We are now in Glacier National Park in northern MT. It is spectacular. Fall colors are already surfacing across the meadows and forest, and within weeks the roads will be closed for winter. We’ve seen several glaciers here, and some of the highest peaks have strips of snow that lasted through summer. On the first day Matt and I hiked up to a lake through the woods. A nice little hike off the main road, but nothing life-changing. As we progressed deeper into the park, though, the scenery became far more impressive and extreme. We headed east along the Journey to the Sun Road. Eventually it bypassed lakes and meadows and forests, climbing up to the pass at 6500 feet. From there we were surrounded by northern Rockies, deep valleys, and an occasional glacier. We camped on the eastern edge of the park and had a pleasant evening, grilling burgers and lounging around. The glaciers we saw here were lovely, but they’re mere ugly stepchildren to the hulking iceflows we saw around Canada and Alaska. But hey, this is the lower 48.
The next day we went to the area of the park called Many Glacier. We found a trail leading to Grinnell Glacier, which started in the woods along two large lakes. Within the first half-hour we saw a massive moose across the water, gracefully munching on something. We continued and saw another mother moose, with some calves beyond her, snacking on a bush. The path continued around two lakes then up a steep hillside which led us along some red rock cliffs to the glacial lake and finally Grinnell Glacier. The morning had started completely overcast, but by the time we reached the glacier the clouds were dispersing. We caught some sweeping views of the glacier, which looked smaller up close than far away. Grinnell Glacier is one of the ones the park has been tracking carefully, and they predict it will vanish by 2030. The hike was about 11 miles total and we got back to the starting point at about 6 pm.
We agreed it was time for a little indoor time. After the hike we returned to the first lake, upon which a huge German Alps-style lodge sits. We popped in and discovered its large wooden porch overlooking the water, as well as the plush living room inside where lots of people were relaxing. So we went to the van, changed, and grabbed booze and snacks for some porch time. As the sun continued to set behind the mountains and the temperature dropped, a hardy rain shower began and lasted for an hour or two. We moved inside and sat by the fire, where I read and did some post cards.
The two nights before Glacier Park were a lot of fun. Missoula, MT! I found us a couch-surfing host there; by coincidence she had gone to U of Delaware with Matt. Her name is Lauren and she turned out to be a gem of a host. We got in on a Saturday afternoon and for some reason the Missoulans had stuffed this weekend fill with festivals. Lauren first took us downtown to Hempfest (a brief walk from her house) where we listened to live music and got food. She showed us around the historic buildings, an artist residence, a brewery, bakeries and more. You may be wondering what Hempfest was. “What exactly is this Hempfest,” you say. Well, MT has legalized medicinal marijuana, and the festival basically consisted of music and food and specialty vendors. For example, a doctor’s office handed out half-off coupons for appointments at which you can get a medical card. Other booths sold pipes and clothes, and one booth even had jars of various varieties of weed for sale. Perhaps the oddest aspect was the consistency of the crowd. The standard hippies represented themselves, strolling along with young families, children, white-haired former flower children and other sun-baked geezers.
We also got to meet a bunch of Lauren’s friends in town, who came over for a houseparty after Hempfest music was over. The newly painted van was a big success. We showed it off to our new friends and received many compliments. “Dude, this van is tricked out!” Why, thank you.
The next day was great too. We went to the same downtown park for the day’s Germanfest and farmers’ market and poked around. Yet another festival, a pedestrian festival on the main street, took place simultaneously. After getting some pizza and warming up in the sun, we decided to go to a swimming hole Lauren recommended. It reminded me of Lexington’s Panther Falls, with a hidden cave reached by swimming under the rock. This place was right on the side of the interstate, though, so we and the other swimmers provided some entertainment for honking truckers passing by.
We stayed that night as well, enjoying a live jazz performance at a bar downtown which featured some creative martinis. Lauren and I had a potent thin mint-type creation, and Matt had a jalapeno-onion cocktail. The following morning we left for Glacier Nat’l Park, 2-3 hours to the north.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Burning Man and Montana (inside: why Canada sucks!)
I'm going to try to describe Burning Man, which is going to be impossible. The best I can do is give a good approximation of my experience and I know when I get done writing it there will be a lot of important things I left out or was unable to fully describe. You've probably heard something sometime about Burning Man either from people who have been or think it's a worthwhile thing or from people who don't try to understand it and want it to disappear, or from the news which tends to generally distort most things to be sensational anyway.
Burning Man is essentially about two things. First, it's a social experiment of a community where commerce does not exist, where you try to give unconditional love to strangers; kind of a big commune where everyone looks out for each other. Second, it's a blank canvas for artists and everyone else to basically try whatever they want. People seem to drop the roles they've acquired in "normal life" and take on whatever seems to fit them at the moment. People generally accept you at face value with an open mind, and you are absolutely guaranteed not to be the weirdest kid on the block. It took me a few days to get used to it all. Burning Man has a reputation for drug use but really it's weird enough on its own, no chemical supplements necessary. There's also this omnipresent quasi-dark sense of humor underneath everything; deep down, everything is all an elaborate joke. And there's 50,000+ people there, so almost everything that could be happening is happening somewhere.
There was a giant Mad Max style Thunderdome the audience could climb on top of and watch participants strapped to bungee cords beat on each other with giant foam sticks. There was a giant grilled cheese diner that moved to a new location every night so it was always a surprise. There was a camp that would outfit you with any costume you wanted as long as you walked down the runway and they insulted you after you put it on. There was a phone booth where you could talk to God (he's a lot more reasonable than you'd expect). There was a sarcastic fortune teller in a box who moved around the playa. There was a roller derby on the playa. There were "art cars" driving around the playa at night; everything from flying carpets to flame-throwing pirate ships that you could just hop on and join the moving party (most had a bar, though you had to bring your own cup). There were talks and classes going on and people handing you sake and bacon as you biked down the street. I did a barrel roll in an airplane at 11,000ft. I took a "shower" by running behind a water-spraying truck. I lost my bike one day and following the advice of the advice booth man sitting in the middle of the desert, I wrote "I need a bike, I lost mine" on my chest and had a new one withing a few hours. People are just waiting to bend over backwards for strangers in an environment where it's allowed and encouraged (it also helps that the festival lasts only a week...). You may have seen the van's new paint job. It came from people walking down the street in Black Rock City, I brought paint and told them to paint whatever they wanted, meanwhile serving margaritas out of my solar-powered blender. The last few days there were dust storms so bad you couldn't see 3 feet in front of you and needed a mask and goggles to get around. Your hair turned into a big grey dusty mass. There's still plenty of playa dust in just about everything I own.
So that's what the attitude of the place is like (really that's only a very very small cross-section). I met some amazing people there (one in particular) who I know I'll keep in touch with. It was nice to have friends especially after 4 months of travelling basically alone except for Robert. You make friends fast on the playa and everyone wants to go try everything and just generally hang out and get to know each other. My camp was called Wanderlust, a group of couchsurfers and travelers from everywhere: Wisconsin, Laguna Beach, Nevada, Canada, Germany... Before I went to Burning Man I was losing my wanderlust in favor of a more socially acceptable (but less personally acceptable) and safer stationary and career-oriented life. Long story short, I was re-inspired to do what I want, not what everyone else wants. I saw people there who were just genuinely happy living how they wanted to free of the normal artificial constraints people let others impose on them. Accepting that uncertainty about the future and really opening your mind to enjoy the infinite possibilities available, taking each day as a new exciting adventure, not rushing along hurriedly towards the end, but really enjoying the ride and every step of it for how much more exciting and unexpected it is. It's much more fun that way.
The main event is the burning of the Man. On Saturday night, the 200ft tall wooden Man is packed with explosives and fireworks and is lit on fire. It's the biggest bonfire I've ever seen. I dance around it with Shar after the Man falls down into a large pile and the crowd pushes me towards the fire. In a week, I've experienced a lot and in the end it's all burnt to the ground. Gone. The city starts to disintegrate and people head back towards the "default world". Sunday night the Temple burns. The Temple this year is a collection of wooden "dunes" and people come to write messages and names of those they've lost, of things they've lost, or of things they want to let go of. Then the Temple burns. It's not a party like the burning of the Man. People are quiet, watching the embers fly up into the air, each one an intensely emotionally charged piece of someone being released. I wrote in the Temple. It worked, I let go of the past, I opened myself up to the future. The sense of humor is much darker now when you realize the whole festival is about the temporary nature of everything. It all burns. You leave no trace. I'll be back to Burning Man, I know that.
We took some hitchhiking Canadian girls to San Francisco directly after the Temple burned. I drove all night and ended up on a run with Caitlin. It was weird adjusting so fast to the "real world" (even San Francisco!). We had a nice day in unusually good weather in a park in the city. I slept well that night. After catching up with Peter Felton from High School in Santa Clara and having some good home-cooked meals his mom served us, we headed back East, for the last time this year. We spent a day in Fallon, NV with Shar from our Burning Man camp. Feeding some cows, driving an ATV, exploring a cornfield, and saying goodbye as she headed to Australia and we headed to Montana. After an uneventful stop in Boise, we made it to Missoula, MT where we couchsurfed with Lauren who, it turns out, went to UD and knew some of my friends there. She was a lot of fun and since we happened to be visiting on a weekend full of festivals in Missoula we hit them all. Missoula is like a little hippie town centered around the University there, really fun and unexpected from Montana. You can check out my pictures from Glacier NP on Facebook, I'll put them up soon. But we spent 2 days there and then planned to head to the Canadian side to see Waterton, Banff, and another Burning Man friend from our camp who lives in Edmonton.
We arrived cheerfully at the border crossing at about 10:30AM, knowing that our psychedelic magical mystery van might make us the target of some extra searching or questioning or whatever, but we were not prepared for this. We were told to pull aside, then step out of the vehicle so it could be searched. It was not only searched, everything that could be removed from the van was X-rayed, swabbed, inspected. It was torn apart.
For 2 hours we had at least 4 customs agents dealing only with us. While the van was searched, I was separated from Robert and questioned, starting with the usual: where were you born? what are you going to Canada for? have you ever been arrested? Then getting more obscure and accusatory: have you ever used recreational drugs? who is this friend in Canada and how did you meet him? how long have you owned this vehicle? has anyone in your family ever been involved in a secret government organization? where were your parents born? what is that scary looking piece of electronic equipment in your van? are you SURE you don't have any drugs on you? really? even in THAT van? After assuring the customs agent I was not a drug trafficker, I was just weird, he passed us on to his supervisors. In the end, after collecting information on our previous employment history, verifying the balances on our bank accounts, taking our social security numbers, and just about everything else we could give them, they decided not to let us in because we did not have "enough ties to the US" Ties are defined by the Canadians as A) a wife in the US B) a job in the US or C) a mortgage or rent payment in the US. "But that's the WHOLE POINT! me not having ties..." He advised us to get married, find a job, or buy a house if we ever wanted to return to Canada. We were denied entry to Canada. Seriously. Really, Canada? "Glacier-Waterton International Peace Park" my ass.
After reassembling our van and what was left of our dignity, we headed back to Montana. The real reason we weren't let in was because of the van and the way we travel. We don't fit the mold of normal tourists. We're not going to spend money on lodges and restaurants, we confused them by not having jobs or W2 forms, we intimidated them because they couldn't categorize us into a safe, border-crossing acceptable category like all the older couples driving right thru the gate (equally unattached to the US I'd argue, retired with no job, taking thair wives with them, and having no fixed address aside from the monster fifth-wheel trailer towed behind them). It left me feeling terrible, somewhere between being raped and arrested. But at least those noble customs agents were able to prevent the peace love and happiness bus from threatening the national security of Canada. In contrast with Burning Man, I had the cynical feeling that strangers are suspicious and afraid of you and even hostile to you until you start paying them for something, at which point they become wonderful, loving, caring people, willing to help however they can. I hope I don't actually think of the world like that, but sometimes it seems a close approximation. Those are the situations I need to get out of. Then last night, sleeping in the van, some drunk idiot fiddled with our bikes trying to unlock them from the rack to steal them. I watched him thru the window for a few minutes, contemplating grabbing my 5-iron and jumping outside (I knew there was a reason I brought that) but in the end just looked at him and said "what's up?" "What's up?" he said, then "shit, peace..." and jogged away. People can be real assholes sometimes too. I'm trying not to focus on that though... For the most part everyone loves the new van paint. We get people asking to take pictures, asking questions, waving, and telling us the van just makes them smile. It's difficult to stay disenfranchised with humanity for long when everyone is smiling and waving excited peace signs at you when you drive by... On to Yellowstone, Denver, and Texas!
20,094mi
132 days
18 states
$5000 spent on gas... ugh
Friday, September 10, 2010
September 10, 2010
I feel like I’ve been here before. We’re driving down a two-lane blacktop that crosses rolling acres of sand and brush. All around in the distance many miles away I can see hazy mountains which blend into the blue and white cloudy sky. We’re leaving Fallon, NV behind and heading north for Boise. It’s about 75 degrees.
The scene my mind connected with this one is from a few years ago, on a college trip to Native reservations in the Dakotas. We ventured into NW Nebraska to see some sites around and the land looked a lot like this. Wonderful scenery but ultimately too dry to be welcoming.
We stopped in last evening to spend the night with a friend Matt had made at Burning Man. She kindly hosted us in her parents’ home, making a nice fish dinner and taking us out to drive ATVs this morning. I thoroughly enjoyed sipping margaritas after dinner and relaxing with some Daily Show and Colbert. Now I feel I’ve recovered most of my energy that got drained at Burning Man.
We had two great days before Nevada, too. We left Burning Man on Sunday night after the ceremonial burning of the temple. A couple of friends we made had asked us for a ride to San Francisco on that day so they could catch flights to return to Vancouver. We agreed and managed to pack them in the back of the van. When we opened any doors people and stuff would spring out like a jack in the box.
We got in line to leave the festival that evening at about 10 pm. After over two hours of waiting in a creeping line we made it to the two-lane road that led to the interstate. Luckily we had some leftover study-aid medication which gave us the energy to make the drive. In fact, we woke up and got quite chatty. Matt and I had some nice time to reflect and discuss future plans while the ladies slept and silently wished for us to shut up.
We rolled into the bay area on in the golden CA morning sun, deposited the ladies, and pulled into a Wal-Mart to have a nap. Before I could doze off, though, a snippy little Asian security guard lady tapped on the glass and told us to leave. Matt tried in vain to protest, but she would hear none of it and sped off in her buggy. So we gave up on a nap and I drove us into San Francisco, where his friend was visiting. We became fast friends with Matt’s friend’s friends (actually Matt’s friend’s sister’s friends), and they invited us to stay the night.
The weather was unbelievable for the time and place: 80 and pure sun all over San Francisco on Labor Day. We joined our friends in celebrating by going to Delores Park in the Mission District, after getting a Mexican lunch and some terrific ice cream. The park is a large space with gradual hills, a terrace-like setting that allows for unbeatable views of downtown and even Oakland. We found a spot to throw our blankets on Homo Hill, the self-named gathering spot for mostly gay locals and their friends. A guy next to us kindly offered us drinks from his pitcher of cranberry-vodka. We accepted and after hearing about our time at Burning Man he told his stories of attending Woodstock ’99. That’s the one that turned from a music festival to something like an apocalyptic mass-riot.
For dinner our group went to a nice little Thai place in the Castro district. We sat on the back patio and enjoyed our dinner and talked about movies and things and then drove Matt’s friend to the airport. The first good night of sleep in weeks, which followed this, only served to remind my body how tired it was.
We dedicated the next day to cleaning the van, laundry, changing the oil, donating leftover stuff to Goodwill, and adjusting the van’s brakes. Then we drove to our friend Peter Felton’s apartment in Santa Clara. Peter is a high school friend, and he showed us a very nice time. His mother was in town and insisted on taking care of us and cooking. Matt and I both enjoyed catching up with Peter, meeting his friends, and having some incredible meals with his mother.
These few days have been a good way to transition back to drifting after time away. The van is getting straightened out, we’re recovering from Burning Man, we’re spending good time with friends, and we’re moving forward. Next we’ll stop in Boise and stay with my friend Marshall. We are both curious to try to find out what Boise and Idaho are about.
The scene my mind connected with this one is from a few years ago, on a college trip to Native reservations in the Dakotas. We ventured into NW Nebraska to see some sites around and the land looked a lot like this. Wonderful scenery but ultimately too dry to be welcoming.
We stopped in last evening to spend the night with a friend Matt had made at Burning Man. She kindly hosted us in her parents’ home, making a nice fish dinner and taking us out to drive ATVs this morning. I thoroughly enjoyed sipping margaritas after dinner and relaxing with some Daily Show and Colbert. Now I feel I’ve recovered most of my energy that got drained at Burning Man.
We had two great days before Nevada, too. We left Burning Man on Sunday night after the ceremonial burning of the temple. A couple of friends we made had asked us for a ride to San Francisco on that day so they could catch flights to return to Vancouver. We agreed and managed to pack them in the back of the van. When we opened any doors people and stuff would spring out like a jack in the box.
We got in line to leave the festival that evening at about 10 pm. After over two hours of waiting in a creeping line we made it to the two-lane road that led to the interstate. Luckily we had some leftover study-aid medication which gave us the energy to make the drive. In fact, we woke up and got quite chatty. Matt and I had some nice time to reflect and discuss future plans while the ladies slept and silently wished for us to shut up.
We rolled into the bay area on in the golden CA morning sun, deposited the ladies, and pulled into a Wal-Mart to have a nap. Before I could doze off, though, a snippy little Asian security guard lady tapped on the glass and told us to leave. Matt tried in vain to protest, but she would hear none of it and sped off in her buggy. So we gave up on a nap and I drove us into San Francisco, where his friend was visiting. We became fast friends with Matt’s friend’s friends (actually Matt’s friend’s sister’s friends), and they invited us to stay the night.
The weather was unbelievable for the time and place: 80 and pure sun all over San Francisco on Labor Day. We joined our friends in celebrating by going to Delores Park in the Mission District, after getting a Mexican lunch and some terrific ice cream. The park is a large space with gradual hills, a terrace-like setting that allows for unbeatable views of downtown and even Oakland. We found a spot to throw our blankets on Homo Hill, the self-named gathering spot for mostly gay locals and their friends. A guy next to us kindly offered us drinks from his pitcher of cranberry-vodka. We accepted and after hearing about our time at Burning Man he told his stories of attending Woodstock ’99. That’s the one that turned from a music festival to something like an apocalyptic mass-riot.
For dinner our group went to a nice little Thai place in the Castro district. We sat on the back patio and enjoyed our dinner and talked about movies and things and then drove Matt’s friend to the airport. The first good night of sleep in weeks, which followed this, only served to remind my body how tired it was.
We dedicated the next day to cleaning the van, laundry, changing the oil, donating leftover stuff to Goodwill, and adjusting the van’s brakes. Then we drove to our friend Peter Felton’s apartment in Santa Clara. Peter is a high school friend, and he showed us a very nice time. His mother was in town and insisted on taking care of us and cooking. Matt and I both enjoyed catching up with Peter, meeting his friends, and having some incredible meals with his mother.
These few days have been a good way to transition back to drifting after time away. The van is getting straightened out, we’re recovering from Burning Man, we’re spending good time with friends, and we’re moving forward. Next we’ll stop in Boise and stay with my friend Marshall. We are both curious to try to find out what Boise and Idaho are about.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Van Photos
Hi-
Many of you have asked for photos/ a photo tour of the Van. Please see my profile on Facebook. I've posted a link to Matt's album "Vantastic." Here you can find all kinds of van photos to get a better idea of what the Van-ship is. Enjoy.
Robert
Many of you have asked for photos/ a photo tour of the Van. Please see my profile on Facebook. I've posted a link to Matt's album "Vantastic." Here you can find all kinds of van photos to get a better idea of what the Van-ship is. Enjoy.
Robert
Norhwest
After a nice relaxing week back on the East Coast (not to mention some much needed time away from Robert), Dan and Erin decided to join us out in the Northwest for a while. Erin and I were on the same flight into Seattle and we met Alex, Danny's friend who had been watching the van for us the past week, for dinner.
All was going well until we drove the van to the airport to pick Danny up from his flight. The transmission started refusing to shift on the 20mi drive to the airport, and literally when I got to the arrivals terminal, it stopped shifting at all. Permanent neutral. In the arrivals driveway with traffic everywhere... Danny called to let us he was ready at the terminal. "Well, good news and bad news Danny: we're here... but we're not going anywhere for a while." We called a tow truck which took a good 2 hours and by this time (1AM) Robert had also arrived. Thankfully the transmission was STILL under warranty (best decision yet to buy that warranty) so it wouldn't cost us a dime. We were worried about time tho, since last time AAMCO took about 2 weeks to rebuild it. We split a hotel room (a lot more reasonable split 4 ways but still expensive) and decided to figure it out in the morning. The original plan was to drive up to Vancouver with Alex until the weekend, so we just took the bus instead which worked out fine.
Here's a related aside about customs. The Canadian customs agents going into Canada from Washington State are very mean. When we drove the van in the first time, a woman who looked like Angela from the Office and had a heart of ice searched our van for 45 minutes. This time was no better on the bus. Here's a bit of an exchange I had with the customs officer:
Officer: Why are you going to Vancouver?
Me: Well, I've never been there before and I wanted to check it out.
Officer: Where are you staying in Vancouver?
Me: Hmm, I haven't figured that out yet, I guess I'll find a motel or something when I get there.
Officer: But you have NO reservations!?
Me: Nope, just kind of flying by the seat of my pants...
Officer: How long will you be there?
Me: 2 or 3 days probably.
Officer: What do you do for a living?
Me: I just travel around, I don't have a job.
Officer: Then how do you get money!?
Me: I don't. I had some saved up.
Officer: How much cash do you have?
Me: I have about $80 US and $5 Australian on me...
Officer: THAT'S IT!?!?
Me: Well I have debit cards and credit cards too, I just didn't feel like walking around with thousands of dollars in my pocket...
Officer: How much do you have access to?
Me: I'm not exactly sure what that means but at least about $10,000.
Officer: Well, what do you plan to do in case of an emergency?
Me: I don't understand how a job would help me in an emergency...
Officer: Well if you need money what will you do?
Me: I have money; if there's an emergency that somehow requires me to have more than $10,000 I guess I'm screwed.
Officer: When will you return to Virginia then?
Me: I don't really know, maybe when I run out of money, or maybe next year, or maybe not at all.
Officer: I see you don't have a return ticket on the bus. How do I know you'll come back to the US? Am I supposed to just take your WORD? (more than a hint of sarcasm here...)
Me: Uh... I guess so (and besides that Canada has nothing to offer me)
Then he confiscated my apple and let me in. I guess I answered all his questions wrong: I'm young, have no concrete plans, I'm dirty, wearing a big backpack, and have no job, so I'm instantly a national security threat. Customs agents make you feel like you've committed a terrible crime just for wanting to cross the border. Like I have to have some very explainable reason for going wherever I'm going. Since I never do, it's kind of a sticky situation. Interestingly enough, the US border agents were actually very friendy, interested in our trip, and said things like "welcome home!" I'd have thought they'd be more suspicious and ask more questions, but they didn't.
Vancouver was lots of fun, our guest drifters were out all night every night since this was their one week there. The bums there are very persistant too, "are you SURE that's all the change you have? Turn out your pockets I don't believe you." all while following you down the street. They accepted American change. Near Vancouver they have this mountain called Grouse Mountain and a 2.8km trail that climbs 2800ft up to the top called the Grouse Grind. I wish I'd timed myself running up it, but the world record is about 25 minutes for less than 2mi... it's steep. Erin took part in a lumberjack competition at the top and then we headed back down and out of Vancouver the next day.
Since the van was left outside in AAMCO's parking lot, we pulled some camping stuff out of it like a tent and a stove and rented a car for the weekend to go over to the Olympic Peninsula. We saw mountains and a rainforest and built a bonfire on the beach with some a Canadian dental student and his dad, among other things, and then came back to Seattle Monday. We had met some of Dan's UMD friends who were in Seattle and hung out with them for a day or two.
Seattle was great, I'm pretty sure I'd have been happy with it if I had moved there right after school for the other job offer. We went to a jazz/funk night and a MLS soccer game and almost forgot about the van until it was fully outfitted with a factory rebuilt transmission, ready to drive to Burning Man. We're in Reno now, after stocking up on costumes and booze and food and water and paint for the van's soon-to-be new paint job... An expensive shopping trip for sure (Robert lost his wallet in WA somewhere so I've been having to pay for everything), but I hope to be able to re-use a lot of leftover supplies. About as ready for Burning Man as I can be, and still not at all sure what to expect besides a bizarre good time.
Day 121
17,765mi
Transmission #3
All was going well until we drove the van to the airport to pick Danny up from his flight. The transmission started refusing to shift on the 20mi drive to the airport, and literally when I got to the arrivals terminal, it stopped shifting at all. Permanent neutral. In the arrivals driveway with traffic everywhere... Danny called to let us he was ready at the terminal. "Well, good news and bad news Danny: we're here... but we're not going anywhere for a while." We called a tow truck which took a good 2 hours and by this time (1AM) Robert had also arrived. Thankfully the transmission was STILL under warranty (best decision yet to buy that warranty) so it wouldn't cost us a dime. We were worried about time tho, since last time AAMCO took about 2 weeks to rebuild it. We split a hotel room (a lot more reasonable split 4 ways but still expensive) and decided to figure it out in the morning. The original plan was to drive up to Vancouver with Alex until the weekend, so we just took the bus instead which worked out fine.
Here's a related aside about customs. The Canadian customs agents going into Canada from Washington State are very mean. When we drove the van in the first time, a woman who looked like Angela from the Office and had a heart of ice searched our van for 45 minutes. This time was no better on the bus. Here's a bit of an exchange I had with the customs officer:
Officer: Why are you going to Vancouver?
Me: Well, I've never been there before and I wanted to check it out.
Officer: Where are you staying in Vancouver?
Me: Hmm, I haven't figured that out yet, I guess I'll find a motel or something when I get there.
Officer: But you have NO reservations!?
Me: Nope, just kind of flying by the seat of my pants...
Officer: How long will you be there?
Me: 2 or 3 days probably.
Officer: What do you do for a living?
Me: I just travel around, I don't have a job.
Officer: Then how do you get money!?
Me: I don't. I had some saved up.
Officer: How much cash do you have?
Me: I have about $80 US and $5 Australian on me...
Officer: THAT'S IT!?!?
Me: Well I have debit cards and credit cards too, I just didn't feel like walking around with thousands of dollars in my pocket...
Officer: How much do you have access to?
Me: I'm not exactly sure what that means but at least about $10,000.
Officer: Well, what do you plan to do in case of an emergency?
Me: I don't understand how a job would help me in an emergency...
Officer: Well if you need money what will you do?
Me: I have money; if there's an emergency that somehow requires me to have more than $10,000 I guess I'm screwed.
Officer: When will you return to Virginia then?
Me: I don't really know, maybe when I run out of money, or maybe next year, or maybe not at all.
Officer: I see you don't have a return ticket on the bus. How do I know you'll come back to the US? Am I supposed to just take your WORD? (more than a hint of sarcasm here...)
Me: Uh... I guess so (and besides that Canada has nothing to offer me)
Then he confiscated my apple and let me in. I guess I answered all his questions wrong: I'm young, have no concrete plans, I'm dirty, wearing a big backpack, and have no job, so I'm instantly a national security threat. Customs agents make you feel like you've committed a terrible crime just for wanting to cross the border. Like I have to have some very explainable reason for going wherever I'm going. Since I never do, it's kind of a sticky situation. Interestingly enough, the US border agents were actually very friendy, interested in our trip, and said things like "welcome home!" I'd have thought they'd be more suspicious and ask more questions, but they didn't.
Vancouver was lots of fun, our guest drifters were out all night every night since this was their one week there. The bums there are very persistant too, "are you SURE that's all the change you have? Turn out your pockets I don't believe you." all while following you down the street. They accepted American change. Near Vancouver they have this mountain called Grouse Mountain and a 2.8km trail that climbs 2800ft up to the top called the Grouse Grind. I wish I'd timed myself running up it, but the world record is about 25 minutes for less than 2mi... it's steep. Erin took part in a lumberjack competition at the top and then we headed back down and out of Vancouver the next day.
Since the van was left outside in AAMCO's parking lot, we pulled some camping stuff out of it like a tent and a stove and rented a car for the weekend to go over to the Olympic Peninsula. We saw mountains and a rainforest and built a bonfire on the beach with some a Canadian dental student and his dad, among other things, and then came back to Seattle Monday. We had met some of Dan's UMD friends who were in Seattle and hung out with them for a day or two.
Seattle was great, I'm pretty sure I'd have been happy with it if I had moved there right after school for the other job offer. We went to a jazz/funk night and a MLS soccer game and almost forgot about the van until it was fully outfitted with a factory rebuilt transmission, ready to drive to Burning Man. We're in Reno now, after stocking up on costumes and booze and food and water and paint for the van's soon-to-be new paint job... An expensive shopping trip for sure (Robert lost his wallet in WA somewhere so I've been having to pay for everything), but I hope to be able to re-use a lot of leftover supplies. About as ready for Burning Man as I can be, and still not at all sure what to expect besides a bizarre good time.
Day 121
17,765mi
Transmission #3
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Alaska
Note: This is the entire Alaska trip, so save it for a really slow day at work, or you can read it in pieces... I promise not to wait this long to post again, it's just that internet (and time) was a relatively scarce commodity in the land of the midnight sun.
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.
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.
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