles hanging from them, the aurora come out and it's 30 below. Sounds like a nice night to be sitting in a hot spring to me.
From there, after surviving a blow-out, some buffalo herds, lots of moose, and US Customs, we made it back to Washington State, ready to stop driving, sleep, and make it back to the East Coast for a week of relative rest at the beach.
6 August, 2010 - Day 91
16,165mi
5 oil changes
1/2 of a haircut
7,420mi driven in the past 3 weeks
Casualties: 1 porcupine, 1 possum, 1 bird, 3 million bugs
Update 8/18/2010 - Van at AAMCO again with a torn up transmission. Ugh.
No comments:
Post a Comment