Portage Valley

From Anchorage, we went down to see the Portage Glacier on a day trip.  We decided to go back and stay for a couple days.  We had a blissful two days at the Williwaw Campground, a National Forest Service campground tucked away in the woods by a stream fed by glacier melt water.  We drove through the Anton Anderson tunnel to Whittier.  It's about 2 1/2 miles straight through the mountain, the 2nd longest highway tunnel in North America.  The really weird thing is that it's also a railroad bed, so they have to tightly control traffic first in one direction, then the next, punctuated by a couple train loads of tourists every day.  Whittier is a pretty traditional sea port town, lots of commercial fishing and cruise ship port, but the passengers don't spend any time in town due to the lack of facilities.  They get off the ship and onto buses or the train to get out of town to more established places, or vice versa.  One of the strangest things was an old army building built to house a couple thousand troops during the cold war.  Back at our campsite, life was good with campfires both nights, walks along the river and a hike up toward the glacier.  We finally saw a moose in the wild that would stand still for a picture.  It had a calf that was too shy, hiding in the bushes.  More pictures from our stay in Portage Valley...

There was a hiking trail along this creek, beautiful views and good exercise

These are Coho Salmon making their way upstream to spawn.  The red coloring only happens when they're on their way upstream to spawn and die.  They say where there are salmon, there are bears.  We were very beary wary.

As I'm always saying, the pictures never do these views justice.  These two cascades were coming down from the same glacier on the mountain above our campsite.  The one on the left was probably 200 feet tall and 15 feet wide.  The one on the right, even bigger.  I hiked up here by myself one morning.

A rare selfie.  If this had been in the lower 48, there'd be 300 cars parked here.  I had it all absolutely to myself.  The boulder above my head is as big as a UPS truck.  Cascades like this are everywhere up here.

The Buckner Building was a self contained world for 2000 troops during the cold war overlooking the port in Whittier.  It took 5 years to complete, and they only occupied it for 6.  It withstood the '64 quake though, so obviously engineered well.

Lined up to drive into the mountain

A couple of the glaciers overlooking Portage Lake.  

Finally, a wild moose that didn't run away at the first sight of my camera.

Williwaw Campground.  Another glacier top center, the one that was feeding the cascades I hiked to.

Anchorage

After Denali, we enjoyed a beautiful drive down the Parks Highway toward Anchorage.  We stayed one night in a little tourist town called Talkeetna.  It had a neat little downtown, crawling with tourists from the cruise ship bus tours that must stay overnight.  After that we headed down to a nice military campground on Ft. Richardson just outside of town.  The park is great, tucked away in the woods with full hookups and spacious sites.  The only downside was listening to the Blue Angels practice for the airshow coming up this weekend.  Loud!  We took care of chores, but had one really nice day trip south of town.  We had met some fellow travelers from Maine up in Denali, and they were back in Anchorage getting ready to fly home so they went with us on the drive.  Craig and Jodi are good new friends we'll see again hopefully when we travel to the northeast.  We also got to have dinner with an old military buddy from almost 20 years ago.  Chuck Baird got out of the Air Force and makes Alaska his home now.  You can find him on YouTube if you search for Alaskan Pioneer.  We stopped in and saw the Portage Glacier, the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Park (animal rescue) and took a stunning gondola ride up to the top of the Alyeska ski resort.  No skiing going on this time of year, but spectacular views.  Our 12 volt water pump quit working, so we're at the repair shop getting a new one.  Can't sit in the woods for a couple days without running water.  Here are some recent pictures:

Typical view out of the windshield.  Good roads, great views.

The beard really completes the whole Alaskan Pioneer persona.  Chuck Beard...uh, Baird.

Two Dall Sheep were feeding on the side of the hill on our drive south to Portage.

Sometimes grizzly bears become too used to town, and they're either relocated or euthanized.   This guy was lucky and ended up at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Park.  He even learned to sit pretty with those 3 inch claws together before getting a food treat.  Cute, until he digs them into your skull...

Hard to tell from the picture, but this iceberg is floating on a lake where Portage Glacier ends.  It's as big as a house, broke off and floated across the lake until it came to rest on the bottom.

The view of 3 glaciers from the Alyeska tram.

Not wild, in the conservation park.  Moose are super flighty.

Musk Ox.  We'd have to go waaaayyy north to see these in the wild.

The tram on it's way back down the mountain.  It takes you over 2000 feet vertically to the top of the ski hill.

Denali National Park

Okay, so the main draw here is the peak.  Denali's south peak is the tallest in North America, a shade over 20,000 feet tall.  It's also visible an average of 2 days during any give July.  We missed those 2 days!  Oh well, they say you can see it from Anchorage on a clear day, so maybe we'll get lucky later in the trip.  Since we hit Fairbanks, it's been pretty much cloudy and rainy all day every day.  However, we took the Eielson Visitor Center shuttle bus 66 miles into the park and saw some awesome wild life.  I saw a moose, but it disappeared into the brush before I could snap a picture.  Those things are easily spooked.  You can only drive 15 miles into the park in your own car, and there's only one possible viewpoint that far in.  If you want to explore further into the only road in the park, you have to take a tour or shuttle bus.  Ours was a great ride.  They stop anytime you see wildlife, and our driver Elton had been driving buses through the park every summer for 24 years.  There are times when the road is right on the edge of the cliff, no surviving a blown out front tire.  I was happy to leave the driving to a pro.  We spent 4 days here at campground just outside the park entrance.  Besides the nature tour, we ran into friends Eddie and Lois from McDill.  They flew up and rented a car to tour some before cruising south down the inside passage.  Here are some pictures:

Gotta get the park name in a picture

We had dinner and a nice visit with Eddie and Lois.  We ate at the round fireplace in the background, really nice with it being so cool and rainy outside.  The weather is finally starting to feel like Alaska.

A panorama from inside the park.  These stream beds all originate at glaciers higher up in the mountains.

One of the steeper portions of the park road.  I'm sure we'd stop rolling at some point down there...

I've been told before that I have a nice rack...

Dall Sheep, sort of like Big Horn.  Apparently the horns get larger in the fall when it's time to crack heads for the girls.  This herd of 10 weren't there when we made the return trip, lucky to see them.

A family of ptarmigan crossed the road right by us.  They turn white in the winter.

Small herd of caribou making their way through the valley.

We saw 5 grizzlies total.  The best was a mother and cubs that were feeding right beside the road.  They were there on the way in, and nearby on the other side of the road on the way back.  They walked right in front of us, spectacular luck.

Several caribou were feeding right next to the road.

Mom and cubs.  They were adorable.

Fairbanks

We made it all the way from Chicken to Fairbanks after a brief rest in Tok.  The Alaska Highway is beautiful, especially compared to the Top of the World.  Fairbanks, as far as I could tell, isn't a lot different than many modern western towns.  You run out of pavement pretty quickly once you leave the main streets, but other than that they've got all the comforts of home (Walmart and Lowes).  We paid $2.67 a gallon for diesel, a little lower than Canada but considering how much oil they produce here, ridiculous.  I'm sure they blame it on refining capability.  I also found out they have no income nor state sales tax, and they give every resident family member about $2,000 a year.  That's over a billion dollars in handouts just for waking up in the morning.  Hmm.  Anyway, we spent 4 days knocking around town and seeing some of the sights.  I got an oil change in the motorhome, topped off with diesel and propane, and got a small rock chip fixed.  We then went about an hour north for a couple nights at Chena Hot Springs Resort.  This will be the northernmost point we reach on the trip.  This morning, it's back through Fairbanks and on to Denali National Park.  We didn't do a whole lot of scenic beauty in Fairbanks, but here are some pictures:

We hadn't shopped for groceries at commissary prices in awhile.  Eielson AFB is about 20 minutes outside of town, so we had to make a stop.  Pretty quiet place on a rainy Saturday morning.

At the botanical garden, University of Alaska.  These purple plants are everywhere.

The first car in Alaska, hand made.  We visited the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum.  Very cool, lots of turn of the century cars, many from Alaska.  They have 7 one of a kind autos.

Laurie and I going for a cruise in our new toad.  You see the term "Sourdough" up here a lot.  It sort of refers to the bread, but more a person who has spent an entire winter up here north of the Arctic Circle.  You keep your sourdough starter yeast close to your body so's it don't freeze.

Our home in Fairbanks, riverfront lot on the Chena River.  Roughing it smoothly, so they say.

The Chena Hot Springs Resort has an indoor ice sculpture museum.  It's 25 degrees in there, so we had to break out our coats for the first time in...I can't remember when.  This is a polar bear lying on his back with balls of ice on his feet.

The marquis award winning sculpture in the museum, two knights jousting.  It's years old, and slowly disappearing through melt and evaporation.

They grow their own flowers at the resort, and like most things in the summer up here, they grow spectacularly.

A reindeer walking in the woods at the resort.  This one's domestic more or less, but we did see another wild moose on our walk.  Those things spook easily.  I couldn't get a decent picture.

Laurie with two new best friends.  They're really into sustainable food and energy at this resort.  It's off the grid, generating it's own power using a geothermal plant.  The chickens in the pen lay eggs that they use for employee meals currently, not certified to serve the public.  I asked an employee if their meals included a lot of chicken and he said yes, but hadn't considered where the chickens come from.  Hmmm.

Like our buddies the horses in Williams Lake, everybody loves grass that can't be reached from the pen.

Tomato plants in the greenhouse at the resort.  They grow their own flowers, tomatoes, peppers, and lettuce.  The vines are dozens of feet long, look below the plants.

Alaska!

You might have noticed that Laurie and I are pretty flexible in our travel plans.  The ferry crossing at Dawson City can sometimes take hours waiting in line, because it only carries one rig like ours at a time.  The round trip takes it about 20 minutes, so if there are 4 or 5 rigs in front of you, you can end up waiting for hours.  We got right on, and when we got to the north shore of the Yukon River, it just didn't make sense to overnight again, so off we went.  The highway from Dawson to the Alaska border was paved, for the most part, so we got there in a few hours.  For us, arriving in Alaska in such a remote place was euphoric.  After a quick and easy check in at the border crossing (the agents live on site), it was on to Chicken, AK.  The first 10 miles of the Top of the World Highway in Alaska are velvety smooth, perfectly new and flawless asphalt.  Ha!  Sucker!  The remaining 30 miles were taken very slowly and carefully.  It's a gravel road, and it was pouring rain, and gosh I'm glad I did it but I'll never do it again.  The views were fantastic, but when your eyes are glued on the road ahead so you don't kill yourself and your wife, it's not as easy to enjoy.  All in all very doable though, just slow and a little nerve wracking.  A car or truck would have been no problem.  A bus, not exactly equipped for it though many of us take that road.

I have a tire pressure monitor system that tells me the status of both the RV and car's tires.  It gives you peace of mind knowing you're not dragging a car with a flat tire through the mud.  Speaking of cars with flat tires, a little Hyundai passed us on the road but then pulled over with flashers on.  I thought maybe they saw a bear or moose, but when the driver got out and put his hands to his face, I knew something was wrong.  I pulled over and learned they'd shredded a tire.  They were a young couple from Belgium and France in a rental car.  He'd never changed a tire, so I walked him through it (in the rain) and then followed them to Chicken to make sure the spare didn't blow as well.  No problem, just slow going.  When we got to Chicken, no tire repair whatsoever, so after we shared dinner at the cafe, they moved on to Tok, where TWH rejoins the Alaska Highway.  We overnighted in Chicken and didn't see them on the road, so I assume they made it okay.

After Chicken, the road becomes paved again and is pretty good all the way to Tok, AK.  The Alaska Highway was great, so we made it all the way into Fairbanks.  This is a thoroughly modern town with all the comforts of home.  We're in a full hookup spot with a lovely view of the Chena River, planning our next moves...but not too rigidly.

Some pictures...

Hitchhikers in Dawson City.  I guess having a passport is a big deal?  Gas money seems more appropriate.

Front row seat on the ferry across the Yukon River

Top of the World views are pretty spectacular.  Just pull over to enjoy them.

Our home at the Top of the World

Laurie says "Woohoo, Alaska!  At the border crossing.

I don't usually stop for a picture at the state welcome signs, but this one seemed special

Nicco and Marion, intrepid travelers from Belgium and France.  Very nice young couple.

In a town called Chicken, they go a little nuts with the whole chicken theme.  A 12' tall chicken seems appropriate.

The Alaska Highway between Tok and Fairbanks.  Very nice, smooth and beautiful views.  This isn't the ALCAN that my uncle George and Aunt Doris told me about. 

The 49th Sticker Ceremony

Now, how to get that Hawaii sticker?  I'm workin' on it...