Three Weeks in Alaska

August 18, 2010

I’m sitting on an express bus to Canada, pushing north through the remnants of Seattle post-work traffic. It’s a golden sunny day now, though the first half was thick with clouds. As I write this I’m listening to a weird late-70s Beach Boys’ album, one that Brian Wilson wrote while in his infamous bedroom, bathrobe, and binge-consumption phase. The songs are quick, about simple themes, and mostly just the famous harmonies with drums and synthesizers. Fun!

We crossed into Canada for the first time on this trip about a month ago. As you may have noticed, we’ve fallen behind in blogging. Mostly that’s due to us being so far removed from places with people. The thing that happened is both of us had a deadline approaching (mutual friend getting married in VA). We wanted to see Alaska in mid/late-summer, so on a Saturday morning we left Portland, OR, where we had had a very pleasant 3-day visit. Before leaving the lower 48 we stocked up on trail mix, camping food (mostly varieties of cheap dehydrated sodium noodles), and energy drinks. We needed them. We drank them.

First, we had to deal with the border. No problems there of course, but we had to wait half an hour for our surly blonde-haired customs lady to poke around the van. A little friendliness can make such a difference. She seems not to have learned this, though, in her many years. I kept on driving, away and away from the border and its commercial districts and big highways. Soon we found ourselves paralleling grayish-blue glacial rivers and going around mountains, passing through vast tracts of Native reservation lands and rural areas. Hardly any traffic was to be found, just some truckers hauling their loads about.

Gradually the sunshine tapered off. As I was relaxing after my shift I peered out and noticed the late-night sunset still in the sky, with brilliant orange, yellow, pink , and grey-violet all coloring the sky. The occasional little homes in this area of British Columbia certainly have some of the world’s most spectacular summer sunsets. Mostly the land belongs to trees and moose, though.

As we progressed we encountered much road construction, and some of the remaining stretches became riddled with bumps, holes, and dips, not to mention the brazen/clueless animals attending to their business on the roadsides. So sleep became more of a challenge for either of us while the other was driving. The main concern, though, was running out of gas. We had to make one detour to get gas, but otherwise we never ran empty. Did carry a jug in the back in the case of emergency. It smelled-- a lot.

Hit the Yukon, Canada – Alaska, US border at 4 a.m. Monday morning. The customs man didn’t have much to say and I took over driving there. We made it a couple more hours in, to where I could get gas, and then I stopped, exhausted and feeling absolutely terrible. We both napped then I got up and drove to the first stop, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.

This national park is, I believe, the largest in the country with some 16 million acres or so. Since it’s a relatively new park (like some others in AK) there are private bits and pieces of land within the park. Wrangel-St. Elias has these two little 100 year-old mining towns that you can access down a 60-mile dirt road inside the park. The copper mining activity is long gone and the towns had fallen into some disrepair by the ‘50s and ‘60s, though some residents remained. Lands had been set aside as state and national preserves in the area periodically in the 20th century, but it was Jimmy Carter’s 1980 authorization that established the massive chunk of land that now comprises the park. Since then the towns, McCarthy and Kennicott, have seen a little tourist boom that’s grown from summer to summer.

We drove the van in and went for a couple hikes and bike rides around these towns. A huge stretched-out glacier runs from Kennicott up into mountains to the north. We climbed onto it for a bit but spent more time hiking up to the former grounds of copper extraction, the actual Kennicott mine, which sits in ruin on a steep rocky slope far up a mountainside. We have some fine photos of this area—check Facebook! The area still has wooden mine-house structures left from the 1930s along with huge amounts of rusty metal cans, plates, shovels, tools, glassware, even handmade shoes. I guess when the ore ran out the miners packed their belongings and fled the harsh place for anywhere else they could earn a livelihood. Our hike gave us spectacular views over the glacial valley, some glacially fed rivers, the two towns, and all kinds of surrounding valleys.

After these few days we drove to Anchorage to get supplies and a meal. We stocked up at REI, checked email, had a great pasta dinner at a Greek restaurant, then started driving North. The goal for this leg was to get to the Arctic Ocean at Prudhoe Bay. We drove thru Wasilla on the road to Fairbanks and as we progressed, homes and businesses quickly became few and far between.

Alaska seems to be a haven for the minute group of Americans who wish to be as disconnected as possible from contemporary, mainstream culture. In Alaska you can still live in a home with an outhouse in the middle of some forest. We met people whose homes are only accessible by boat. Residents in McCarthy & Kennicott send a guy with a van to Anchorage, half a day’s drive away, to Costco for food. A lot of people in the state also appear to lead relatively self-sufficient lives, hunting for their food and growing plants indoors rather than depending on a grocery store.
After picking up a slightly crazed Inuit lady and having some run-ins with little animals playing on the roads we did make it to Fairbanks. That was a depressing city to me. We slept at Wal-Mart, changed the oil, and got onto the Dalton Highway which runs to the Arctic Ocean at a spot called Deadhorse. This is the road where they film the show Ice Road Truckers in the winter. At Deadhorse are acres and acres of oil fields where all the global industry players have set up.

The scenery along this road is simply incredible. First of all, we were so far north by this time that we reached the point where there is no night. The land of midnight sun. The sun never sinks below the horizon in these brief summer months. We went through massive conifer forests across a mountain range then onto broad green plains of tundra, all along following the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline. While we each took breaks from driving we read a little book about the history of the pipeline, an engineering marvel.

The only other people out here in this vast expanse are the truckers, pipeline workers, and a few fellow travelers marveling at the land and trying to get to the Arctic. We crossed the Yukon river, a wide, fast river that’s grey from glacial till. At one point we took a break and parked off the side the road. We got snacks and water and walked through a marshy field then forded a glacial river then climbed up the foothills of mountains on the other side. It felt like we were the first people to touch the land. Mosses of red, orange, yellow and green covered the spongy ground along with blueberry bushes and other berry plants. We got in the van and kept on driving. We’d investigated where to buy gas on the road (there is one little stop called Coldfoot where you can get gas and food), and we had the extra so that wasn’t a huge worry. Gas at Coldfoot and Deadhorse ran about 4.40/gallon!
We kept driving way into the wee hours and finally found a spot about 60 mi south of Deadhorse to spend the night. The gravel path ran to the edge of a beautiful river. We went to sleep in the bright 4 AM sun after watching an episode of Breaking Bad, a new favorite show. This section of the road was so nice. I’m pretty sure it was real and not just a hallucination from my exhaustion.

We got into Deadhorse the next day. It’s an industrial place where the buildings are all prefab and there are no actual residents. Workers come for 2-week shifts on their drill-sites and stay in company lodging or the hotel. Most of the buildings are just trailers connected together. In the wintertime they build ice roads over the frozen tundra and even over the ocean. The sky was cloudy and a cold wind blew. We took a quick van ride along with some other tourists to the ocean. This is the only way you can access the coast post-Sept. 11 due to concerns with oil field security.

We then followed the road back to from where we came, beyond Fairbanks to Denali National Park. We got to Denali around 9 AM and parked and slept, then picked up wilderness permits and chose the section of the park to explore. They grid off the wilderness in order to prevent too many people from hiking the same areas; the Park Service tries to limit the chances of any groups encountering other people in the wilderness. We saw a few other groups in the distance setting up camp but that’s all. We spent the first two nights at Wonder Lake, a campsite 80 miles into the park. Private vehicles aren’t allowed so we parked and rode the park bus in. Our driver pointed out wildlife and stopped for photos along the way. We spent 2 nights at Wonder Lake, hanging out and doing day hikes and looking at the mountain range to our south.

After Denali we showered and cleaned up, then took off for Anchorage again. First, in a town called Talkeetna, we got on a 10-seater airplane tour over the mountain range for an hour. We saw a bunch of glaciers, some with blue crevasses and some black and white, and lots of sharply angular mountains that were brushed with snow and ice. After lunch we got on to Anchorage, where we ran errands and hit up some of the nightlife. The best place was Chilkoot Charlie’s, an old bar complex that had two bands playing at once and a great crowd.

After that we had a couple shorter stops: Valdez and Seward. We didn’t stick around Seward but drove thru the little port town and went to a nearby glacier park. In Valdez the following day we went on a small group tour with inflatable kayaks around a glacial lake. The lake is at the base of a glacier and has other streams feeding it and icebergs all over. It was hard to reconcile the fact that the next week I’d be sweating at the beach in South Carolina while at the moment I was cold in raingear on a partially frozen lake. We enjoyed the lake tour and then began our slow return to the lower 48. Made one tourist pit-stop in Skagway, got dinner in Whitehorse, B.C., and we stopped at Liard Hot Springs, a great little park in northern B.C. After refreshing/burning in the springs we continued slowly but surely making the miles to lower B.C. and finally Washington. We passed a herd of bison on the way.