Hollings Bar: Your Northern Exposure

Into the mines! (The Lost Post)

2009-08-12T15:17:00.002-08:00

SO...now after all this time, I went back and looked...and one blog post was missing. I had written this all up the day it happened and somehow the blog website never posted it. This was one of my favorite adventures, too...so now I'll repost it. This occurred during our Valdez trip on the day before we took the ferry...

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After I finished writing the previous post upon our arrival in Valdez, Matt and I went out to explore the town and to get dinner. This gave us a better look at what was around this city.

Valdez seemed, to me, to be exactly like the other Alaskan port cities of Homer or Seward, only with much less charm and far more industry. Its touristy downtown consisted of this one street along the waterfront.
Most of the businesses there are either small restaurants, glacier/sightseeing cruise companies, or fishing tours. Even so, there are only about a dozen or so businesses there. Valdez has what looks to me like a smaller harbor than Homer or Seward, though it was still decently sized. Most of the industrial ship-loading equipment is located on the other side of the bay with the Alyeska Pipeline terminal. There weren't many touristy gift shops or anyhing like that, so I didn't find a place to buy postcards or anything. We then drove out to the "Original" Valdez Townsite. Valdez was one of the places hardest hit by the giant waves generated from the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake in Alaska. The waves apparently rose up and completely swamped and destroyed downtown Valdez. So, they moved the town to a place four miles down the bay. I'm not sure that puts them in any better position if another giant wave were to come but...they moved the town. What's left of the old townsite are a bunch of random gravel roads with remnants of sidewalks and wooden walkways still visible, all running in a miniature grid throughout this grassy marsh at the end of the bay.

In the water by where the old port of Valdez used to be, you can see the pilings that used to support the main pier in town, as well as some old, rusted machinery that was left behind. I'm amazed that they've let all of this just sit here since 1964...it's still in recent enough memory that a lot of local residents were alive and remember well what happened that day. However, the entire subject and its remnants are treated with a museum-like atmosphere that makes it feel like this disaster happened centuries ago. It's an interesting atmosphere surrounding that earthquake.
The next day, Matt and I set out for our destination (chosen by me) of the city of McCarthy, Alaska, and the Kennecott Mines nearby. There are only two ways to get to McCarthy--you can either fly in or drive down the Edgerton Highway and McCarthy Road--the latter half of which is an unpaved, gravel, 1-lane drive for 50 miles on an old railroad bed into McCarthy. According to my Milepost guidebook, this route was recommended for those who like "adventurous drives." We would find out.

However, the route to McCarthy begins as the Edgerton Highway, which branches off the Richardson Highway some 85 miles north of Valdez. The Edgerton Highway heads into the heart of the Copper River Valley region of Alaska, which is a rather broad, flat region that runs all the way to the Wrangell Mountains in the east. On a clear, non-hazy day, the skyline in the above photo would be dominated by the great stratovolcanoes of the Wrangell Mountains, but today there was a fire to the south that was spreading smoke up north. This haziness really hampered our views of what should have been a spectacular mountain setting. Nevertheless, it was a pleasant, scenic drive.
Thirty-three miles down the Edgerton Highway, we came to the town of Chitina (which is pronounced like Chit-na...the second i is apparently silent). This is the last stop with gas and food services on the route before you begin the McCarthy Road. It's also the place where the pavement ends. Chitina sits in a very scenic little valley at the junction of the Copper River and the Chitina River. The Edgerton Highway and McCarthy Road follow what used to be old railroad beds, in particular for the Copper River and North-Western Railroad which was built solely to transport copper ore from the mines at Kennecott out to the port of Cordova on the coast. You may remember several posts back when I was flying to Juneau my plane stopped in Cordova. I talked about how there was a highway, the Copper River highway, that ran out northeast of town for a ways before randomly ending in the middle of nowhere after going over a "Million-Dollar Bridge" over the Copper River. That highway in Cordova follows the southern end of the old Copper River and North-Western Railway bed. There are miles of abandoned railroad grade between the end of the Copper River Highway outside of Cordova and here in Chitina, where the road once again picks up on the old railroad bed. Eventually the state of Alaska has plans to connect the two, but that could be a long ways off. Anyhow, when the railroad was active, Chitina was a major stopping point for it, about halfway between the mines at Kennecott and Cordova on the coast. There were thousands of people living in the town in the early 1900s and it used to be one of the largest cities in the state. The photo above shows all that's left of it. It's not much.
Then the Edgerton Highway ends and the McCarthy Raod begins. You can see here that the pavement ends and the road narrows considerably to travel the remaining 60 miles in to McCarthy.
Immediately upon leaving Chitina, the road crosses the Copper River itself, and it is quite the mighty river--worthy of all of the things named after it. This area of the Copper River is popular for dipnet fishing. This basically involves taking huge nets on the ends of long poles and running them through the water when the salmon are running, virtually guaranteeing a catch of fish. It is a method used by many natives and rural Alaskans for obtaining food for subsistence and, because it is so "simple," the state of Alaska limits dipnet fishing to only current citizens of the state. This means that none of us out-of-state people can participate in it.
The McCarthy Road has many scenic moments. Because the road is all gravel, it's extra challenging to drive and requires a lot of concentration. Many times you'll come around a curve and there will be a car coming the other way. The road has several winding spots where the road is very rough and full of washboard sections that force you to slow to almost a crawl. I lost half of the coins out of my little change bin in my car on the drive out, simply from all the bouncing around in the car. However, there are also several long, straight sections where the gravel has been totally packed down and its practically as smooth as pavement.
On these sections, you can get your speed up to 55 mph for a while with no trouble. Otherwise, I usually averaged around 35-40 mph going down the road. This means it took about one and a half hours to reach McCarthy--all down this gravel road.
The road doesn't actually go into McCarthy. It stops at several small parking areas at the edge of the rushing Kennicott River where you leave your car. Some parking areas are free, others require you to pay for the day. We chose one a little further out that was free. From there, it was about a half-mile walk down the road to a footbridge over the Kennicott River (the river is spelled Kennicott with an 'i' and the mining town is spelled Kennecott with an 'e'...apparently it was a very old clerical error...).
On the far side of the footbridge you can see a van waiting. Every half hour or so, the Wrangell Mountain Air Tours people have shuttle vans that run between the end of the footbridge, the town of McCarthy and the Kennecott mines. The actual town of McCarthy is about 3/4 of a mile from the end of the footbridge, and the Kennecot mines are another 4.5 miles beyond that. Matt and I figured we could walk into McCarthy, but would probably have to take the shuttle out to Kennecott. The shuttle costs $5 for one way and $10 for round trip. That $5 one way gets you from any point on the run to any other point on the run.
The view to the north from the footbridge was stunning. Up on the mountainside was the massive Root Glacier. At the base of the glacier was this extensive field of glacial moraine hills that looked like piles and piles of dirt, gravel and sand all spread around like sand dunes. Such an amazing vista. Note how clear it was at this point.

Matt and I then walked the easy 3/4 mile into McCarthy. I knew that McCarthy was supposed to be a very small town, retaining much of its appearance from its mining days in the early 1900s. This is the view upon turning down Main Street in downtown McCarthy.
And this is what downtown McCarthy actually looks like.
The town of McCarthy started as a service location for the miners and other workers up at the Kennecott Mines. Though all the workers lived on site at the mining town up in Kennecott, the mine owners placed the usual restrictions to make it a proper company town--no alcohol, no cigarettes, no vice of any kind. In response, the town of McCarthy sprang up about 5 miles south and off of the mine's property, featuring several saloons, brothels, and various other stores that stocked goods that were not sold in the Kennecott company store. When the mines closed in the late 1930s, the town of McCarthy basically shut down as well. It is currently enjoying a decent revival, though, as tourism to the Kennecott mines has exploded in the last few years. The town is currently home to some 50 permanent residents, who live in homes scattered throughout the area down random gravel roads. There is a general mercantile store in downtown McCarthy that stocks groceries and other goods, two restaurants that I saw, a small clothing store, and several tour companies. All the mountains you see in the backgrounds of these photos are peaks in the Wrangell Mountains, though none are the massive volcanoes the range is known for. The McCarthy-Kennecott area is located in the heart of Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park, and McCarthy is fast becoming a major launching point for backpackers and other adventurers who are exploring the park. With these adventurers and renewed interest in visiting the mines, McCarthy is starting to boom once again. Literally, that's all there is to the town now, though...

Matt and I bought something to drink at the mercantile and then got tickets from the Wrangell Mountain Air place to take the shuttle up to Kennecott. We also signed up for the 3:30 PM tour of Kennecott for $25. If you go back two photos to the one with the big glacier, the Kennecott Mining town is located at the base of the mountains to the right, above the big field of glacial till and moraines. Here's a closer view of what that area looks like through the trees as we drove by it. Such a bizarre landscape...almost looks completely unnatural and out of place.
We then arrived up at the main road in Kennecott, through the mining town. The tour launched from this point. The National Park Service bought the Kennecott mining town in the 1990s and major renovation and refurbishment work on all the buildings is currently ongoing. Thus, many parts of this "abandoned" mining town are extraordinarily neat and restored. It actually is a very pleasant-looking place.
If you imagine taking that photo above and turning left 90 degrees, this is what you see---that eerie dune-filled landscape again.
What's more incredible, though, is the fact that you can see this wall of smoke and ash moving up the valley from the south. The winds had just shifted, and the smoke from the major wildfire to the south was moving northward en-masse. I've never seen smoke have such a pronounced edge like that before...
Our tour was rather long--two and a half hours--but very, very informative and entertaining. We walked past several of the buildings. There you see the Kennecott Lodge up on the hill. Since the previous owners of the mine sold various parts of it to private individuals, the park service doesn't own every building. This lodge is an example of one of the privately owned buildings. Completely renovated and refurbished, the lodge is now a 35-room hotel with a full restaurant. Apparently it's very hard to get reservations to stay there, since it is always booked up. I was surprised at how many people were out in the mining town...we ran into maybe a dozen or so people in McCarthy, but up at the mines I saw at least 50...maybe more. Don't know where they all came from...
You can see here how the park service is refurbishing this place. The building in the foreground used to be a bunkhouse for mine workers. It's currently in the process of being redone by the park service, but you can still see the worn out paint and all the broken windows. In the background is the main storage building for the mining town, and that building has been refurbished...note the deck has a nice red railing and all the trim is painted and the roof redone. Almost every building a Kennecott is painted red for the same reason that all those turn-of-the-century schoolhouses were painted red--it was the cheapest color of paint available at the time. I really enjoy the image of the red and white buildings at this place.
The world's richest and densest concentration of copper ore was discovered in the mountains above Kennecott by prospectors in 1900. Instead of me going into the full history of the mines here, I invite you to read the Wikipedia article on the mines at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennecott,_Alaska. It will just save me a lot of space here. Anyhow, obviously one of the first things you need to have when you want to build a mine is a sawmill so that you can cut the lumber needed to build all the rest of the mining buildings. The photo above is what remains of the sawmill, oddly one of the only buildings in the entire mining complex to completely collapse--most remain quite intact. Since they didn't have a sawmill to begin with, the sawmill itself was made out of very poorly hewn and assembled timbers, thus it didn't stand up to the test of time.

This creek runs through part of the mining town. It had a major flood in 2006 with the stream reaching heights that hadn't been observed since the original building of the town. All the buildings seen in this picture had part of their foundations washed away due to the flooding, and that's what's now causing them to collapse. The Park Service is doing whaever they can to stabalize and secure these buildings but some, like the Assayer's office in the front left foreground of the photo, have been so damaged or washed away that they'll likely just be allowed to collapse. The white building in the photo was the hospital for the town, and some mine administrative offices and housing were located in the partially collpsed white house behind that. The buildings on the right were more bunkhouses for the men.
This is the biggest and most famous building in the town...the massive mill. The primary reason I wanted to take the tour we took was because this tour let you go inside the mill. In doing all my research these past months about things to do in Alaska, I was always haunted by images of that mill building whenever they came up. The Park Service didn't even want to touch it to try and refurbish or restore it, so all they did was secure and stabilize it so it wouldn't collapse. They ASSURED us that it was safe and stable. I still think that building is just amazing looking. In the foreground, you can see a backhoe and some new construction--that's a replacement bridge that goes over the creek seen in he previous photo. The 2006 flood washed out the old railroad trestle that used to be there. You can see how the railroad cars would have crossed there and pulled into the buildings at the base of the mill. Ore from the mines was brought into the mill at the top and they let gravity move the ore down through the various stages of milling--this is why the mill building is so tall and built into the hillside.Our tour went to the top of the hill where the ore would have come in and we began our decent through the mill building there. The actual mines themselves are way up in the mountains above the mill and, though there are trails up to them and many people do visit them, there was no time for us to do that on this trip. So we started into the mill building. That did not look like the most inviting place to enter...Apparently when the mine was abandoned in he 1930s, they tore the roof off of the upper part of the mill. And some walls too. It seriously looks like a tornado came through and did all this damage...complete with the snapped power-line pole thing in the foreground. The Park Service people assured us this was safe...keep in mind were atop a 22-ish story wooden tower built nearly 100 years ago...Even though it REALLY doesn't look safe... there was a "walkway" with handrails on it that we were told to follow. No one even thought about straying from it...This is an aerial view of some of the other mine buildings from the top of the mill. You can see the construction progress on that new bridge.Looking out the other side, you can see a variety of other plants, including the one with the smokestacks which was the electric power generating building for the mine. You can just see the furthest tendrils of the Root Glacier out in the glacial moraine field out there, but...that smoke had really set in and that's what our visibility was cut down to.Anyhow, back inside the mill, our tour group of 14 people carefully poked our way around in there. Such chaos...there are no full floors...there are half floors and drops in the floor and there are sometimes ceilings 6 inches from your head and sometimes ceilings 20 feet above your head. Timbers crossing every which way in no clear pattern...random abandoned machinery just lying around idle. Complete chaos in there...Just more chaos. Some of these ladders were unstable and we were told not to use them. This was one place where everyone obeyed the guide to the letter.There was a set of red stairs outside of the building that followed a chute leading all the way from the top of the mill to the train tracks below. We were told this was for the highest grade of copper ore that needed no milling...they just put it in the chute straight down to the trains. Otherwise, ore that was less pure had to be crushed and ground up and then separated into copper and non-copper bits or "tailings". That's what a majority of the equipment in the mill was for. Anyhow--that ladder. It's known as the "John Denver" stairs, apparently, because, according to our guide, in one of his songs he mentions the Kennecott mines and McCarthy and in an "Alaskan Special" video, John Devner performed while sitting on these steps. For that reason, the McCarthy-Kennecott area now has an annual "John Denver Tribute Festival" where they gather to play John Denver songs and have a potluck and all that. Being a John Denver fan myself, this intrigued me...Anyhow, it took us a full hour to descend through that building. It was so dark and creepy in there...and so completely confusing. Stairways were steep and narrow, everywhere there were broken floorboards and random equipment just laying around. We were told that one summer a bear had found its way into the building and a tour group ran into him about halfway down through the mill. Both the bear and the tour group were scared out of their wits and took off in opposite directions. The tour group scrambled down to the next level, only to walk around a corner and find...that the bear had scrambled down as well! So both the bear and the group were frightened again and took off in opposite directions...such a cartoonish thing. But, we saw no bears and made it out of the building in time to catch the 6 PM shuttle back to the footbridge. I am so glad we took that tour (even if it was a bit scary) and it is definitely a highlight of my Alaskan adventures.

We got back to the footbridge and, now that I knew where all the turns and rough spots were, we made excellent time back down the McCarthy Road into Chitina and pavement. We stopped in Chitina, actually, and ate dinner at the Hotel Chitina--just like Copper Center Roadhouse, another randomly delightful restaurant in a random, middle-of-nowhere place in Alaska.

We then drove another two hours back into Valdez where we quickly fell asleep. But, we had to get up early for the ferry the next day. More on that tomorrow...

PS. I can't emphasize enough--keep in mind just how far away from everything all of today's activities were. It took us nearly 4 hours of driving from Valdez to get to McCarthy, and along that entire way we went through only one other town--Chitina. And in Chitina there were hardly any services--one small-store, shady-looking gas station and the restaurant we ate at and that was is. It was a 60 mile long gravel road into McCarthy---there are no other towns or settlements anywhere within that 60 mile radius of the city. And yet, this whole huge mining complex and the town of McCarthy with all of its tourists and adventurers and whatnot...they're all there. It just amazes me. My entire concept of "remote" has been completely changed by trips like this, the Alaska Highway, and driving up through the Brooks Range and the North Slope. Incredible.

Take the midnight ferry...

2009-07-20T23:15:00.018-08:00

For our return journey from Valdez, Matt and I decided that instead of driving the full 6.5 hours back or so, we would take the "shortcut" and take the ferry from Valdez to Whittier, which is southeast of Anchorage just a few miles from the end of Turnagain Arm, though it is on Prince William Sound. The map here should show it better. Valdez is in northeastern Prince William Sound and Whittier is on the northwestern end of Prince William Sound.

The ferry from Valdez to Whittier is part of the Alaska Marine Highway System. Many of the coastal cities in Alaska have no road connection or lie at the ends of roads, and getting from place to place can require major detours inland. Thus, the Alaska Marine Highway was born. It's an official part of the Alaska State Highway system and is even eligible for federal funding through the interstate highway system because one of its connections is at Bellingham, Washington. The Alaska Marine Highway System (I'm going to use the AMHS acronym from now on) is one of the primary modes of transportation between the many towns on the many islands in southeastern Alaska, places like Juneau, Sitka, Ketchikan and Skagway. However, there is a "cross-gulf" route that goes across from Juneau to ports on Prince William Sound like Valdez and Whittier that are connected to the mainland road system. This greatly simplifies travel to the rest of the state from Juneau, as it affords people with cars a way of getting them out of Juneau and to someplace else.

The ferry also has a western branch to its system, with departures from Homer on the Kenai Peninsula out to Kodiak Island (famous for its bears) and then west along the Alaska Peninsula through the Aleutian Islands to the cities of Unalaska/Dutch Harbour. When I ge the money one day and can come back up here, I would love to take the 3 day--2 night ferry ride out from Homer and Kodiak to Unalaska/Dutch Harbour, slowly cruising by all of those islands in the Aleutian Chain. It's expensive, but not moreso than any other method of travel. The cost to transport a single passenger out to Dutch Harbour is around $800 one way, which is about the cost of a plane ticket to go out there anyhow. I would plan to take the ferry out there and then drive back.

The city of Anchorage does not have immediate access to the AMHS, as they expect you to drive to Whittier or Homer to pick up the ferry. It's meant to be a supplement to the road system instead of an alternative, for the most part. However, we just wanted the experience of riding the ferry, so we went for it.

It cost us $89 per person to get passage across Prince William Sound, and another $105 to transport my car. Rather expensive, but we still wanted the experience. The cost and scheduling are the most prohibiting things to travelling on the AMHS.

Case in point, the only ferry that would allow vehicles on it was the 5 hour and 45 minute ferry that left Valdez at 8 in the morning. There was a second ferry leaving around noon that only took three and a half hours, but this "express" ferry didn't allow vehicles. Twice on my confirmation email and on the AMHS website appeared the line "FOR ALL FERRY PASSENGERS WITH VEHICLES TO/FROM WHITTIER--CHECK IN IS 3 HOURS PRIOR TO SCHEDULED DEPARTURE". This meant we had to check in at the ferry office by 5 AM. Early morning...
We got up at 4 in the morning and were at the ferry terminal by 5 AM (the terminal was only a five minute drive from our hotel). It was very foggy and rainy in Valdez, but still light out, since it's always light out up here. The lights in the ferry terminal, however, were all dark and a sign in the window said that they were closed. This bothered me. So we parked the car and I went up to read all the signs posted in the window. The largest was a schedule which listed all the departure times and the phrase "All departures must check in one hour prior to departure." One hour. We now had two hours of nothing to do. Very disappointing. So, Matt went back to sleep and I read for an hour and a half until someone showed up and the terminal opened. We went inside and picked up our tickets. We then got back in the car and were directed to a holding area by the ferry. There were already six vehicles there. I don't know how six vehicles got in ahead of us when we were sitting there in front of the terminal the whole time, but somehow they did.
In the photo above you can see the ferry on the other side of the covered sidewalk. This was in the holding area. We waited there for another half an hour before they finally began boarding the vehicles.
On board the ferry, we turned to the left which would be toward the aft of the ship. There's a wide deck inside, but we were told by the crew members there that I would have to back down into this narrow side "hallway" of sorts because my car was small enough. I don't like backing vehicles into anything, and everyone else somehow seems to be very good at it, but I'm not. They had people directing me though, and after watching these other drivers get yelled at and crew members running toward them yelling "NO! NO! STOP! STOP!" my nearly flawless parking job meant all the more to me. They packed the cars in very, very tight.
This is the first time since I've had this car that the car has been able to travel somewhere without having to do all the work in getting it there. I felt good about giving my car this break, particularly after all its been through in the past few months, even more so after driving down the McCarthy Road the day before. You're not allowed to access your vehicles during transit, so Matt and I collected a few things then climbed the stairs to the surprisingly lush passenger deck.
This was the foreward observation lounge. It reminded me of a theater, but with windows instead of a screen or stage. The chairs were all very plush and they all reclined--wide seats with plenty of legroom too. If only flying could be so comfortable. I enjoyed watching the rest of the vehicles go down the ramp into the ship for a while.
Somehow they got all the cars in and we shoved off right on time. The fog was very dense and it was pouring rain, so for the first hour or so we didn't see anything at all except white emptiness. The boat moves at around 14 knots, but the waters were also very calm and you could hardly feel that we were moving. A member of the US Forest Service was on our ferry, and the AMHS has Forest Service or National Park employees on many of their ships to act as guides and answer questions to take the pressure off the crew. Our guide set up a schedule where every hour he gave a 15 minute presentation on some aspect of our surroundings--be it glaciers, fishing, fox farming, or the city of Whittier. I found this to be very entertaining and fun. Our guide was an elderly man who lived in North Carolina, but came to Alaska with his wife every summer and the two of them did work for the Forest Service. Apparently there are a lot of people with summer jobs in Alaska...
After a time, the fog began to clear a little and we could see a bit of the surroundings. The ship's bell is out front and the label on it has our ship's name, the Aurora. I went outside to the outer deck that runs around the outside of the ship and was able to take in the misty scenery.
After a short while, we passed Bligh Reef, which was the actual location of the Exxon-Valdez oil spill. This is how it looked through the fog--all cleaned up now.
Soon we passed north of an island called Glacier Island and entered a strait between it and the northern shore of the Sound. Apparently the very large Colombia Glacier was to our north, but we couldn't see it through the fog. However, chunks of ice that had calved off the glacier recently started showing up all around.
Some of these icebergs came VERY close to the ship. I think everyone has ingrained in them he danger of icebergs to ships because of the whole Titanic thing. A lot of people on board the ship became very edgy as these bergs came in closer. The captain and our Forest Guide had to keep assuring people that everything was all right. I just went outside and took pictures.
The fog set in again, though, and we spent most of the rest of the trip lost in obscurity. There was a full-service, cafeteria-style galley behind the observation lounge and when they opened at noon for lunch Matt and I ate. I enjoyed a fish (cod) and chips meal that I didn't expect to find on this ride at all...I had no idea they had a cafeteria on these cruise ships. Very pleasant find.
On the way there, I noticed the familiar "Alaska Scenic Byway" sign that I had seen on so many roads in the state. Apparently, since the ferry system is funded as part of the state highway system, they can declare the ferry as a "Scenic Byway". Strangest scenic byway I've ever been on...
Anyhow, we were due to arrive in Whittier around 1:30, so we soon approached.
Whittier is a very funny kind of town. It's only a little over an hour from Anchorage by road, down past the end of Turnagain Arm. There's only a small strip of land separating the eastern end of Turnagain Arm from Prince William Sound. Once again, see the map I linked to above for better details. This strip of land is that low ridge of mountains you see behind Whittier. Without that strip of land, the entire Kenai Peninsula would instead be Kenai Island. Of course, as we can see here, Whittier is on the Prince William Sound side of these mountains and not on the Turnagain Arm side. In the 1940s, the US Military established the town of Whittier as a military outpost during World War II. Turnagain Arm and the Cook Inlet (where Anchorage is) freeze over during the winter, but Prince William Sound does not. Thus, the military wanted an ice-free part that was near Anchorage and thus Whittier was born. Of course, accessing Whittier from the Anchorage side was still a problem, so the Army Corps of Engineers constructed a 2.6 mile long tunnel under the mountains to connect Whittier with the rail line to Anchorage. More on that later.

In the photo above you can see two large buildings. The tall, lighter-colored one on the right is called the Begich Towers and 75% of Whittier's population of almost 200 live in that one building. The other 25% live in one of two other condominium/apartment buildings nearby. The other, lower, darker building on the left is called the Buckner Building, and at one time it was the largest building in Alaska. Back in the days when Whittier was a military town, the entire population lived in that one building. However, it was abandoned in the 1960s (before the 1964 earthquake, actually) and today no one knows who owns it. The building, though huge, is completely abandoned and condemned as well. People had planned to tear it down, but the building is full of asbestos, which complicates matters. The city of Whittier once offered to let Steven Spielberg blow it up for one of his movies, but he learned he would have to pay several millions of dollars to then clean it all up--which is difficult not just because of the asbestos, but also because the only way out of Whittier is by boat/barge or through the very narrow tunnel. So the building remains abandoned, but several local residents and many tourists still go into it to explore. I'm told the building smells horrendous, several of the lower floors are flooded, walls are caving in, ceilings are collapsing, and bears hibernate in the building for the winter. But people still go there...
We departed the ship and drove towards the tunnel out of Whittier. On the way, we passed this building that, on a sunny day, is what I have often thought one of the most picturesque buildings I've seen in Alaska. It's called The Inn at Whittier and is one of the few places with lodging that you can find in this 3-street town. I have wanted to eat at the restaurant for some time now, but I'm told it's very pricy. One day I'll find out. The rest of Whittier is the harbour with all of the small boats and a lot of the little shacks offering fishing, wildlife, and glacier tours. There are no real "shops" or anything else...in fact, there really isn't anything to do in Whittier unless you catch one of those cruises or the ferries there. Other people have insisted to me that there's "tons!" to do in Whittier, but all I can ever get them to remember is that they bought fudge at a shop there. It's a strange town.

We approached the tunnel, which was only upgraded to include car traffic about a decade ago. At 2.6 miles long, it is the longest car-train combined tunnel in the world, and the second longest automobile tunnel now that the Big Dig in Boston is complete. Normally, coming in from the Anchorage side, there is a toll of $12 round trip you have to pay to use the tunnel. There is no toll booth on the side leaving Whittier, so if you're like us and come in on the ferry, you don't have to pay anything, which I greatly enjoyed. Since the tunnel is only one lane wide, it alternates between which direction gets to go at which times. Every hour on the hour for the first 15 minutes of the hour, traffic out of Whittier is allowed to go through the tunnel. Then it shuts down and if there's a train, the train can go through. Then, at thirty past each hour, a 15 minute window opens for traffic going into Whittier from the Anchorage side. Thus, for whatever direction you're going, you really only have 15 minutes every hour when you can get through the tunnel. The tunnel also closes at 11 PM and I don't know when it opens in the morning...so it's conceivable that you can get stuck in Whittier. Anyhow, since we got in at 1:30, we were able to make the window that opened at 2 PM with no problem. First, we waited in a staging area until we were signaled to enter.
The zoom on my camera was zoomed in a bit much for this photo, but you can see the narrowness of the tunnel. They also send the cars in relatively tightly. It's rather dark in the tunnel, but my camera took in a lot of the light and made it look significantly brighter to give this image.
As you can see, the tunnel is only one-lane wide and the road bed is shared with the railroad tracks. As I said before, the tunnel is 2.6 miles long and the posted speed is 25 mph, so it takes about 10 minutes to get through it. It feels like an awfully long time, though, as you just keep plodding away through this tunnel. At four places along the tunnel's length are "safehouses" which are apparently rooms to the side of the tunnel. This is an earthquake prone area, and should such a disaster occur and the tunnel collapses, in theory people will be able to make it to one of these safehouses where we are told each one has enough food, oxygen and supplies to keep 50 people alive for 25 days. Apparently they think that rescuers will be able to get there in that length of time. The entire tunnel is kept well-ventilated by large turbines that look like jet engines periodically spaced on the ceiling. The walls for the most part are raw rockface. So we spent 10 minutes driving under the Chugach/Kenai Mountains and then popped out the other side.
And from there on it was the normal 1 hour drive or so back to Anchorage down the Seward Highway along the north shore of Turnagain Arm. So, in effect, I only had to drive for one hour and five minutes to get back from Valdez to Anchorage instead of driving for six and a half hours. We spent another five hours and 45 minutes in the meantime cruising across the sound, but it was well worth the time. I enjoyed this experience a lot. And so ended this weekend's trip.

I'll try to post again sometime later this week (maybe FINALLY describing the scenic goodness that is that Turnagain Arm drive), but this is my last full week in Alaska, as I'll be flying into Washington this weekend to make the presentation for my scholarship.

Update

2009-07-18T23:53:00.001-08:00

Made it back from our travels today, but it's very late and we have to be up early again tomorrow, so the description of today's travels will have to wait a day...

The Rest of the Chugach

2009-07-17T21:23:00.010-08:00

This weekend marks my last full weekend in Alaska before flying back to Washington to make the final presentation from my internship. It's amazing how quickly this summer has gone by. But, there's still the drive back to look forward to, and always another adventure after that. This weekend I decided to head back into eastern Alaska, an area I haven't really been to since driving up here. The basic destination for this trip is Valdez, at the end of both the Richardson Highway and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. My friend Matt from up here wanted to accompany me on this trip, and everyone else had shifts to work or didn't want to tag along. So, I worked 10 hours per day for Monday through Thursday of this week to get my 40 hours in and was able to head out today.

We began by heading north on the Glenn Highway out of Anchorage like usual, only heading east through Palmer and staying on the Glenn Highway. When I drove in originally, I mentioned that the Matanuska Valley was extremely scenic, but had no pictures at the time to show of it. I took a few this time, but it was rather cloudy and the valley didn't have the magic spectacular-ness I remember from my first time there.
At the head of the valley is the Matanuska Glacier, one of the most accessible glaciers in Alaska. The state park service claims that there are only three glaciers accessible by road in Alaska-he Matanuska Glacier east of Palmer, the Worthington Glacier north of Valdez and the Exit Glacier north of Seward. We would get to see two of these today, starting with the Matanuska Glacier.
A lot of white water rafting trips start in the Matanuska River just below the end of the glacier. Apparently thousands of years ago the glacier used to extend all the way to Palmer, some 50 miles west of its current terminus, but over the years it has retreated. We didn't drive up to the glacier, but did stop at an overlook to take the photo above.

The road then continued out into the widening Copper River basin, between the Chugach Mountains to the south, the Talkeetna Mountains to the north, the Alaska Range to the northeast and the Wrangell Mountains to the east. The valley really widens out as you approach the city of Glennallen, which is some 150 miles from Anchorage. The area is covered in black spruce forests and dotted with glacial lakes.
Normally, on a clear day, you can see the massive, snow-covered volcanoes of the Wrangell Mountains on the eastern horizon. Alas, major wildfires in the Alaskan interior made it so hazy that we couldn't see any of those mountains. We turned south on the Richardson Highway to Valdez at the city of Glennallen, which has nothing really in it except for a few gas stations and some administrative buildings. The first part of this drive south was spend trying to see any of the Wrangell Mountains. All we could see was the entrance sign for Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park, the largest national park in the country.
Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park is mostly a wilderness park, and it covers almost the entire southeastern corner of the main body of the state--all the way down to near Yakutat. Tomorrow the plan is to drive down one of the roads into the park, so I'll leave further descriptions until then.
As we headed south, Matt got really hungry and wanted to stop some place to eat. Of course, this being the middle of nowhere in Alaska, there literally are no services whatsoever for the next hundred miles or so. However, there was a sign for a loop road through the small village of Copper Center, and a sign advertised food, so I hoped to find a gas station with a Subway or something in it for him. The road looped around, past some houses and a few small stores, but no real food places. It was looking like Matt was out of luck. As the road swung back around, there was a junction in it where the main road continued on it to the right, but there was a side road with a green sign and an arrow pointing down it that said "Loop Road". I knew that we were on the "Copper Center Loop Road" so I assumed I was supposed to go that way, though my major instinct was to continue along the road I was going down. So I took the "Loop Road" and immediately thought it was going to just dead end somewhere and I had taken a wrong turn. Then, we came around a corner and saw this:
A very random, well-kept "Roadhouse" motel/general store/restaurant with several people stopped there. I was immediately satisfied that this was a decent place and we went in and had lunch. I had a very good roast beef sandwich with potato salad on the side. Such a random place to stop...and to think I almost didn't take the "Loop Road". This Roadhouse seemed to attract more locals than tourists or travellers, which was also different from most of the Alaska places I had been to. We were amused to sit in their small dining area and overhear bits of conversation from the people in the kitchen or out in the lobby. Conversations like,
"Hey...do you know whose black dog that is?"
"What? No...I've never seen that dog before..."
"Well, he keeps trying to get in the back screen door."
"Do you have your paintball gun?"
"Sure do...but I don't...hey, wait a minute...didn't some lady say she had lost her dog earlier today?"
"Oh that's right...don't remember who, though. Go next door and ask Mrs. Winslow. She was in for breakfast this morning and might remember that."
"All right. I see her in her garden now..."

Seems like such a mundane conversation, but it only further emphasizes just how random stopping here was. We didn't know this place existed until we happened upon it, and the food was decent and we were entertained. Pleasant stop. They even had one of those old-fashioned type gas stations across the street that was actually a working gas station instead of a deserted, abandoned shell of a building.
After finishing lunch, we followed the "Loop Road" around, which rejoined with the "Copper Center Loop Road" and then headed back to the Richardson Highway. We continued south Valdez and entered the Chugach Mountains. Now, the far western edge of the Chugach Mountains is in Anchorage, so this is a very "familiar" range to us. This was the eastern part of the mountains, though, and I thought this part was a bit more scenic.
Many mountainous vistas.
Ironically, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline actually parallels the highway all the way into Valdez. However, it's almost entirely buried at this point, since they don't have to worry about melting permafrost this far south. After driving up for a ways, we came to a turnoff for the Worthington Glacier. We thought this was worth the stop and we turned off.
Though it's not the most spectacular glacier, it still is rather impressive. They have several short, paved trails leading to viewing platforms near the glacier's base. From there, several small footpaths are visible in the glacial till surrounding the glacier that head up to and along the glacier. Loose rocks made these trails a bit interesting to follow, but we decided to head up a short ways down one of the paths we could see to get a closer view.
You hear a lot about glacial moraines, particularly if you live in southeastern Wisconsin. For instance, Kettle Moraine State Park is full of hills that are the moraines left by the glaciers after the last ice age. Moraines are just hills of soil and gravel that build up on the edges of glaciers and then are left as the glacier retreated. The glaciers that covered Wisconsin were much, much more massive than our little Worthington Glacier here. However, the mechanics are the same, and there were several small moraine hills around the base of the glacier.
There were also a lot of streams all filled with meltwater rushing down around the glacier.
After a bit of exploring, we continued heading south on the Richardson Highway toward Valdez. We started climbing to Thompson Pass, the highest summit on the highway as it goes through the Chugach Range. While only half as high in altitude as the Atigun Pass through the Brooks Range up north, it's still a decently tall pass at over 2,000 feet. This location is also one of the snowiest places in the United States during the winter.
The pipeline also crosses this pass (though it is underground). From here, it's all downhill to the ocean, so the oil in the pipe is just carried by gravity all the way to the end of the pipeline at the port of Valdez. We, however, decended a series of wide switchbacks along the road decending the other side of the pass. It was enough of an incline that I didn't have to use the accelerator on my car for a full five miles on the other side. You can see these odd, bent poles on both sides of the road. These are to guide snowplows that have to try and keep this road clear in the winter. The cross parts come all the way over the stripes on the edges of the roads so the snowplow drivers don't get too close to the edges.
At the base of the decent, we entered a river canyon called Keystone Canyon.
It reminded me a whole lot of the Big Thompson River Canyon in Colorado, the one that famously flooded in the 1970s. It was just the road and this raging river with steep canyon walls on either side.
The canyon only lasted a few miles, but it was fun to drive in and there were several waterfalls coming down the canyon walls. However, the road soon began winding down towards Valdez. A few miles further and we could see the massive Alyeska Pipeline facility that marked then end of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. We couldn't get up there because there were security gates. However, you can see all the big storage tanks where they store the oil until tanker ships can come and pick it up.
Of course, many people remember the Exxon-Valdez Oil Spill in 1989. Yes--the Valdez part of that ship's name comes from this port city--Valdez. The actual oil spill itself occured just a little ways from Valdez out in Prince William Sound. The area is as cleaned up as it can be now, but I'm told that for years you could still find oil slicks out on the sound from that disaster. Many of the beaches near here still have darker veins of sand where there's still oil mixed in that had washed ashore. Just some background there. This visit out here also means that I've been to both the beginning and the end of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. It seems so familiar now...
We entered the city of Valdez and it was...a lot smaller than I had expected. It has a population of over 3,000 and is slightly larger than Seward. However, it's clear that this is a fishing and oil industry town and not as much of a tourist town. They had one street by their harbour with some touristy shops and tour places. More on that tomorrow, though. We ate dinner at a nearby restaurant that advertised the "best New York-style pizza in town". I don't think there was much competition, but the pizza was decent. We got to our Best Western hotel on the waterfront and are going to bed early for our trip back into the Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park tomorrow.

There be whales here!

2009-07-11T23:16:00.041-08:00

This weekend one of our group up here wanted to take a cruise to see whales and this sounded like a fun idea. We found a three hour "wildlife" cruise out of the city of Seward for $60 per person. Not exactly the cheapest thing ever, but still not too bad. We decided to make a full day trip out of it and see the city of Seward, another popular Alaskan destination. So, this Saturday morning we headed out.

Seward is on the eastern shore of the Kenai Peninsula, so the first half our drive was retracing last weekend's drive down Turnagain Arm and through the Kenai Mountains on the Kenai Peninsula. This time, we took the road to Seward instead of Homer.
I really don't think that the drive down to Seward is that spectacular, but it is one of those "Alaska Scenic Byways," so I suppose it must be something scenic? You stay in the mountains and drive through a lot of trees, but I don't think that these mountains are as scenic as most of the other mountains in Alaska. But that's just me. One of the guys who was on this trip with me thought that the drive was spectacularly scenic. I suppose it all depends on the perspective. Since I was driving, I didn't take any pictures.

We got into Seward around 11 AM. It's only 130 miles from Anchorage to Seward and the speed limit is 55 or 65 for most of the way. Because of this, I don't understand why all of the guidebooks say that the drive is estimated to be around 3 hours. It took us 2 hours and 15 minutes. Seward has about 3700 people and sits at the end of Resurrection Bay, which is more off the Gulf of Alaska than off of Prince William Sound, but it's pretty darn close to Prince William Sound. The city is divided into two sections--the harbour tourist area and the downtown tourist area. We parked in the harbour tourist area, since that was where the cruise would depart, at a public use parking lot that charged $5 per day. The harbour area reminded me a lot of Homer, though without the quaintness of being out on a sand spit.
As you can see, the marine layer was in and the skies were all cloudy, but it was still rather warm with temperatures in the upper 60s. I will say that I did like Seward's Tsunami Evacuation Signs more than Homer's. Seward's signs include a stylized stick-figure man charging up a hillside ahead of the angry monster wave.
We ate lunch at a local restaurant, where for the first time I saw cod being served as a main fish dish in addition to halibut. Seward is still known as a major halibut fishing area, but apparently there are some kinds of Pacific cod in the nearby waters and I was able to enjoy a fish and chips lunch. We then walked the mile down the road to the downtown tourist area.
Downtown Seward is like that typical-looking "historic" downtown, with the quaint storefronts, advertising local products and souvenirs. I bought a shirt that says "Seward, Alaska" on it a one store. I am continually surprised at, with all of the local pride, how difficult it is at many of these gift shops to find shirts that have the name of the city on them. I can understand that it's probably more cost-effective for some huge screen printing shirt company in Anchorage to make a bunch of "Alaska" shirts and distribute them everywhere, but I want to wear a shirt that reflects the locality, the city I visited, as opposed to just the state. Anyhow, we also stopped at a local museum and spent about an hour looking at relics and photos describing the history of Seward.

I should point out that, had I not visited the (in my mind) somewhat similar tourist/fishing city of Homer the weekend before, I would have been a lot more excited about Seward--it's a very charming town with a rich history. Take, for example, this mountain right behind downtown.
This photo was taken earlier in the day when the clouds were still around. The mountain is called Mount Marathon, and every 4th of July they host a footrace up and down the mountain. This tradition started back in the early 1900s as a bar bet between two guys where one bet the other that he couldn't run to the top of Mount Marathon and back in less than an hour. So the best was taken and it ended up taking 1 hour and 3 minutes that first time for the runner to get to the top of the mountain and back. This race has expanded to include a whole field of competitors, who run, stumble, fall and crash their way up and down the mountain every Fourth of July. The current records are around 40 minutes now for the entire trip. It apparently takes the best runners 30 minutes to get up the mountain, but only 10 to get down--that's how fast they're moving. It's not uncommon for people to be all bruised and bloody at the end because of them falling on the way a few times. This is a major event in Seward every year and their Fourth of July celebrations as a whole draw hundreds of people every year. So, this is a town with a lot of life to it.

There are also more things to see in the area, like the Exit Glacier near town. This is a glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park that you can actually walk to the face of on a half-mile path from a parking area. There's also the Alaska Sea Life center, which is a large saltwater aquarium in downtown Seward that houses all the animals (except whales) you could find in the area, for those who don't want to go out on a cruise to spot them there. There are many unique restaurants and bars in the downtown area, and we didn't have a problem deciding on places to eat (for once). Seward is a good place to spend a day.

Anyhow, we had to be back at the docks by 3 PM to get on our cruise.
Our ship was called the "Orca Song," and at maximum it could hold about 75 people. On our cruise, there were maybe 40 some people, and they were a mix of elderly couples, some college students, families with small children...just about anyone. I really, really like being on boats. I know that one day I will own some sort of boat. I've always wanted to go out on a sailboat and learn to sail, but I've never really had the opportunity to do so, nor does anyone I know conveniently have a sailboat and know how to sail. That's something I really want to do, though. There were plenty of sailboats in the harbour, as well as many fishing boats and some yachts. I was delighted to see all these marine radars on the boats being used. But anyhow, the clouds were beginning to break and our cruise headed out on time at 3:30. We were soon literally leaving Seward in our wake and heading out into Resurrection Bay.
Apparently the bay is called Resurrection Bay because the Russians who first entered it did so on the Russian Orthodox Easter. We headed down the bay toward the open ocean rather quickly and soon saw our first wildlife--a pair of sea otters playing in the bay. Since I was on the top deck of the boat, and the otters were so small, it's difficult to make them out in the photo. But, they're there...
The otters were fun to watch for a few minutes, but then the boat continued on down the coast. Next we saw two bald eagles in the trees on the shore. You can see their white heads against the dark trees in this photo.
The boat then entered a small cove and we drove right up to the cliff face. The area was a major rookery for puffins and cormorants. I'm not sure which of those birds are in this photo, but you can see how many of them there are in the cracks in the rock. Though they look kind of like little penguins, they definitely are not. By this point, I was really wishing my camera had a better zoom ability.
We then headed out to the mouth of the bay where it meets the open Pacific Ocean. There was one small island left. At the top of this island is a small station that used to be a watch post during World War II when the military watched for any boats or submarines trying to enter Resurrection Bay.
At the base of this island was a large colony of Steller's Sea Lions. Steller's Sea Lions are an endangered species, so this was apparently a rare and treasurable photo opportunity. Our boat waited and watched off the shore of the island for a while, and you could hear the sea lions grunting and barking at one another. Very fun.
As you might be able to tell from the photos (aside from the fact that my camera cannot zoom at all), as we headed down the bay and out to the open ocean, we entered the marine layer again and the weather had turned cool and cloudy. We crossed the mouth of the bay and I was able to look out at the open Pacific Ocean. This is the first time I had ever been on a boat on the ocean, so it was an experience. Somewhere out there, 2500 miles away, is Hawaii...
At this point, our captain said that they had spotted two humpback whales up ahead, and the boat plowed in that direction. Everyone gathered at the bow of the boat to see what they could see. I went down to the lower deck to get a better view. We waited for several minutes, hoping the whales would come up again. And they did. First we could see the spray from their breathing...
We soon learned (from our captain) that it looked like we had found a mother humpback whale and her calf. We next saw the characteristic humped back of one of the whales.
Then the two whales resurfaced very near to the boat. The younger whale decided to roll on its back. You can see its white fin in this photo. The mother whale's back is also there.
Then the younger whale lifted its tail out of the water in a classic shot. This photo was a chance happening, but I'm glad I was able to get it.
After this dive, the whales disappeared for several minutes. We thought they had gone and the boat turned to head back into the bay. I happened to be on the ocean side of the boat for this, and everyone was congratulating everyone else on seeing the whales. Then, there was a huge explosion a little distance away...and the mother whale leaped completely out of the water...
Which was followed by a huge splash...
Just spectacular. There were cheers on board the boat. I'm so glad I was able to see that, and that the point of us going on this cruise was fulfilled. Having seen what we all came to see, the boat turned back to Seward, this time following the western shore of the bay. We passed near the Bear Glacier which "empties" into the bay.
As we approached Seward, it was nearly 6:00. Apparently that's the time when a lot of the fishing charters come in. I felt like we were leading a full fleet back into the harbour...
Seward harbour is very scenic. We followed a sailboat through the breakwater. Once again, the maze and tangle of masts and ropes on all the ships reminded me of those puzzles I used to put together. It also reminded me of a poem we had once read in English class in high school--the Idea of Order at Key West by Wallace Stevens. It includes a stanza that goes,

"...tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night... "

This scene just reminded me of all that as we returned in the evening. It wasn't quite "night", but still...
Those few clouds were all that remained of the cloudiness that had been around all day. The sunshine was welcome after all those hours out on the ocean. We got back in at 6:30 and found an Italian restaurant for dinner. After that, I mailed another round of postcards and we drove back into Anchorage. The drive back was rather uneventful, as most of the other people slept on the way.

Homer Bound

2009-07-05T16:34:00.026-08:00

It's been several days since I last posted, mostly because I've been busy at work putting together details of a presentation and haven't had time to do much exploring. This Saturday changed that routine, as some of our group (including to me) wanted to head down south and drive down the Kenai Peninsula to the city of Homer, Alaska, which is well-known for being a scenic and "Alaskan" locale.
This map below shows the Kenai Peninsula, which is a large area to the south of Anchorage. It's bounded on the south by the open Pacific Ocean, Prince William Sound to the east, the Cook Inlet to the west, and almost completely on the north by a deep bay off of the Cook Inlet to the south of Anchorage called Turnagain Arm.
Only a small bit of land connects the Kenai (pronounced like the words "keen-eye") Peninsula with the rest of Alaska. There is one highway from Anchorage to the peninsula, called the Seward Highway. This runs along the northern shore of Turnagain Arm (which I will describe in another blog entry) and down into the Kenai Mountains which, in turn, run down the eastern half of the peninsula. From there, the highway splits into the Sterling Highway which heads west to the Cook Inlet shore and down through several towns to the city of Homer and the other extension (which is still called the Seward Highway) that goes to the city of Seward on Prince William Sound to the east. Homer is some 220 miles from Anchorage by road and it takes 4.5-5 hours to drive there. This meant going there and back would be an all-day trip.

South of Turnagain Arm, the road enters the Kenai Mountains. These are more or less a subrange of the Chugach Mountains, except for the fact that the Kenais are lower and run north-south to the Chugachs' east-west.
Though they're not a very "spectacular" mountain range, the Kenai Mountains do provide a few sweeping vistas. I'm surprised that the road, which crosses the entire range, has very little in the way of hills or elevation gain--it stays relatively level. The mountains give way to dense forests in the foothills as you head further west. Two rivers in this area--the Kenai River and the Russian River--are very, very popular fishing locations. In fact, fly fishing on the Kenai and Russian Rivers is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Alaska. Several local companies along this road advertise fishing tours and outfitting. There are several lakes on the peninsula, too, including Kenai Lake (everything is named Kenai...) and Skilak Lake. The Sterling Highway actually crosses Kenai Lake at a place called Coopers Landing.
I was surprised how busy traffic was on the road, particularly around the Coopers Landing area. Then again, what better way to spend the 4th of July than going camping and fishing. We soon exited the mountains and went across the large, tree-covered plain that is the western Kenai Peninsula. We passed through the small town of Sterling, for which the highway is named. The highway, though, goes right on through Sterling to the city of Soldotna. Soldotna is the seat of the Kenai Peninsula Borough and has around 7,000 residents, making it a fairly large city by Alaskan standards. I seemed a lot like any other town you'd find anywhere else in the US, complete with fast food and chain stores. Of course, being way out on that plain and the Cook Inlet shore and far from the mountains made the backdrop very different from what we're used to in Alaskan cities. This made it all the more normal-looking...
We detoured north to the neighboring (and almost as large) city of Kenai (yes, everything is still named Kenai) since that's where the "Anchorage" weather radar is located, and I wanted a photo of it for my presentation. Though it had taken us almost two hours from Anchorage to get this far, most of that drive was to head far east and then far back west again to get around Turnagain Arm. As such, the Soldotna-Kenai area isn't really that far from Anchorage as the crow flies. We managed to find the radar and also spent half an hour bypassing downtown Kenai where they had their Fourth of July parade going on. We stopped for lunch at an Arby's and then continued south along the coast.

We started being able to see mountains across the Cook Inlet. These mountains were some of the great volcanoes of Alaska that make up the Aleutian Range. Whenever you hear about volcanoes erupting and causing problems in Alaska, it's usually one of these ones. As many of you know, for the last few months, concern has centered around a volcano called Mount Redoubt that briefly erupted in March and has been steaming ever since. Since this is such a well-known volcano (and because it was actually steaming and semi-active) we wanted to get a photo of it. I had heard that the Clam Gulch State Recreation Area offered good views of the mountain across the inlet, so when we came to that area on the highway I turned in and we walked down to the beach. There, across the bay, was the Mount Redoubt Volcano. To us it was as plain as ever and rather vivid. However, it was a somewhat hazy day and, to the camera, it didn't look like anything much. There is a massive, steaming volcano in the center of this photo:
Can you see it? Don't worry if you can't--I really can't either. So I fiddled around with my limited photo editing tools and adjusted the contrast and the color levels and whatnot and this was the best I could do:
I'm sure it could be made better, but that's the best I'm going to be able to give you. At least you can somewhat make out the volcano and the steam plume rising up. To us standing on the beach, it was as clear as day. I don't know what my camera was picking up, but it did not like the haze. The beach itself was made up of a very fine particulate sand that was actually mostly volcanic ash.
There were many small stones mixed in, but for the most part it was all volcanic ash. Volcanic ash isn't really like "ash" as we normally think about it--it's small pieces of rock that make a very, very fine and soft sand. Imagine getting tons of sand dumped on your house or car and you'll get an idea of what a volcanic ash fall is like. It's a very common thing to find in Alaska, and you can see evidence of recent volcanic activity everywhere. Tons of ash were released into the air during the March eruption of Mount Redoubt and you can see what likes like dirty patches on the ice and snow near the tops of many mountains in the Kenai Range and beyond. These patches are from the ashfall that spread out over the area from that eruption. There are entire seas of sand dunes in parts of Alaska that are all volcanic ash. Quite the sight. To see what an ashfall looks like, I can direct you to http://pafc.arh.noaa.gov/stories/2009/webcam-homer-Apr04-1.html. This is an animation of webcam images taken from near Homer on the day of the eruption and compiled into a Flash animation by someone at the Anchorage forecast office. The full write up (with more webcam images and some other satellite and radar views of the eruption) can be found at http://pafc.arh.noaa.gov/stories/viewer.php?pId=Redoubt&year=2009. In the first video that I linked to, the sun comes up at the beginning and there's snow already on the ground. The day continues normally until around the time 1530Z when the volcano erupts. This sent an ash cloud tens of thousands of feet into the air which then moved over Homer. If you go frame by frame you can see the pitch black and completely opaque ash cloud move over the city, totally blocking out the sun. Then, all the ash just falls out at once in a big "whoosh" almost. It almost looks like a very brief, heavy snowfall--you can see on the roofs how before they were mostly clear, but after they are covered with white poweder. Then the cloud moves on or dissipates and the city is left with what looks like a fresh dusting of snow--but it's that sand-like volcanic ash. Pretty amazing.
The volcano didn't re-erupt while were there, and no one was that concerned about it. A lot of people had driven their trucks out onto the beach and were spending the 4th of July there. It was a very pleasant beach--the volcanic ash sand was very fine and soft and the water wasn't that cold either. I wouldn't have minded spending more time there. But, it was already nearly 3 in the afternoon and we still weren't at Homer. So we moved on.
The road continued south, weaving close to and away from the coast. I haven't done much coastal driving in my many driving adventures, so I rather enjoyed this. We passed through the small town of Ninilchik. Despite having a weather station that I've been using in some of my studies, Ninilchik is home to the Kenai Peninsula Regional Fairgrounds and Rodeo, as well as an old Russian Orthadox Church that has been around since the time when Alaska was Russian territory. We didn't see the church, but many people take a small trip to stop and see it. An hour south of Clam Gulch we got to the top of the bluffs overlooking Kachemak Bay and the city of Homer. This was the view.
Once again, the haziness contributes to the washed-out look of the background. The Kenai Mountains, which had been running along the eastern, opposite coast of the peninsula from us, swing across the southern end of the Kenai Peninsula just south of Homer. The body of water between the bluffs we were on top of and the Kenai Mountains out there is called Kachemak Bay. To the right of this photo is the end of the Cook Inlet and the open waters of the Pacific Ocean. On a clear day, looking in that direction usually gives good views of the Iliamna and Mount Augustine volcanoes. We could actually see them through the haze and I took picures, but try as I might I can't cut through the haze on the photos. So we're left with the city of Homer and its "spit" which is a large sandbar 5 miles long sticking out into Kachemak Bay. You can just see it out in the water in the center of this photo. That's where we were headed.
The city of Homer has a reputation as one of the quaintest, most "Alaskan" cities you will find. It is known as a haven for "hippies" and supposedly supports many arts colony sorts of establishments. It also bills itself as the "Halibut Fishing Capital of the World." The father of one of my roommates, who had been to Alaska before, said that Homer was "better than Denali (Mount McKinley)" as an attraction. A lot of people speak highly of the town. I'll give it a lot for its scenic beauty and overall pleasantness. It didn't seem very eccentric to me. But we headed into town. Downtown Homer is actually on the mainland and it's much like the downtown of any resort town with its shops and local groceries and restaurants. If we had had more time, I would have liked to explore that area more. However, we drove straight through to the start of the Spit.
Starting down the Spit, we drove two miles on what amounts to a causeway with water on both sides. The tide was low when we were there so it looked very muddy and the smell of dead fish was quite prominent. After those two miles, we got into the buildings, stores and docks at the end of the spit. These demand some detail, so there will be several pictures. First we drove all the way to the end of the Spit, which is, by most accounts the "end" of the paved highway system in North America. You can go no further south in Alaska and no further west on (paved) roads. There is a resort at the end of the road fittingly called "Lands End".
We parked near there and started walking back down the Spit. First thing we came across was the massive Homer harbour with all of its boats. I seem to remember putting together many jigsaw puzzles that looked like this...
While many of these boats are the property of people who have vacation homes in Homer, a lot are commercial fishing boats and many belong to fishing charter companies, of which there are many located right on the Spit. You can call ahead or come out early in the day and get on an all-day halibut fishing trip with one of the groups there. They'll provide all the equipment and explain to you what to do. Most will also offer to clean any fish you catch as well, so at the end of the day you can walk away with fresh packages of halibut fillets from what you caught that day. In fact, by the time we got there late in the afternoon, many of the charters were beginning to come in and the fish cleaning process had begun. Here you can see the workers outside one of these charter places preparing to clean the day's catch of halibut.
Halibut are large fish--most people catch ones around 30-50 pounds, but they can get up to over 200 pounds and be up to 7 feet long. Homer has an ongoing competition every year to see who can catch the largest halibut that year. The winner gets something like $30,000 dollars. Everyone is eligible, so any time any of the charters come back with an extremely large catch, they immediately bring it in to weigh it before it starts drying out. Because Alaskan law defines the "catcher" of a fish to be the person who is operating the pole that first hooks the fish and not the person who actually brings it in, there can be interesting circumstances--like how recently a 200+ pound halibut was "caught" by a 6 year old girl. All she had to do was hook it and it was hers--before three or four other adults took over trying to haul the thing in. Lots of fishing stories are made here, I'm sure...

Also, in case you were wondering, all of these buildings on such a narrow strip of sand are a risk from tsunamis or large waves, which can occur from the earthquakes up here. Thus, in case people were unsure where to go with only one road on the spit, that road is indeed a "Tsunami Evacuation Route." I enjoy the stylized monstrous wave on the sign...
As I said, the one street is lined with lots of charter fishing "huts," but also several restaurants and gift stores. Here we are looking down the spit towards the mainland. It's rather narrow and most of these buildings are supported by stilts on the water side.I draw your attention to the lighthouse building further down the spit. This place is called the Salty Dawg Saloon and is the "most famous" or "most photographed" building in Homer. So they say.
The saloon is a bar, of course, but it is made up of a mishmash of old buildings from Homer's history. The lighthouse, with its new shingles on the outside, used to be a water tower for the city way back when. The smaller building to the front apparently was once the post office, and later a school, mining outfitter, fishing cabin, and a bunch of other things before it was moved and attached to the saloon. There are two other small buildings attached on the back side as well with their own history. The ceilings are very low inside and it was completely full when we got there. The inside is covered with a lot of one-dollar bills that are all signed by various people and pinned to the walls. As the story goes, once several years ago a fisherman who was having a drink at the bar took out a dollar bill, signed it, and pinned it to the wall saying that a friend of his was coming in later and he wanted to buy this friend a drink but he had to go, so this was for his friend's drink. Since then it has been tradition for all visitors to go to the saloon, sign a dollar bill and pin it to the wall. Unfortunately, there were those in our group who didn't want to go in and get a drink and do all of this, so we moved along.
There are lots of little shops like that one that are really no more than small shacks. That one happened to have a group of musicians out front playing sea shanties. This was, I think, the closest we came to radical, hippy sort of people we are told are in the city. We're convinced that, based on all of the stories we've heard about there being all of these quaint locals, that they were just all in hiding for the fourth of July or something. Anyhow, there are scattered collections of these buildings all up and down the end of the Spit. Like I said, most are on stilts on the ocean side.
In between the collections of buildings are rows and rows and rows of RVs and tents on the side of the road. Apparently it's a really big thing for people to "camp out" on the Homer Spit. I suppose there is a certain novelty to that.
We got ice cream at this one shop and I bought post cards in another. Only one person in our group was really hungry, and she half-heartedly suggested stopping at this restaurant. I was very, very pleased that no one else was in the mood to stop and eat there.
However, we had two people who had come off of working midnight shifts at the forecast office the night before and people also wanted to get back that night to see the Anchorage fireworks. So, we didn't stick around much longer. We headed back off the spit into downtown Homer, which looks like this as you come in from the spit. Like I said, a very scenic, pleasant little town on the bluffs. I would have liked to explore more and see what that whole area of town outside the Spit was like, but we needed to be heading back.
The drive back went a lot faster than the drive going out, mostly because we only stopped once for food and gas and everyone seemed more talkative on the way back. I rather enjoyed the trip, even if it was rather whirlwind. I also enjoyed being out of sight of the mountains for a while. I hadn't realized how accustomed I had become to them and how consciously different the landscape seems without them. I have lived pretty much all of my life out of sight of mountains and it just feels slightly more right to me. So, heading back we went though all of the towns we went through going out, only in reverse (there's only one road, after all). We entered the Kenai Mountains again and returned to Anchorage by 11 PM. The fireworks were supposed to be at midnight, but everyone fell asleep anyhow, so all I did was do some reading in my room and listen to the booms that were pleasantly far away.

Ice, Water and Beer

2009-06-29T22:42:00.017-08:00

Today I had to check out of my hotel in Juneau by noon, and leaving my hotel means bringing all of my stuff with me and forfeiting their shuttle to the airport. Since my flight didn't leave until after 6 PM, this left an awful long time without that hotel safety net. I still had things to check off on my list of things to do in Juneau, though, so I checked out around 10 AM and trusted to the good fortune and providence that had sustained me so far on this trip to carry me through to its end.

First on my list of things to see was the Alaskan Brewing Company, which is located in the Lemon Creek neighborhood, a small valley halfway between the residential Mendenhall Valley area where my hotel was and the downtown Juneau area. This was well beyond walking distance and it was another overcast, rainy day in the Mendenhall Valley. I decided to try using the Juneau city bus system. I obtained a map from the hotel lobby and attempted to figure out. Ostensibly, the system is very simple--it runs in a loop around the Mendenhall Valley area and then into downtown Juneau. And that's it. Fares were $1.50 no matter where you were going. Very simple. I found the nearest bus stop and got on.

I've never been a big fan of bus systems. Sometimes, in Norman, when I'm looking to go around and see things without having to drive, I'll take one of the city busses around. I used to use that as my main transportation before I had a car. I met a lot of interesting people on those busses, people who would just start talking about their entire life to you without asking. As such, I feel like I have to be in a particular mood to ride the bus. I wasn't really in that mood this morning, so I wasn't looking forward to it. The bus I got on was very, very efficiently run and there was such a high turnover of people, no one had time to talk about anything. Of course, I didn't know where exactly I needed to stop, and the map wasn't clear. I took a chance and got off at a stop where many other people got off just past Lemon Creek. My fortune held and the next cross street I came to was the right one to turn down to get to the brewery. It was only two blocks away.
The Alaskan Brewery is the largest regional brewer in Alaska, and its beers are more popular than any other mainstream on-tap beer in the state. All of their beer is brewed at their Juneau brewing facility here, back in the hills of the Tongass rainforest. It was lightly raining out when I go there, which kind of added to the liquid atmosphere. I have never toured a brewery or winery or anything like that before, though (at least up here) I have been to many brewhouse pubs and restaurants. I've started collecting glasses with he brewing company logos on them, maybe to outfit a wet bar in my future home one day or something like that. I just like that kind of item to collect. Anyway, I decided to take advantage of my 21 years of age and go on the tour of this place.
Their "tour" didn't exactly go through the brewing part, but they did have a gift shop and "gallery" room where we got a 20 minute presentation by one of the brewers about the history of the brewery and why their beers are so special. Small digression here. Way back in January when I first flew to Anchorage for my site visit, I had just turned 21. I flew Alaska Airlines on my way up and our flight was delayed due to some refueling issue. To make up for that delay, the flight crew announced that, for their beverage service, they would not charge for any alcoholic beverages that people ordered. One thing that Alaska Airlines "proudly" offers is small bottles of Alaskan Amber beer, which is the flagship beer of the Alaskan Brewing Company. On my flight up, I was sitting next to a native Yupik Eskimo who was a doctor of some kind, and he ordered an Alaskan Amber. At the time, having just turned 21 the week before, I was still leery about ordering alcoholic things so I opted for a tomato juice. However, this man insisted to me that while I was in Alaska, I had to try an Alaskan Amber at some point, because it was such a local staple and, according to him, amazingly good. Every time I went out to eat in Anchorage on that trip there were always people around me orderin Alaskan Ambers or Alaskan IPAs or Alaskan Oatmeal Stouts...I began to realize how big of a deal this was. So when I returned for this summer, one of my earliest goals (now having had more experience with the different varieties of beers) was to try this Alaskan Amber and soon after I got here I bought six bottles from the store. And the beer was fantastic--it's by far my new favorite. It still retains the hoppy flavor that comes out so strongly in the craft beers, but at the same time I find it very drinkable, with or without food. I really, really do enjoy it. So, this added to my excitement at visiting the Alaskan Brewing Company.
Now that the stage is better set, I enjoyed their little presentation and asked several questions about their fermentation processes and whatnot. Having tried to ferment wine myself in a closet at college, I was aware of some of these challenges, even if wine is an entirely different concept. Of course, the highlight of this kind of brewery visit is the free beer. They have a little bar in their gift shop area with every variety of beer that the brewery produces, and they hand you a small sampling glass when you come in, encouraging you to return to the bar many times to sample their wares. I tried the Alaskan Summer Ale (which tasted like a lighter version of the Alaskan Amber to me...), the White (which is a wheat ale--definitely had a more fruity flavor) and the India Pale Ale IPA (which was an odd combination of bitter and slightly fruity?). I'm not a big one for stouts or darker beers, and after having one of their roasted malt beers described to me as, "It's like drinking liquid campfire smoke..." I was glad to stick to my lighter beers. The amber is still my favorite, though.
In their gallery where they gave their presentation, they had bottles from craft breweries in "every state," and I was eager to explore this (as recently finding these craft brewers has started to become a hobby of mine). There were several from Illinois, a ton from Wisconsin, and none from Oklahoma. (I do know that COOP Ale Works opened in March in Oklahoma City as I believe the first craft brewery in the state of Oklahoma...I'm looking forward to sampling their stuff...). At the gift shop, since this was a big deal for me, I bought two large pint glasses with the Alaskan logo on them, two smaller sample glasses and a set of coasters. I think it would be fun one day to have a little wet bar in the corner of the basement of my house and stock it with a few bottles of all these different kinds of local craft brews from around the country. It would be even more fun if I could serve these brews in the actual glasses I bought when visiting the brewery... But that's just a whimsical plan for the future. Anyhow, if anyone out there has any suggestions for any good craft breweries, by all means let me know--I'm finding exploring them to be fun. And Alaska is as good of a place to start as any. Alaskan beers are only distributed in Alaska and in basically every state from the Rocky Mountains west, so locally you won't be able to find them. This is kind of sad, but at the same time adds to the uniqueness.

Anyhow, after that tour (and with more beer than I planned on drinking at 1 PM), I took the bus back into the Mendenhall Valley loop to find the Juneau Weather Forecast Office where I was supposed to meet with someone to discuss their radar usage for my project. The Forecast Office is located on the same property as the National Forestry Service's headquarters for the Tongass National Forest. As such, the Forest Service dictated how the Weather Forecast Office's external appearance had to be. For this reason, the Juneau office is one of the most pleasant-looking forecast offices I have ever seen.
Most Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs) are white brick or white siding with blue, Culvers-like roofs (to echo the blue and white logo of their parent organization, NOAA, furher representing the sea and the sky), but this one is all wood siding with a green roof (to echo the trunks and leaves of trees, like one would expect from the Forest Service). I will say that I found it somewhat odd that the Forest Service, dedicated to preserving and maintaining our National Forests, would want buildings that were covered with wooden siding. But...who am I to judge. There are several trails that lead from the Forest Service's headquarters out into the National Forest, and apparently this is a major hiking trailhead for local hikers. However, none depart from the Forecast Office, as this sign that I though was AMAZING and unique out front indicated...
What other WFO is concerned with trailheads? There were a few people working that day, and I was quickly welcomed into their little fold. It has been amazing how accomodating all the people in these WFOs I've been visiting have been. They are all very interested in what I'm doing and quick to engage me in conversations about everything. I don't feel like I'm impinging on their time or that they feel like they have far better things to do than talk to me. On the contrary, they seem eager to have someone else to talk to. Maybe that's saying something about professional meteorologists... Anyhow, I also met their two summer interns, one who is a graduate student at Oklahoma named Richard who I had met while I was still in Oklahoma, and another who is one of my Anchorage roommate's best friends from college and is also a Hollings Scholar like me who will be doing her internship next semester. Once again, this feeling of belonging and community was really there. After an hour-long discussion about the local weather and how they use their radar, Richard and Andrea (the other intern) offered to drive me out to the Mendenhall Glacier in the WFO's government car and then on to the airport, all without my having asked. I had planned on taking the bus to the airport and hadn't even planned on seeing that glacier--luck and providence come through again!

We drove out to the Mendenhall Glacier, which is a major tourist attraction in the Juneau area. The glacier comes almost to the city limits and is one of the most accessable in the state. It's only about a mile and a half from the WFO and apparently the forecasters often go there on their lunch breaks. It also is amazingly crowded whenever the cruise ships were in and, remembering that I had seen three in the harbour yesterday, this proved to be true. But, anyhow, you park at the parking are and there's a large viewing platform to see...the glacier.
You're a lot closer to the glacier and it's a whole lot bigger than this photo makes it seem. There's a visitor's center on a small hill behind where I took this photo, and they have an elevated viewing deck there (with a roof over it...very important in this rainforest...), but it cost three dollars to go into the visitor's center, so we didn't enter. Richard and Andrea had been here many times before, so they knew a lot of the trails to get closer to the glacier and the lake. We headed down a few and I was able to get some good photos.
The glacier periodically calves off several very large and very blue icebergs into the lake below. The lake water was not as freezing cold as I thought it would be--maybe all the rainwater mixing in near the surface helped keep it warmer. But, however cold it was, it was cold enough to support these icebergs. They came in all shapes and sizes and were this very pleasant and rich shade of blue--more so than you can tell from the photograph. I'm told that this blue hue comes from the rock sediments that are compressed into the ice as the glacier grinds its way down the mountain. These particles help scatter the reflected blue light better, so it gives a very bluish hue. If you ever look at a river or stream that forms at the end of a glacier, often the waer will also have a blue, milky color. In free-flowing water, those rock sediments are called "glacial flour" and, because of their presence, it's apparently not advisable to drink water freshly melted off a glacier. You'll end up with a mouthfull of rock and sand. Remember this the next time you see an adverisement for "Pure Glacial Water...". It had to be filtered first.
There was a very powerful-feeling waterfall next to the glacier that just seemed to pop out of the rainforest up the hill. Lots of people from cruise ships ventured out and got very, very close to this waterfall. It was very refreshing to be near it, though, as it gave off a spray that was, for some reason, far more pleasant than the light rain that continued to fall. From the base of the waterfall, we were as close as we could get to the glacier.
Because I had my flight to catch, we couldn't stay long, otherwise I would have explored more and taken more photos. Since I was with a few friends now, I finally did manage to have a photo of me taken while I was in Juneau...
Richard drove me to the airport and arrived two hours before my flight was scheduled to leave. Right on time if you're planning to fly out of O'Hare. Way, way, way too early if you're planning to fly out of Juneau. I was sitting in their gate area, which is probably the size of a banquet hall and has only 5 gates (all Alaska Airlines), and was the only person in the gate area for at least 45 minutes. There weren't even any airlines people working any desks or anything...I was literally the only person there. Then, another family of three arrived and a business traveller, so now there were five of us. And the five of us were the only people waiting for our flight until ten minutes until boarding time when 20 people suddenly showed up all at once. I guess you don't have to worry about waiting in lines to check in or get through security in Juneau (I certainly didn't). Our flight was immediately cleared for departure and we arrived back in Anchorage early. I wish all flying was like that. Though I suppose growing up flying out of O'Hare I've only seen the worst of air travel and assumed all air travel was like that--it can only get better, right?

Anyhow, I enjoyed this Juneau trip immensely and definitely recommend Juneau as a vacation stop for anyone who wants to go there. It was kind of odd landing in Anchorage and feeling like I had arrived back "home"...in Anchorage. But, I'm happy to be back as well.

North of expected--or didn't Juneau?

2009-06-28T22:10:00.007-08:00

Aside from the terrible title of this post, this should describe one of the most fantastic days I have had in my Alaskan experience so far. Juneau has become my favorite Alaskan city, and I still have another day to go. Because I took so many pictures, I'm going to run this like I did with the Brooks Range-Arctic blog and not insert any photos because they would take up too much space. Instead, you can page through my entire album at http://picasaweb.google.com/madaus.le/JuneauDay1 . The following narrative should generally follow those photos, so here we go.

I was told to expect rain and clouds during my time in Juneau, so waking up to a pouring, cold rain outside my window was no big surprise. I got up around 9 and after showering went downstairs to make arrangements to take the hotel's advertised "Free Downtown Shuttle" into downtown Juneau for the day. The city of Juneau has many sections--the main downtown area where most of the businesses, tourist areas and government buildings is built into the side of a mountain and a little flat area along the ocean channel running through. The bulk of the residential area, the airport, and my hotel are located about six or seven miles northwest of there in a little valley called the Mendenhall Valley. As such, to travel in a timely fashion between the two, you need some kind of vehicle. The two areas are connected by one highway, the Egan Expressway (Alaska State Highway 7) which, outside of running some 50 miles in and around Juneau, just randomly ends at both ends and does not connect to the continental road system. Thus, the city of Juneau can only be reached by boat or plane.

Anyhow, now that the location was set, I learned that the shuttle to downtown actually only ran three times per day, and the next run wasn't until noon. This negated my plan to go to the cathedral of the Diocese of Juneau for church that morning, as that was in downtown. So, I said I would take the noon shuttle and was informed that the pickup time to come back would be at 5:30 that evening. I returned to my room and, as luck would have it, there are only two Catholic churches in Juneau, and the other one was only three blocks from my hotel. They had a 10:30 AM mass, which I figured would give me plenty of time to walk there, go to mass and then get back in time to make my noon shuttle. I proceeded to walk to Saint Paul's Church...through the rain. It was pouring. I was soaked by the time I got there.

Saint Paul's was a...unqiue...church. For those familiar with the Catholic mass, some highlights included the periodic inerruptions, particularly in the Prayers of the Faithful and UNUSUALLY in the middle of the Liturgy of the Eucharist, to ask the congregation if they had "anything they would like to add." Apparently that wasn't unexpected, because on both occasions people jumped in with random prayers and requests. During the Liturgy of the Eucharist, they added their own personal sentiments about the greatness of the sacrament and the joy they felt in its adoration. I had never seen that before. But, the Catholic church in Alaska is still the Catholic Church (just with "...and Edward our Bishop...") and so it was a familiar experience overall.

All of those congregational interjections lengthened the service considerably--it was ten minutes to noon by the time I got out. And still raining. I half power-walked, half ran back to my hotel, fully expecting to have missed my shuttle. But, upon arriving, I learned that they actually wouldn't be leaving unil 12:20. It ended up that I had time to head up to my room, blow-dry my hair and my jacket, and try to look presentable again for my departure.

It took about ten minutes by van to get into Juneau. I was immediately enthralled by the scenery--steep mountain slopes to the east, the channel of the ocean creating a unique waterfront, and then the mountainous Douglas and Admiralty Islands to the west. So scenic. The first place I headed was the Alaska State Capital building. Since the legislature is not in session at the moment, extensive renovations and remodeling were underway. I took several photos of the building, and found it to look remarkably like a county courthouse. A sign outside advertised free tours of the building inside, but upon entry I learned that the tours wouldn't begin until that afternoon. I planned to return then, and set out towards the Governor's Mansion, which is only a block or two away.

Since the city is built into the mountainside, the roads are very narrow and winding and there are a lot of trees. There are houses in the hillside right next to the road that are painted many very bright colors. They have small lawns or other gardened areas around them as well. The entire combined effect is to produce exactly what I love to see in a city. For some reason, this kind of hillside construction with small yards and buildings at all odd angles and trees and narrow, curving roads just enthralls me. The area around the stately Governor's Mansion is like this, and as such I enjoyed it immensely. Sarah Palin is still out of state at this time and, because it is a private residence, I couldn't go inside the building. I learned that each year, around Christmas time, it is traditional for the Governor to host an open house at the mansion, where all citizens of the state of Alaska (and anyone else in Juneau in the middle of winter) is invited to the mansion for tea and cookies and the opportunity to shake the hand of the governor. Apparently, or so I was told, that would probably be my best shot to meet Sarah Palin. Not planning to be around then, though. There was also a small lawn behind the Governor's mansion with a very cheap-looking trampoline in it. I guess that's what the Palin children do for fun...

I headed back down to the main shopping district. The entire area is a National Historic Landmark so it retains a very quaint, local feel. Lots of small gift shops, bars, and other specialty shops line the streets. It's like going to Galena or Mackinac Island. It's also obvious that they are catering to the cruise ship crowd. Around 70% of tourists who come to Juneau arrive via cruise ship, then another 20% via air and 10% via the ferry. While I was in town, there were three cruise ships docked and, as such, the streets were teeming with people. For many, this was their first Alaskan experience, which I found odd considering where I have been all this time in Alaska looks remarkably different. I was also amused at the many people who could not figure out how to open up the bear-proof garbage cans that fill the city--even though the instructions are printed right on top.

I knew that I wanted to find something called the Mount Roberts Tramway, which is a cable-suspended car that takes you up to an outpost on top of the mountains on which Juneau is built and gives spectacular aerial views of the city. However, I couldn't quite figure out where it was. In the meantime, I browsed through several stores and stopped to buy some fudge and some postcards. Back in Anchorage, when I discussed this trip with my mentor there, he told me his most vivid memory of Juneau was this one T-shirt store that was very bright orange and played very loud, modern music--in stark contrast with the quaint, trying to be historic-looking stores and shops that line the rest of the streets. As I was strolling down the streets, the sun came out (it was not ever raining in downtown Juneau...amazing...) and I suddenly heard this modern rap music coming from down the street. As I approached it, I saw an obnoxiously orange-colored building blaring rap music and calling itself the "Alaska Shirt Company". This was clearly the place my mentor had talked about. They had a very large sign out front saying that it was, "Definitely Locally Owned." I guess many people ask about that? Anyhow, I went in and ended up buying two shirts. Upon leaving with my obnoxiously bright, orange-colored bag, I saw, across the street, the ticketing booth for the Mount Roberts Tram. Amazing how one thing leads to another...

I paid the $27 for my adult ticket to ride the tram up and down (or, actually, it's valid for "as many rides as you want for 24 hours...) and, after filling with 20 some people, we began the ascent. I took several photos of Juneau from various altitudes as we wen up. It's odd to be floating above the trees without any rail or anything that we're riding on. I was also surprised how smooth the ride was--I was expecting the car to sway a lot in the wind. We had a "guide" who conducted our car on the ascent. She was about my age and born here in Juneau. It's a 4 and a half minute ride up and, during that time, the other passengers started a conversation. All of them were from the cruise ships and this was their first time in Alaska. They started asking questions about Juneau and whatnot, but then some of them wanted to know if our guide knew anything about the Anchorage or Fairbanks areas. She said that she had only been to Anchorage a few times and never to Fairbanks. So then I chimed in, since they had specific questions about things in those two cities that I actually knew answers to. Because of this, I was elevated to the level of "native Alaskan" as far as these people were concerned and she and I did a lot of question answering. I found it so funny--here I was, living here for a little over a month, and already to most people I am as good of an Alaskan as someone who has lived here all their life.

At the top of the tram there are several nature areas and many paths through the Tongass National Forest which surrounds this area. The mountains around the Juneau area receive on average some 150 inches of rainfall per year and, because of that, they are technically a temperate rainforest. You can tell when you're up there, too. It may be cool, but it is packed with very full and thick Sitka Spruce trees with many smaller plants and it's also very humid. I would have loved to have more time to explore up there, but I only really had 5 hours or so in downtown Juneau and I had lots more to see. I ate lunch up at a restuarant they have on the top of that tram and had a burger with an Alaskan Amber beer (which is by far my new favorite beer). The ride back down was pleasant and I had no cruise ship people asking me questions.

By then, it was late enough that I could go to the state capital for the tour. I meandered back that way by a long route, cutting through the docks by where the cruise ships were. The entire area smelled like fish, but I guess that's to be expected. I passed a McDonald's on the way that is literally a town landmark. Every map marks it, every guidebook I've read mentions it--maybe all these cruise ship people just want something so very familiar by the time they get back on land. Anyhow, eventually I made it to the capital building and caught on a tour led by a high school student from Juneau who was doing this as her summer job. Since the House and Senate floors were closed for remodeling, we saw some smaller rooms, like the Finance Committee chambers (which were still impressive). Apparently their penalty for having a cell phone ring in that room is to have the person whose phone it is buy twelve poppy seed muffins for every ring of the cell phone. Or so a sign said in that room. We also saw the door's to the Governor's Office (Sarah Palin's Office), over which was a digital countdown clock that was put there by Governor Palin. It counts down the number of days, hours, minutes and seconds until the end of her term as governot as the time left for her to "make a difference". I learned that there are no term limits for governors of Alaska, so long as they run no more than two of their terms consecutively. Who knows when Governor Palin's time will actually end. I met some people from Fort Worth on that tour and, when they learned what I was doing this summer, they, too, decided that I was the closest thing to an Alaska citizen they would find and asked me all these questions about what to see and do in Anchorage. I just find it hilarious...

Back down by the docks, it still smelled of fish. I mailed a few postcards that I had written throughout the day at the main post office and found a few NOAA buildings as well down by the waterfront. I then had about half an hour until my shuttle pick up, so I decided to go on a quick run through the Alaska State Museum. I thought that the Museum of the North in Fairbanks had a far better collection, bu it was still interesting none the less. Actually, of all the things there, I enjoyed finding a Fresnel lens from a lighthouse the most. For some reason that kind of device has always intrigued me, this massive conglomeration of brass and glass that focuses the light beam from the lighthouse. I had never seen one until then. They also had a Science on a Sphere thing in their lobby that was drawing quite a crowd. It was exactly the same system as we have in the Weather Center in Norman. I found it amusing how enthralled people were with it, and also reflected on how accustomed we at the Weather Center have become to our big spherical earth projection. The one in this museum, though, featured a user-customizable display, where you could push different buttons to see different data sets projected onto the sphere, like recent earthquakes or ocean currents. I wish we could do that with ours.

Then I went to pick up my shuttle. By the time 5:50 rolled around with no shuttle I figured something was up. So I called my hotel and sure enough, "Oh...we have no record of anyone asking for a pickup this evening..." even though I was there and saw her write it down. They promised to send someone, though, and sure enough in 15 minutes the van arrived. It was the same fellow who had picked me up from the airport yesterday, and he was most apologetic about not being there on time. As we drove to the hotel, he mentioned that he was going to the ferry terminal to see if there was anyone there who needed to get to the hotel and asked if I wanted to tag along out there before we got back to the hotel. I'm not one to pass up the opportunity to explore a new area, so I went along with him. This led me north of Juneau on the highway, up to the ferry terminal by Auke Bay. This is where a lot of the local harbours are, not only for the ferry terminal, but also for several fishing boats and local yacht owners. It's a very scenic area, though most people who live up there are rather wealthy. Still, I enjoyed the brief tour.

I returned to my hotel and ate at the Mexican Restaurant at its base. The Mexican food in Alaska has nothing on the Texas and Oklahoma Mexican places I've been to. I guess I've been spoiled somewhat by that. But anyhow, I'm enjoying a nice quiet evening now with a good rest before more exploring tomorrow. I hope I stay as dry as I ended up staying today...

Alaska From Above

2009-06-27T20:23:00.007-08:00

I knew for a while that I was going to spend a large chunk of my traveling budget up here on a flight into Juneau for a few days. Located in the panhandle of Alaska (the part down along the west coast of the continent), there are no roads into Juneau, as none have been built to cross the rugged Coast Mountains range to the east of town. As such, the only ways to get there are by boat or by car. Since taking the ferry from one of the ports near Anchorage would cost about as much as flying there, but also take several days, I decided that I would fly. Acting on the advice of my mentor at the forecast office, he suggested that I try to visit as early as possible, as the weather gets very foggy and rainy in July and August. With that in mind, I booked travel for this weekend. I flew into Juneau today and will fly back late Monday evening. This gives me tonight, Sunday, and most of Monday to explore and see things before I return. But first, for day 1, I flew in today and this is what happened.
My flight out of Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport left at around 3:40, so I was at the airport by 1. The Anchorage Airport is a decently large airport and, obviously, serves as a hub for Alaska Airlines. Since the Anchorage forecast office is right by the airport, most of the drive was like a commute into work, and it only takes 10-15 minutes to get there from our apartment as long as traffic is good. Compared to the nearly hour-long trek into O'Hare from home, this seems so simple--and I can sleep in and not spend half of my day in transit and waiting at the airport.

The airport is undergoing some remodeling, so only a Chili's and a Quiznos are open for food at the airport. I grabbed some lunch at Quiznos, and had to wait in line between this mother and daughter who ordered four sandwiches and were the pickiest, most particular and argumentatively insistent people I have run across in a while. It took them forever to order their sandwiches and THREE times they asked the lady trying to make them to start over because she "had gotten it all wrong". So when I came up and just ordered one classic Italian on white with all of the normal toppings, she smiled at me and said, "Thank You". I went to sit down at a small table nearby, not stopping to think where the table was. After about 15 minutes of eating and wondering why it seemed like everyone who came by stopped to stare intently at me while I was sitting there (but I didn't want to look up and stare back at them...) did I realize that I had sat directly under the flight arrival and departure screens for all the flights. These signs were mounted on a very, very large photograph/mural that looked oddly familiar. Then I read the caption sign and realized it was somewhat fitting for me to be sitting under it. I had been there.
My flight left, slightly delayed but only be about 15 minutes so they could load more cargo. I deliberately chose this flight because it stopped at two cities--Cordova and Yakutat--that are NOT on the Alaskan road system and therefore are very difficult to get to. Most people woule choose the direct flight, of which there were many. But I chose this one. (It was also slightly cheaper.) Upon taking off, they soon announced that all approved electronics could be used, so I took out my camera. If you've been following this blog, remember how I have been trying hard to get a decent photo of the city of Eagle River that I like so much? Well, here is the entire city from above, all at once. The Glenn Highway is the north-south-ish road to the left of the city. Anchorage would be located to the lower left of this photo.
And this photo is actually the trailhead at the top of Arctic Valley where I went not too long ago.
We started passing over some glaciers. There are a lot of glaciers in southern Alaska. We're still following the Chugach Mountains at this point, so for a mountain range whose western end is in Anchorage, they extend very far to the east.
The body of water we flew over then is called Prince William Sound.
Prince William Sound is notable for many things, most notably being the center of activity for many whale and glacier viewing cruises and also for being the scene of the Exxon-Valdez oil leak many years ago. It is ringed by three major cities--Seward on its western shores, Valdez in the far north and Cordova in the southeast. Seward and Valdez are both on the road network, but Cordova is not. Even so, Cordova has some 2300 people in it, which in Alaska terms makes it a fairly large city. Our plane soon landed there. The airport consisted of this building:
And this building:
And a few other small hangers and huts scattered out in the forests. There was a single paved road leading away from the airport and presumably into the downtown area, which you cannot see. From the airport sign, you can see the airport is called the Merle K 'Mudhole' Smith Airport and, in reality, most of the flights into Cordova are referred to as flights into "Mudhole".
We stopped there for about half an hour. Our flight was not densely populated at all; I had no one sitting next to me and there were maybe 50 people total on our Boeing 737-400. And literally 2/3 of them got off at Cordova. We had fewer than 20 people left. Three got on at Cordova. The entire flying time from Anchorage to Cordova was only half an hour. It really was not long at all. And the low altitude because of the short flying time gave me a very good view of the terrain. But soon we took off again and headed for the next city, Yakutat.

As we gained altitude, we crossed over the mouth of the Copper River, one of the major rivers in this region. Most famous for being the source of Copper River salmon, this river is a major artery for transportation as it is the only river that actually reaches from the Pacific coast all the way through the Chugach Mountains by the shore without running into a glacier and entering the interior of Alaska. This makes it one of the few good passes through the mountains. To that end, there were plans to build a highway, Alaska Route 10, to connect Cordova with the mines at Kennecott in the interior and the rest of the road system. A railroad, the Copper River and Northwestern Railroad, was built along that route in the early 1900s. After the interior mines started fading out, the railroad fell into disuse and its entire right of way was sold to the state to be converted into the Copper River Highway (Alaska Route 10) that would connect Cordova to the road system. Construction began on this road in the 1950s, but was slow going. The great 1967 Good Friday Earthquake up here ended up destroying a lo of the bridges and messing up much of the old railway alignment, so continued road construction was abandoned. However, the highway does stretch out east of Cordova and across the Copper River. It extends for several miles before abruptly terminating at the far end of a bridge over the Copper River called the "Million Dollar Bridge" since it cost that much to build it. However, it is the epitome of another Alaskan "Bridge to Nowhere" as they never finished the highway after the bridge. However, as part of the Alaskan State Highway system (even though it doesn't connect), the road is still maintained and paved all the way out to the bridge and, if you have a car in Cordova, you can drive out on it. I was fortunate enough to be able to see the road from the air, cutting its way across the Copper River delta here.
Then we saw glaciers. East of the Copper River, at some point the Chugach Mountains end and the Saint Elias Mountains begin. The Saint Elias are known for some spectacular glaciers. Here you can see one and all the icebergs it produces in the water at its end. This process of ice splintering off is called "calving" and is supposed to be remarkable (although, a bit dangerous) to witness from a boat.
As we approached Yakutat, we flew over the Malaspina Glacier, which is the largest glacier in Alaska. It's some 40 miles wide and 28 miles long and covers an enormous area. I believe it's also some sort of National Landmark or something. Anyhow, it was huge...
That glacier was right across Yakutat Bay from Yakutat. Yakutat is located on a the strip of Alaska that's very narrow and connects the body of Alaska with the Alaskan panhandle to the southeast. I set the map in the upper right corner of the blog to point to where it is. Because of the very tall Saint Elias Mountains just a little way inland, any southerly winds off of the Pacific Ocean carrying moist, maritime air are immediately forced upward as they hit the Saint Elias Mountains, causing the water vapor to condense out into rain. This makes Yakutat one of the rainiest places in all of Alaska. I didn't have my camera on as we flew over the town, but it looked somewhat pleasant--located on the bay across from the huge glacier, it had many gravel roads and some paved ones, winding their way through small collections of brightly-colored houses and other buildings with dense pine forests in between. Like in Cordova, the airport was somewhat outside of town.

We stopped for a half an hour here as well. I noticed that their was a bar that had one side on the airport tarmac and the other side on the opposite side of the fence and in the public parking area. The place was called The Yakutat Lodge and several, presumably local people were sitting around on a small deck drinking drinks and watching the plane. I guess that's what you do in Yakutat. Yakutat is not connected to the road system either, but it is on the Alaska Marine Highway, so ferries will come into the port regularly to bring people and equipment in and out. (Cordova is also on the Marine Highway). I was surprised at, for a city of 800 some people, how many got on the plane here. We filled up again to probably near the 50 people we had started with--some 30 odd people got on the plane here. Many of them had ski poles, and I was wondering if they had gone skiing on the glacier (do they let you do that?) Others had their fish stories going on and on, so I knew they had come there for that. One man who sat down in front of me was working for the US Forestry Service in the area (the Saint Elias Mountains, the Malaspina Glacier and the surrounding areas are all in the Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park) and he had been there working on developing an eco-tourism sort of plan for the area. Another man who looked to be in his 40s and was sitting across the aisle in my row had just finished kayaking up the coast from the city of Skagway (which is in the northern Alaskan Panhandle) out to Yakutat. It had taken him two weeks. He said that his eventual goal would be to kayak down the entire Aleutian chain of islands, then cross the Bering Strait to the Russian coast, kayak down the Russian coast through Kamchatka and the Kuril Islands and end up in Japan. I don't know if they let you do that either. And where do these people get this time? It reminded me of those bikers we met on the Dalton Highway who claimed they wanted to bike all the way down to the Argentine. Really? You're going to do that? I really want to know how many of these fanciful and grandiose schemes people come up with that they begin, and then see how many actually complete it and how many decide not to.

The flight to Yakutat had taken another half an hour, and it was another half-hour hop into Juneau. Leaving Yakutat, we again climbed over the Saint Elias Mountains. Though difficult to see (and kind of at an angle) there is a very, very tall mountain that goes up into the clouds on the left side of the following photo. If my geography serves me right (and, as long as I'm not rushed, it usually does...) this is Mount Saint Elias, which is the second-tallest mountain in the United States behind Mount McKinley (Mount Logan is the tallest mountain in Canada). It also lies on the Alaska-Canada border and marks the beginning of the Alaskan panhandle to the southeast.
We began flying over the Saint Elias-Yakutat glacier field. This is the densest concentration of glaciers in the world outside of Greenland (which is, in effect, one big glacier). Seeing all these glaciers fill the valleys between the mountains finally put into scale, at least for me, what these ice ages and major historical glaciations must have been like. These are massive glaciers--even humbling the towering mountains with their size. You can imagine with a bit more snow over time, they could become even taller than the mountains. It's no wonder that thousands of years of these icy rivers moving along ground the mountains down into the flat plains we see today in the central US. Finally it all made sense...
I also got a photo of an ice jam. These are major events in Alaska when they happen, particularly on interior rivers. The temperatures are still cold enough for the ice to remain relatively frozen, even as the chunks of it flow down the river once breakup begins in the spring. But sometimes, enough oddly-shaped chunks collect in the right way to completely block the river. If they do, more ice and water will pile up behind this ice dam and it can lead to severe flooding, which is bad news for many interior Alaskan towns which are built along the river banks. There are no towns around here, and I don't think this was too severe of a jam, but it's what one looks like...
And I saw the Yakutat glacier at its terminus. I like how the "river of ice" transitions so abruptly to a "river of water" with the same width and everything.
Of course, then we flew into a cloud bank and stayed in the stratus clouds all the way into Juneau. Coming in for a landing at Juneau was spectacular--we came down through a channel of the ocean in between the coastal mountains and the relatively mountainous outer islands. This means we decended down into a sort of valley over the water below. Of course, I had to have my camera off, so no photos of that. However, it was spectacular. It was (and is) also very densely forested here. Anyhow, after landing, I got out of the small airport to wait for my shuttle to the hotel. These two photos illustrate the view:
The airport itself was very small. And, in my opinion, in need of a facelift. It looked like they were building an addition on one end of it. Plus, construction out front means that you can't drop off or pick anyone up...and they only have one drop off point, since there's only one airline. Literally, this photo shows the entire extent of the airport terminal for Juneau, Alaska's capital city of some 31,000 people:
I've been told that it is usually very cloudy and often rainy here, and that will probably be the case this weekend. However, from what I can tell I like this place. First impression? This is the quietest "city" I've ever been to. It's unusually quiet. Not sure why. But the city is heavily forested and kind of strung out along the coast, with the mountains rising up almost immediately behind the city and then again across the strait in the islands over there. The buildings seem somewhat rustic and it has a feel more of what I had imagined Alaska to be--less the modern American city like Anchorage is and more out there--on the edge, with the city on or in the mountains and the ocean channel right there. Of course, I'm just staying in my hotel tonight, but tomorrow will be much exploring. Hopefully I'll have an account of that up when I get back tomorrow evening.

To the End of the Earth

2009-06-24T20:25:00.009-08:00

I apologize for the delay in posting this. It's taken some time to get things back together now that I have returned. This is going to be a very long one, so feel free to take a break partway through...

Starting from where the last one left off, we began our trip on Saturday morning to head north to the Brooks Range of northern Alaska. I maxed out the memory card of my camera with almost 200 photos--and that was only on the way up. Instead of trying to embed a select few in this post, I uploaded all the photos to a web album which should be viewable here. You can click on the slideshow option at the top of them to page through. They should be in chronological order and most have captions describing what they show. The ones that don't have captions usually just follow the photo before with another view or something. The full background story, though, will be here.

The day started off with us driving to the Fairbanks Airport to pick up our van at 6 AM. We rode with a company called Northern Alaska Tour Company which operated their "Dalton Highway Express" service. Our plan was to drive up with them to a point just south of our campsite at Galbraith Lake on the northern slopes of the Brooks Range. We would then meet the hydrologist from the Fairbanks forecast office who was planning to go backpacking and rafing through the mountains for a week before he ended up a Galbraith. We were to pick up his truck and drive it up to Galbraith, then leaving it there the next day after our Dalton Highway Express van came back down to pick us up. So that was the plan.

We expected there to be not many people going up there. However, our van was completely full. Aside from me and Tyler, there was a Hungarian man who had lived in California for many years and a young couple from Switzerland. Those three people were all headed up all the way to Deadhorse-Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean on a kind of tour. There was also a staff member and a graduate student who both worked at the Toolik Lake Research Station which is run by the University of Alaska--Fairbanks and is located on the North Slope. So, there were 8 people in the van going up. But it proved to be good company.

We left Fairbanks and it immediately became apparent that our driver was very cautious. Too cautious for my taste. On the roads leading out of Fairbanks with 55 mph speed limits, he was going a good 40. However, the first hour or two of the trip was what Tyler and I had driven the day before, so not much had changed there. We did stop to drop off supplies at a roadhouse along that highway in the town of Joy. That building was acually the only building in the town of Joy, but nevertheless we took 20 minutes or so there unloading supplies and whatnot. Then, we packed back up and headed to the beginning of the Dalton Highway.

The first hour or two was mostly driving over very hilly terrain through spruce forests. It was mostly that ugly black spruce, so it wasn't too terribly attractive. The hills were big, though, and the grades were steep. There was a constant stream of traffic every few minutes or so going the other way (and several vehicles passing us as well) so it wasn't like it was isolated. I quickly discovered the importance of the CB radio on this road. All of the traffic that has a CB radio is expected to tune to channel 19 and not a truck passed us without saying hi and asking about the conditions of the road ahead. We never had anything bad to report about the conditions as the road seemed to be in pretty good shape. It was mostly gravel, though there are several muli-mile stretches where the road is paved and marked. The entire length of the road is well-signed and there are mileposts along the way.

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline parallels the road for much of the journey north. The pipeline was built by and continues to be run by a consortium of many different major oil companies who banded together to form the Alyeska Pipeline consortium. "Alyeska" is the native Aleut word that means "the great land" and it is the word from which Alaska got its name. Every mile or so along the highway there is a turnoff which is gated that heads towards the pipeline for access. Alyeska maintains a tight watch on the pipeline and flies helicopters along the entire length of it daily to check for leaks or other problems. There are also 7 pumping stations along the Elliot and Dalton Highways north of Fairbanks to keep the oil flowing. These make for good landmarks along the drive.

Our next stop was at the Yukon River Camp next to the Yukon River bridge. The Yukon River is the longest in Alaska, even though it begins back by Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory. The bridge that the Dalton Highway and the pipeline share when crossing the river is the only bridge over the Yukon River in Alaska. The river will freeze over in the winter, and when it breaks up again in the summer the ice flows would crush normal bridge supports. Apparently this bridge was designed to defeat the ice in some way. The bridge was the last section of the pipeline and road to be completed. Before that, people and equipment were ferried across the Yukon River at this point, thus the camp was a major center of activity. It's only about an hour and a half to two hour drive from the start of the road, so it's not that terribly far. There's good food, a phone, "hotel" rooms made out of old pre-fab housing for the pipeline workers and people to help if there are mechanical problems with your vehicle. They do not have gasoline though, which is a big disappointment to many.

After pausing briefly at the Yukon River Camp, we continued northward. The rainy, gray, foggy conditions we had been having to that point cleared up as we got out of the Yukon-Tanana uplands and into a broad, sweeping valley (that still had hills) that stretched between those uplands and the foothills of the Brooks Range. There were much fewer trees in this region, so the views got more expansive. Most of what tree stands there were looked to have been at least partially touched by wildfires and there were a lot of stands of burnt trees. This area of Alaska is one of the most convectively active and thus they routinely get thunderstorms with lighting in this region. This lightning is what sets off most of the wildfires. While this was a "valley" there were still many hills that needed to be climbed. One of the most prominent was called "Finger Mountain" for the finger-like boulder at the top of it. There were a lot of these random granite boulders sitting randomly about the ground. We were told that they were called "tors" and that's about it. The road became paved partway through this valley at a point south of the Arctic Circle and continued to be paved all the way to Coldfoot in the southern Brooks Range. This made the drive a little faster and much smoother.

After another three hours or so, we arrived at the Arctic Circle rest area down a little turn off from the main highway. This area has the famous sign saying that you are now at 66 degrees, 33 minutes north latitude and has a map of the northern hemisphere for reference. I was told by he staff member going to the research station in our van that in reality the Arctic Circle is a few miles down the road, but this was the most convenient place for them to put the sign. Regardless, nearly everyone stops here and takes photos. I ran into a few people who were motorcycling down the highway, and another couple in a van with Illinois license plates who happened to be from Decatur (and mentioned how much they enjoyed the Clock Tower Resort in Rockford...?). We arrived at the Arctic Circle on June 20, and since the solstice is between June 20 and 21, I consider this crossing the Arctic Circle on the solstice. North of this line, there are 24 hours of the sun being completely above the horizon for at least some time during the summer months. It isn't right to say "24 hours of daylight" because even as far south as Anchorage it never gets dark and there's enough light all night during the summer to sit outside and read a book if you wanted to. North of the Arctic Circle is also defined as the true Arctic region, also known as one of the Lands of the Midnight Sun. This too is kind of a misnomer, because the lowest point the sun gets in the sky, the "solar midnight" if you will, actually happens at around 2 AM here. This is because of two things: first, we are not exactly centered in the Alaska Time Zone, so the sun acually sets later than it would otherwise and secondly, we are on daylight savings time, so we're an hour ahead of normal time anyways. Both contribute to the solar midnight sun being at around 2 AM. This becomes important later...

We continued north on the highway, and the hills became broader. Still very few trees. Then, coming over a hill called "Gobblers Knob" we got our first glimpse of the foothills of the Brooks Range. Because the winds were out of the south, they were pushing air that was strongly heated over our broad valley northward and into the mounains. This is a classic example of terrain-induced convection, and sure enough there were several storms and showers on the southern edge of the Brooks Range. We went over a long, winding hill that ran east to wet for a very long ways. According to my Milepost guidebook, this was a the terminal moraine from the last glaciation of the Brooks Range. During the last ice age, glaciers filled the valleys of the Brooks Range and spread out into the valley. That hill marked the southern edge of those glaciers, where all of the rocks and soil they pushed out ahead of them had ended up.

The road wound down into a wide river valley and we entered the Brooks Range proper. The Brooks Range is the northernmost, east-west mountain range in the world, staying entirely above the Arctic Circle and running from the Bering Sea in the west all the way across northern Alaska to the Yukon border. There is a tectonic plate that sits under the north slope and another plate over the interior of Alaska. The collision of these two plates formed the mountains, as the interior plate tries to rise up and over the northern plate and ends up fracturing and breaking in the process. Before the mountain building really started, the entire region was under a shallow sea and, because of this, layers of sand and sediment collected on the sea bottom, forming layered limestone rock over time. It is this ancient seafloor, now in limestone form, that is being forced up to create the mountains. You might be able to see in some of my photos how the sides of the mountains show layers that are tilted with their highest ends to the north and sinking down into the south. You can picture, then, that tectonic plate shoving in from the south, trying to rise up over the northern plate and just fracturing in the process. I was amazed how well this stood out while driving through the mountains and how you could literally see how they were formed.

The pipeline followed the road for most of the way through the valley. Because of the mechanism of formation that I just described, it makes sense that the newer, taller, and more rugged mountains were found at the northern end of the Brooks Range, while here at the southern end they were older, shorter and more weathered. Still highly scenic, though. With all of the rain falling on the southern slopes of the mountains, we saw spruce trees again in great numbers throughout the valleys. The pipeline alternated between its supports above the ground and being buried. The road was still paved by this point, but not in the normal way. It was a kind of pavement called "chip seal" pavement which doesn't look paved, but in reality it is. The road surface was still rather decent.

We quickly arrived in the city of Coldfoot in the southern passes of the Brooks Range. Though this small outpost may regularly be seen as one of the, if not the coldest place in the US at any given time, it was actually named for a group of miners who were headed north to mine but got that far and got "Cold Feet" and turned around to go back. Or so a sign at the place told me. Record lows of -80 degrees fahrenheit and lower have been recorded here. When we got there, it was overcast with temperatures in the upper 40s. The Coldfoot Camp where we stopped has a very good trucker's restaurant, lodging, a convenience store, maitenence facilities and, most importantly, gasoline. It's 240 miles north to the next services in Deadhorse, so everyone fills up with gas here. And it was only $3.74 per gallon--not too bad. Also in "town" across the road is the Arctic Interagency Visitors Center, which has information about the area, specifically with regards to Gates of the Arctic National Park to the west and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the east. While the Dalton Highway never actually crosses the border into either of these, the boundaries for both of these areas come within a mile or two of the highway for most of its trip through the Brooks Range. The Visitors Center was an odd outpost of very modern facilities in this otherwise rustic place. I bought some postcards and picked up some maps there.

After we headed north from Coldfoot, the road stopped being paved again. Truck traffic was rather heavy through this region, for some reason. The mountains also started getting more rugged and taller. The valley we were in got narrower. We paralleled a river and the pipeline for quite some ways. There was a mountain that was very rough and rugged looking and also completely limestone with no trees on it to the east of the highway. This mountain was called Sukakpak Mountain and is a prominent landmark on the road. Nearly every map you see has it marked as an excellent photo opportunity. I liked how you could see the layered limestone rather well in it. However, there was also this very symmetrical-looking and very pointed mountain sticking up across the road and a little north of Sukakpak Mountain that drew my attention. It wasn't overly tall or big, but it seemed very prominent and I rather liked the way it looked. My detailed map of the Brooks Range didn't give it a name. Apparently, at least in Gates of the Arctic National Park, they have intentionally not named most of the mountains that weren't already named so as to help "maintain the wilderness feel". I suppose this makes sense--if the mountain has a name, you know you're not the first person to see it or experience it. Now when you travel through, it's just "that mountain". I thought that was an interesting tactic. While the Dalton Highway, as I mentioned, pretty much rides the park's eastern boundary, there are no roads at all that actually go into the park. You can fly to a small native village a few valleys over called Antanivuk Pass, but that's it for accessing the park unless you hike in from the Dalton Highway, which many people do. Anyhow, this prominent mountain lay right on the eastern edge of Gates of the Arctic National Park and was unnamed. So, Tyler and I decided that from this point on that mountain would be Mount Luke Madaus in the Brooks Range. Maybe if that catches on, one day the USGS will actually attach that name to the peak. Who knows...

We continued on down the gravel road towards our rendezvous with the hydrologist and his truck. As we climbed in elevation, the clouds got thicker and it got somewhat foggy. Still, the mountain views were spectacular, as was the rushing Middle Koyukuk River we were then following. At the junction of the Middle Koyukuk and the Dietrich Rivers, we finally ran into our hydrologist friend and his white Toyota pickup truck. The van dropped us off and we helped the hydrologist and his nephew prepare for their hike. They were going to be hiking and rafting (using inflatable rafts stored in their backpacks) from Saturday through Thursday up through the Brooks Range to our camp at Galbraith Lake. I'm amazed at how people can do that. While we were helping them, a heavily backpacked man rode by on a bicycle and stopped to chat. He was from England and two days previously he had been dropped off up at Deadhorse. His plan? To bike all the way from Deadhorse-Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean down to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of Argentina. All the way down North and South America. And before you think this is crazy, over the course of this trip we ran into three other completely separate people who were trying to do the same thing. All of them expected it to take months, even a year or so to finish it. If that. I personally wonder how many people start out on these trips with high hopes and a week later, when they finally get into Fairbanks, just say "Ok...that's it..." and stop right there. I guessing a good number...

Tyler and I continued north, but now in our own pickup truck and able to go our own speeds. The hydrologist encouraged us to take his truck and drive all the way up to Deadhorse if we felt like it because, "the scenery is incredible and who knows when you will be able to do it again? Just remember to fill it up with gas in Deadhorse...". And, after some discussion (and knowing we had literally no end of daylight), we decided to do just that, then return to Galbraith Lake to wait to be picked up the next day.

We entered the North Slope Borough, the largest county-level entity in the United States. Definitely one to add to my list of "county (equivalents) I have been to". We passed a big open area in the middle of the Brooks Range called Chandalar Shelf before beginning the ascent to Atigun Pass. This route through the Brooks Range follows the Koyukuk-Dietrich valley as far in as it will go, but the main spine of the Brooks Range blocks the end of that valley. Just on the other side, though, is another valley heading north, so a very steep and tall pass was navigated high in the mountains to get from the southern to northern valleys. We were told by many that the ascent to the pass was a "harrowing, hairpin drive up muddy and unpaved roads where you don't know if there's an out of control truck barreling downhill toward you around the next bend..." so we approached with some trepidation. The truck we were driving had a manual transmission, and though I could have done it, Tyler normally drives a manual vehicle, so he was driving. I actually didn't think the ascent was that bad...sure it was steep, and the weather worsened as we went up, but it only took maybe 5 minutes to get to the top. The height of the pass is at over 4500 feet and there is a wide turnoff there for vehicles to stop. We took many photos, as you can see in the album.

Coming down the other way was even quicker...mostly because the car just went downhill. We drop down immediately into the northern valley, and the first thing you noticed were the lack of trees and much less vegitation. The road quickly drops to the valley floor and the buried pipeline re-emerges to continue its journey alongside. Within ten or fifteen minutes of driving, you could see the clouds breaking and the still tall mountains...abruptly ending? It had taken us around 4 hours of driving through the southern part of the Brooks Range just to get to Atigun Pass, now only 20 minutes to get back out of the mountains? To what?

At the end of the valley, we passed pumping station number 4 and saw the wide expanse of Galbraith Lake to the west. It was a beautiful scene looking back, but I'll get to that later. Right now we planned to continue north to Deadhorse. So we exited the valley...to find the fabled North Slope of Alaska. The mountains literally just stopped and melted into these low hills, completely covered with tundra vegitation as the road wound up and around the hills, paralleling the pipeline. It was such an abrupt transition, but such a beautiful one as well. Of course, seeing the sun again after driving through 4 hours of mountains, fog and rain would make many things look beautiful. But this was really something. Glaces back showed us that the mountains really did just end there...and we continued driving out among the tundra-covered hills. Not a tree in sight. I was immediaely reminded of driving across the Flint Hills or the High Plains in Kansas. It was very, very much the same kind of feeling. Replace the pipeline with a railroad track and it would be exactly that. I took lots of pictures of the area, just because it was so different. We picked up a river to our east (the Sagavanirktok River...which is why I'm just calling it "a river") and that river cut a series of bluffs into its eastern shores that periodically showed up on the drive north.

At one point, there was a wooden viewing platform by the side of the road and we got out to walk around a bit. Apparently, you are not supposed to walk on the tundra because it is very fragile and has a difficult time growing back. I had not heard this until I returned, so I went stalking across the tundra for a ways just for the experience of it. It is the strangest thing ever to walk on--so spongy. And so wet. The entire surface is covered with a plethora of mosses and small grasses and small wildflowers and looks very solid. But, everywhere you step on it your foot sinks in several inches. Half of the time, that's all that happens. But, often, you'll put your foot down, and there will be liquid water or some very muddy-feeling soil under your shoe. It's the strangest thing. I have a photo at the end of the album which is a close-up of the tundra.

The road became paved north of this point and we continued on at a good speed as the hills began to wind down to a plain. We passed pumping station number 3 and noticed that a very low cloud deck was starting to set in. Still, we pressed on. About half an hour further the pavement ended and the clouds set in to a big fog. By now the tundra was completely flat in all directions, as far as the eye could see (minus the bluffs that occasionally appeared off by the river to the east). Never did I expect to find the flatness that you see on the High Plains or out in the panhandles of Texas or Oklahoma anywhere else in the world--but here was land just as flat. And it was cold. Temperature was going down through the 30s by this point, and the fog really began to set in. It really felt like we were driving off to the end of the world--literally and figuratively. Eventually, some creatures loomed up out of the fog crossing the road--caribou. Hundreds of them over a span of some 50 miles leading all the way into Deadhorse. The caribou have very large horns and randomly run splashing across the tundra for no reason. Like I said...there's liquid water below much of that ground. I don't know if it's melted permafrost or what...it's liquid. And when those caribou run across it, they splash...

We saw many caribou in the fog. I don't know if this entirely qualifies as "Caribou Fog", but it was the closest thing I'll probably get. The fog became almost impossibly dense as we headed even further north. We really slowed down. No terrain at all. Finally, we saw some shapes on the horizon--buildings. Like approaching a city on the High Plains, it's just silhouettes on the horizon for a long time. But here we were--Deadhorse-Prudhoe Bay at the northern end of the Dalton Highway. As we entered town, we passed a few Musk-Ox by the side of the road. It was so strange seeing such large animals way up there in the middle of nothingness...

The "city" lies a little inland of the Arctic Ocean and you can't get to the Arctic Ocean without special permission because you have to cross the oilfields. However, Tyler wanted to go as far as we could and I agreed. So we tried navigating the town to find gas and go as far as we could. As my Milepost book says, "Deadhorse in no way resembles any kind of actual town..." and that is very true. There are no services for travellers or anything like that. There are two public gas stations and two hotels, but that's it. No restaurants or anything like that. You pass building after building whose large parking area in front is littered with every kind of construcion and earth moving or drilling vehicle you could imagine. All of he buildings look like steel railroad containers just welded together with windows put in them. Off in the distance you could see countless small buildings with many Eiffel Tower-looking contraptions sticking up, which I assumed were oil wells.

We stopped to get gas at one of the unusual gas stations (with its two public pumps that looked like emergency telephones) and it was only $3.80 per gallon. I really had expected far worse... I got out to clean the windows. It was COLD. Definitely below freezing. There was also a strong northerly wind coming off of the still-frozen Arctic Ocean a few miles to our north, which added a wind chill. I found that I had cell phone service, though (randomly, after not having had any since Fairbanks) and sent a few text messages and called my friend Joe (who always wanted to travel up to Deadhorse on the Dalton Highway...). I can't figure out what the place is supposed to be called. I read somewhere that the original name of the town itself was Deadhorse (after the Deadhorse trucking lines that used to serve the area used to operate the only store and service station in town) but since the town lies on Prudhoe Bay and the oil companies call it the Prudhoe Bay field, when the Postal Service established a post office there, they called the town "Prudhoe Bay". So, apparently either name works. All the signs heading north gave mileage to "Deadhorse", so I often use that, though I much prefer the name "Prudhoe Bay".

We passed the North Slope Borough administration center, which I'm told was like the county courthouse building (even though I believe the borough seat is actually in Barrow, which is several hundred miles to the northwest and slightly further north...). We also passed many familiar oil companies and their outposts, including a sinister-looking Halliburton building and yard. Finally, we got to the security gates for the BP oil fields--the furthest north you can go on a public road anywhere in the world. And we were there. I have driven to the end of the road and this, this was literally the end. We took photos and then returned.

After driving back through Deadhorse, we set out to return south to Galbraith Lake. We left Deadhorse around 11 PM. The fog was still there...probably caused by cold air from the Arctic Ocean advecing in over the somewhat warmer ground or something. When midnight rolled around, we wanted to get a photo of the midnight sun, but alas the fog made it impossible, so we pushed on. Finally, another two hours later we had re-entered the North Slope hills (the North Slope is actually the entire region between the Brooks Range and the Arctic Coast) and, as our elevation increased slightly, the fog began to lift. We were treated to some spectacular views.

I got several photos of the sun coming out from behind the fog and over the hilly tundra at around 2 AM. Remember, this is about the time of solar midnight, so this is the true Midnight Sun. It was amazing. The temperatures were back into the 40s this far south, so it wasn't so bad to stand outside and look around. Everything was so still--and so quiet. There were no people or anything around for miles, no wind...just the empty tundra, the fog and the sun at 2 in the morning. Nothing quite like it. As we continued on in the truck, we went up and down several hills which took us back down into the fog and then back up out of it. At one point, we were driving through a dense patch of fog when a dark shape loomed up in the road ahead, completely silhouetted. It was clearly an animal and it was completely motionless. I tried to evaluate it as we inched closer--it was too small to be a bear, definitely had too skinny of legs to be a bear...too short to be a caribou or a moose...definitely not a Musk-Ox...still was rather big...ok, definitely either feline or canine...that's a wolf. Tyler got an excellent photo of the wolf silhouetted in the fog. As we got closer, the wolf moved off to the side of the road and headed away across the tundra. I got one quick photo through the fog before it was gone. But we were close enough to see that it definitely was a gray wolf. A lone wolf too. Pretty amazing what you run across in the arctic fog.

I got a few good photos of the pipeline and the sun through the fog that I rather liked. As we approached the Brooks Range again, the mountains were lit up in this reddish-glow of the midnight sun now due north of the mountains. You never see the sun due north. But here it was. Beautiful mountains. In my mind, the Brooks Range has always been my favorite mountain range, just because of how remote and difficult to get to it is. How northern it is and how imposing it seems. And here it was in all of its glory. Just a fantastic sight.

We pulled into the camping area at Galbraith Lake, and there were already three other SUVs at random places in the area with people no doubt sleeping. The area is by the lake and near an airstrip that serves the Alyeska people and the pipeline. It's also near pumping station number 4 and you could see the lights of the station (not that they needed them) down in the valley, so you knew there were people around. This made the place feel very safe to me, very reassuring and also very beautiful. Tyler still had a lot of energy at 3 AM and wanted to hike down a nearby valley into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I wanted to sleep. So we moved the car to a large turnout by the Dalton Highway and I slept in the reclined front seat of the pickup truck while Tyler went hiking (he does that sort of think a lot). I slept until 10 AM, though Tyler got back around 7 AM and slept in the covered back of the truck for a little while.

We then returned to the main camping area at Galbraith Lake to await our van, which was supposed to arrive at 2 PM. Some soup was had for lunch, and I hiked off (across the tundra again...) to the base of one of the nearby mountains to find a stone to take back with me. I found one and washed it off in a stream. That stone will always remind me of the Brooks Range when I look at it, and I enjoy having a piece of that place with me. Anyhow, the mosquitoes were very, very bad by the lake and I wore a bug shirt made of netting over my clothes and my head for much of our waiting time. There was an outhouse at the camping area (stocked with toilet paper by the people at the airstrip, no less...) so that was taken care of. The van arrived promptly around 2 and we began our return trip.

At about that point I maxed out the photos on my camera, so there our none of the return trip. It was almost completely uneventful, so nothing much was missed. Just the entire story in reverse. However, we stopped at Coldfoot again on the way back and this time I had their all-you-can-eat buffet for $18.95 (which was the only thing you could order...) and it was amazingly good. I always enjoy sampling local cuisine...this is about as local as you can get. They had a good meatloaf with mashed potatoes, a tuna casserole, salad, steamed vegetables, and several different desserts. Very satisfying. I recommend you try it if you're ever in Coldfoot.

Then, about 50 miles south of Coldfoot, we were back on gravel road and we came around this curve and there's a young man, about my age, standing in the middle of the road waving his arms. Our driver slowed and rolled down the window and the guy said that his friend was driving their car and they had just gone off the road. The road at that point was coming around a hill and there was a very, very steep embankment on the side leading down to a black spruce forest. We could not see the car from the road, but the guy and his friend, the driver said they were both all right. They wanted a ride "into town" to make arrangements. While our driver and these guys were talking, one of the Alyeska Pipeline surveying helicopters that was making its rounds apparently noticed the car off the road from above and came swooping down, landing right next to our van in a small turnoff. This is the closest I've been to a helicopter landing and taking off, and it was oddly thrilling... Anyhow, one man got out of the helicopter and wanted to know if anyone was injured and needed to get to a hospital. Since no one did, he got back in and took off. Our driver went to get out the satellite phone to call someone, but upon opening its box discovered that the satellite phone was not there. So, he offered the two guys a ride "into town".

So these guys...I didn't notice at the time, but it turns out when they got into our van, they didn't go back to get any of their stuff out of their car at all. An hour later they realized that only one of them had his wallet and they had no clothes or anything. They did have their cell phones, though, so that was good. But still...Tyler asked them where they were from. "Texas," they said (and then it all made sense...). They had driven the driver's fathers' 2008 Honda Civic up the Alaska Highway and had just arrived in Alaska the other day (even more sense...). "Where did you stay last night?" I asked, assuming they had stayed in Fairbanks. "I don't know...the first town we got to after arriving in Alaska...some place...". "Tok?" I asked, now being familiar with the route. "Oh yeah....that place," was the response. So I asked, "So how far were you headed?" and they responded, "Oh...no clue...to the last city on that road?" "Deadhorse?" I asked. "Umm...if that's the last city, then yeah...".

My point is, and not to be hard on them because it's obvious they were shaken up, but...you don't travel to and around Alaska without a plan. I had been planning my drive up the Alaska Highway for months, and I congratulate these two on getting that far. But there's no way in the would you should even consider taking a little 2008 Honda Civic down a road that is considered to be one of the most difficult traverses in the entire road system of North America. Not knowing where you're going can mean very bad things up here. You have to ration yourself, know where the gas stations are and where it's safe to stop. You have to consider your resources and drive carefully. When we got to the Yukon River Camp again, they went in and our driver made some calls. The two guys refused to stay at the Yukon River Camp (even though the staff there was more than accommodating) because they just didn't want to. This means we hauled them all the way back into Fairbanks. A good 6 hours away from their car down that empty road. After dropping them at a nearby hotel, our driver effectively washed his hands of them. I still wonder what happened with them--the embankment was steep enough that they would need some heavy equipment to get the car up. And then if it was damaged to the extent of being undriveable (which, from what I heard, it didn't sound like it...), it would have to be towed into a garage. I don't know if either Coldfoot or the Yukon River Camp had the resources to handle that kind of repair. And it's in such a remote place...tally the cost of this hotel expenditure, getting someone out to that remote site (probably from Fairbanks), extricating the car, towing it, repairing it--you're probably talking about a multi-thousand dollar mistake there. So just a warning for those who aren't careful and don't plan...

Even so, with as remote as the highway is, it's so well-travelled and with the Alyeska people surveying the entire pipeline every day in helicopters--if you do break down or have a problem, someone will be around rather soon who will be able to help. I highly recommend this journey to everyone. That was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, excursion I have ever been on. And, though the Brooks Range was even more majestic and powerful than I had pictured it, I am very glad we drove all the way up. That scenery on the tundra--even in its emptiness it is so beautiful. The wildlife, the weather, the history, the end-of-the-world-ness...such a fantastic trip. An experience I will never forget, that's for sure.

Having gotten a bit of rest on the way back and not wanting to spend more on a hotel in Fairbanks, Tyler and I picked up my car and drove the five and a half hours back to Anchorage that night. We got into Fairbanks around one in the morning (though by this point I had not seen the sun below the horizon for nearly 48 hours and my sense of time was so messed up...) and got into Anchorage around 7. I had already planned not to come into work on Monday, so I just slept all day (which of course messed my internal clock up even more). I was so tired that I apparently slept through the 5.6 magnitude earthquake that shook Anchorage late Monday morning. So I've been through an earthquake now, too. Some people I know here felt it, many did not. Who knew...

And if you've gotten this far in the story, through you're long reading you've gotten a sense of the marathon that this trip was as well. Please enjoy the photos in that album and I really hope that some of you get to experience the same thing some day...

A Day Near Fairbanks

2009-06-19T19:57:00.017-08:00

Today we awoke in Fairbanks and decided to do a little exploring. First on our agenda was a visit to the nearby town of North Pole, Alaska. This town, while not at the actual or magnetic or any other North Pole, serves as a focal point for Christmas spirit in Alaska. The town's streets are called things like "Santa Clause Lane" or "Kris Kringle Drive" and all of the lamp posts are candy canes.
There is a large building there called Santa's House which, from what we could tell upon going inside of it, is a massive, year-round Christmas store. I bought a few post cards there and spent a lot of time browsing around. They have a Santa Clause there during all of their business hours to talk with children who come in, no matter what time of year. We're practically on the complete opposite side of the year from Christmas, anyhow, so I figure there was no better time to be coming here. The temperatures outside were in the 60s, though, so even at North Pole it was still a pleasant day.
We then stopped at the North Pole post office to mail a few postcards. They have a special "North Pole" postmark on them that apparently is much sought after by many people. Tyler and I spent some time talking with the lady who was working the counter at the post office (there was no one else there, oddly) who told us about all the different kinds of letters and odd things people do with the Christmas and Santa Clause lore surrounding that post office. She described how apparently some people will just send a shoebox completely full of their Christmas cards addressed to various people and ask them to postmark them all from "North Pole" and then send them out. They have a special program there where you can send them whatever you want to be postmarked by them at any time in the year and they will hold it until December 1st when they will start sending it all out. Apparently, it's an AMAZINGLY big deal for some people. The lady (who had a strong Brooklyn accent, oddly...) also told us that we had just missed this family who had come into the post office with an odd plan. Apparently this mother and father and their now 18-year-old son are visiting the Fairbanks area. They had kept a letter that their son had sent to Santa when he was four years old because it apparently had been a dream of theirs to get a response from "Santa" in North Pole, Alaska (I don't understand...). So, the father came in yesterday and asked them if they could have the Santa over at the Santa's House store write a letter back to their son, addressing this letter he had written when he was four, and then postmark it and all of that. And the people in the post office and Santa's House all agreed and they did just that. Then, today, the family came in, with their son, and went to the counter saying that their son had sent a letter to Santa at North Pole and had never gotten a response, so could they check and see if they had received it? And all the while apparently the son was being all exasperated and saying, "Oh, come on...why are you asking about this?" and so on. But, sure enough, they came back with the letter and the response and there it was, in his own four-year-old writing, with the response written by Santa that just "had never gotten through." Apparently the son was amazed and everyone was happy and they took pictures. And that was the story. I won't pretend to understand, but, I suppose it is just something some people want to do. And they're very accomodating at North Pole...
Tyler and I left North Pole around noon and returned to Fairbanks to have lunch. We got subs from Subway. Note that the much hyped "Five-Dollar Footlong" apparently doesn't apply up here...
We found a park in downtown Fairbanks to eat. There was a trio of women there who were performing music they had written. One played the guitar, another the violin, and the third the mandolin. Considering that these are three instruments that I can play, am trying to learn how to play, and would love to learn how to play, I rather enjoyed this little concert. At least, until a downpour came and forced them to end early. The park we were in had a large statue of Eskimos in the middle of it and there were benches all around. The performers played at the base of the statue.
We then found our way to the Fairbanks Visitors Center. The city of Fairbanks has started to grow on me a little bit. I don't know. I felt more secure sleeping here than I have yet to feel in Anchorage. Maybe it's the proximity to the ocean or something. My knowledge of weather and geography often subconsciously goes into the comfort, security, or "shelter" I feel when I spend the night somewhere. Some places are bad--I did not feel "sheltered" in Winnipeg or even to this day in Anchorage. Some places are excellent--I have never felt more sheltered and secure in my sleeping than when I stayed in a hotel room in Colorado Springs. Not that I can't sleep at any of these other places--I sleep quite fine. It's just a feeling. And I felt unusually secure here in Fairbanks. That feeling alone greatly improves the city in my sights. Who knew? Anyhow, I grabbed some literature on Fairbanks and Anchorage at the Visitors Center (I acually grabbed more on Anchorage than on Fairbanks--the titles like "Summer Activities in Anchorage" will apply far more to my life than anything in Fairbanks, I'm afraid...). I also bought a very nice map of Gates of the Arctic National Park.

We then decided that, since tomorrow we were going to be heading up the Dalton Highway in our shuttle van, we might want to get some photos now. At least, I wanted a picture of my car on the Dalton Highway and to be able to have said that I have driven on the Dalton Highway. Even if it's just for a mile. I suppose I should interject to explain this Dalton Highway.

Starting about 70 miles north of Fairbanks, the Dalton Highway is a 414-mile long, mostly gravel road, that parallels the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline northward to the oil rigs at Deadhorse and Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, on the Arctic Ocean. It is the only road that goes this far north and the only road connection to the Arctic Ocean. There are little to no services on the road and some 250 miles between gas stops. Because of this, and because the road is mostly gravel, I was not going to take my car on that highway. Instead, we've found a shuttle company that mostly shuttles scientists to various research locations in the upper Arctic along the highway, and they are going to take us up tomorrow and then back again on Sunday. This will accomplish many things--we will get to cross the Yukon River (in Alaska), cross the Arctic Circle on the Summer Solstice, go pretty darn far north, and hopefully, if the skies are clear, be able to witness the midnight sun. We will not be going all the way up to Deadhorse (they don't allow you to go all the way to the Arctic Ocean without special permission from the oil companies), but we will go up to the North Slope and camp at a location called Galbraith Lake. This is on the northern slopes of the Brooks Range, which has long been my favorite mountain range and now I finally will get to see it. Very exciting.

Anyhow, I still wanted to take my car to the Dalton Highway. So we drove for an hour north of Fairbanks through the winding "hills" of the Yukon-Tanana (which is apparently pronounced Tah-nah-NAW) Uplands on the Elliot Highway to its junction with the Dalton. The drive was more scenic than I expected, winding through tree-covered hills.
Leaving Fairbanks, we drove through a storm that had fired up. I've talked about the convection forming up here, but then we got something I did not expect--hail! There were small pea-sized hailstones in this downpour, making the familiar smack-ing sound as they hit my car. It's difficult to see in this photo, but if you look closely you can see the hailstones falling outside the car.
That downpour didn't last for long, and soon things cleared up. We also got our first glimpse of this great Alaskan engineering achievement--the Trans-Alaska Pipeline!
The pipeline at this point goes underground for the rest of its journey up that hill. It looked kind of funny at first because it seemed like it just ended. I didn't take many pictures of the pipeline since the Dalton Highway parallels the pipeline north and no doubt we will be seeing much, much more of it. But, it's still a fun thing to photograph. After the hour of driving, we made it to the beginning of the Dalton Highway. I rather like this photo. The marks on the sign are actually stickers put there by various people and groups that presumably have traveled down the highway.
The road almost immediately became gravel and I drove down it for about a mile, so I can now say that I (and my car) have driven on the Dalton Highway. In the photo below, you can see the mileage sign saying it is 414 miles to the end of the highway at Deadhorse up on (or, rather, "near") the Arctic Ocean. You can also see the pipeline snaking its way up over the hill in the background. At this point here where the mileage sign is, my car is at the northenmost point it will probably ever be. A momentous occasion--that car has brought me a very, very long ways. And this is one of the extremes of its travels.
It was a pleasant drive back as well. Tyler wanted to do some driving (and also say that he had driven on the Dalton Highway) so I let him drive the way back. On the way, we passed the other side of Pedro Dome (where the Fairbanks radar is) and I got a very distant view of the radar at the top of the hill (which you probably can't see in this photo, but it's there...).
We passed the Silver Gulch restaurant where we ate last night on the way into Fairbanks again. I got a picture of it this time. Note the exterior that does not match the ritzy restaurant within...
We grabbed some food at Safeway and made preparations for the journey tomorrow. We will depart Fairbanks at 6 AM and won't get into Galbraith Lake until 6 PM. A long day on the road, but at least none of us will be driving. And I'm sure there will be plenty of photos taken and things to look at. Of course, this means I will be out of internet and cell phone coverage for the next 48 hours or so. But, to go this far, that's just what you have to do...

Driving to Fairbanks

2009-06-18T21:33:00.015-08:00

Today began my big journey northward to Fairbanks to meet with their forecasters at the National Weather Service Office there. I am joined by Tyler, another Hollings intern up here and one of my roommates, for a full weekend-long trip up north.

We started out at 6 in the morning heading north through Wasilla on the Parks Highway again, like we did for the Mount McKinley viewing expedition. Unfortunately, today was a rather overcast and rainy day and the mountain was nearly completely obscured. So, no new photos were taken. However, north of where we stopped before, the scenic-ness of the Alaska Range continued.
This kind of scenery went on for quite a ways. We followed the Parks Highway past the entrance of Denali National Park to the large collection of resorts and other Denali-themed excursions near the entrance. I stopped to get gas here (even though my tank was still half full). Gas away from the major metropolitan areas, of course, was at $3.47 per gallon there... The area near the Denali park entrance was very built-up and there were lots of buses and RVs around.
We were told that the best time to drive the Parks Highway was either late at night (night being a relative term this far north...) or in the winter--since that's when there are no RVs. And while we didn't see many RVs on our route, the few that we did run into were always going 10-20 mph below the speed limit. They also blocked a considerable portion of our view. Good thing my view wasn't blocked when we reached this point...
A mother moose and her baby calf were in the middle of the road. I stopped a good distance away--did not want an angry mother moose charging my car. And, after ten minutes or so, the moose finally decided that the road was not the best place and headed off to the side. So I can chalk up another moose encounter to my list.
The drive got rather monotonous after we got out of the Alaska Range of mountains. The road wound through a lot a trees but eventually ended up on a ridge of some moderately tall hills as we approached Fairbanks. The view in both directions, when it was there, was rather pleasant--looking out at flat plains filled with forests and dotted with lakes. Trying to get a picture as we were driving...that was difficult, though.

Finally, 5 hours and 45 minutes later, we arrived in Fairbanks. This was odd because all of the online estimates I had found said that it took between 6.5 to 7 hours to get from Anchorage to Fairbanks. I think they assumed you were driving an RV. Since it was 11:30 and my meeting with the forecasters wasn't supposed to be until 1, we drove around Fairbanks a little.
Fairbanks is the second largest city in Alaska and well into the interior. It sits in the Chena river valley at the base of the Yukon-Tanana Highlands to the north, which a are series of rolling, tree-covered hills (that would probably be called mountains anywhere else in the US, but not up here...). Fairbanks has around 35,000 people in it, so by population it's about the size of Beloit, Wisconsin (for those of you who know Beloit, Wisconsin). It is also constructed like a town the size of Beloit, Wisconsin. The city's life seems centered around the University of Alaska--Fairbanks north of town, the airport southwest of town, the military bases east of town, and the railroad yards on the northeast side of town. There is a small downtown area with some semi-tall buildings.
I don't think that Fairbanks is the prettiest city I've seen. There's a lot of new development around the outskirts with nothing but sprawl within. The town likes to celebrate its mining heritage, but instead of giving the city a quaint, rustic kind of charm I feel like it has instead amounted to a lot of old equipment sitting around rusting in the NUMEROUS scrap yards we passed going through town, or the many rundown and boarded up buildings we also passed. Granted, this is a place where they are not near the ocean and thus the weather becomes more extreme--highs in the summer in the upper 80s with lows in the winter of -40 or so. They also have convection--actual good thunderstorms that form with the "thermal trough" in the area and will sometimes dump small hail on Fairbanks should one of them move overhead.
With all of that said, we eventually found our way to the University. This signpost on campus was a real help. It told us how many miles and in what direction to go just about everywhere except where we wanted to go.
The weather forecast office in Fairbanks is located on the third floor of the building below on the campus of the University of Alaska--Fairbanks. As such, it kind of reminded me of Norman, where the Norman forecast office is in the same building as our classrooms. The office itself was very nice, though I thought somewhat understaffed. I met with the Science and Operations Officer there and we had a good two hour discussion about their local weather and their two radars and things to do in Fairbanks.

After this meeting, Tyler and I went to see the nearby Museum of the North which has exhibits on various Alaskan things. I found the museum rather interesting, particularly a painting of convection in Alaska.
After that, upon the recommendation of the people I talked to at the forecast office, Tyler and I went to eat at the Silver Gulch restaurant, which is 10 miles north of Fairbanks on the Steese Highway. It was a unique experience--we pulled up outside of the place and it looks like a big, corregated metal barn or farm storage building. So we went inside and it's a fantastically modern, well-furnished, plush, brewhouse sort of resaturant. The place advertises itself as the "Northernmost Brewery in America" and I bought one of their glasses because of that. They brew several different beers, including an Amber that I particularly enjoyed. All of their food has some of their beer in it in some fashion--be it the beer-battered onion rings, the beer-crusted "Alaskan Pizza" I tried, or the vegetable platter with rice boiled in beer that Tyler got. The food was all good, and we were amazed at the restaurant and how its appearance was so unique and it was so far in the middle of nowhere... (well, ten miles from Fairbanks...).

Also while we were up north of town, we passed by the hill called Pedro Dome, on top of which is the Fairbanks (Pedro Dome) radar (hence the call letters PAPD for it). This photo is the first one I've actually gotten of an Alaskan radar since I've been up here. It's way...way...way up on the top of this hill...
Anyhow, Tyler and I returned to Fairbanks and got into a Holiday Inn Express hotel, where I am now. Lots of sun still in the sky, even a 10:25 PM. Tomorrow we are looking forward to another day of exploring Fairbanks.

Two Sides of the Same City...and a Moose

2009-06-16T21:56:00.025-08:00

This post begins kind of where the last one left off. In my last post, I described how I was going to go back some time and investigate this Arctic Valley exit just north of Anchorage. Well, this Sunday, two of the other interns and I had nothing really to do in the afternoon. So, we decided to drive up there and explore. Or, rather, no one else had any preference on where we were going, so I decided. Quite the surprise in driving up there.

I knew that the Arctic Valley Ski Lodge was at the end of Arctic Valley Road, so I was determined to find that. The road started off going through a golf course, which was somewhat unusual, at least from my perspective. I didn't bring my golf clubs up, but I think it would be rather fun to play a golf course up here. I know of two in Anchorage and they both looked fantastic. The road continued around a few bends and suddenly became gravel. Now, I have some trepidation about taking my car on gravel roads (which will become important later), mostly from a fear of some sort of breakdown upon hitting a bad rut or large stone or something. However, my tires are very good tires and the car is a good car, so we pressed on. Many other cars (some smaller than mine) passed us going the other way, so I knew it couldn't be too bad. The road started a series of switchbacks and headed up the side of the mountains along the "valley". At one point halfway up, the road swung around a wide curve and opened up to the west for a spectacular view of Anchorage from above.
I have seen many photos of Anchorage taken from the "usual" vantage points of the Glen Alps viewing platform (at the base of Flattop Mountain, where I first hiked) and Earthquake Park (which I will detail in a later post). I had never seen a photo taken from Arctic Valley Road. The photo does not do it justice--the city looks much further away in the photo than it actually seemed. The sweeping panorama also isn't captured. Where is Dad with his fancy camera lenses when I need him? Anyhow, we continued to follow the road until it came out at a trailhead next to the ski lodge.
The clouds were in (it was a marine layer day) and it was relatively cool. We were obviously above the treeline and the entire area had a barren appearance. This was combined with the ski lifts and lodge that were all closed for the season and sitting there, frozen in time, to create a very lonely landscape. We hiked around a little bit.
Up on the top of a nearby hill was what was apparently an abandoned Nike Missile Site from the Cold War. There were also a few phased array radars on a nearby hill. I thought it was kind of interesting, even if it was all abandoned. There were a few trails that claimed to head off to nearby peaks, but it was more hiking than we had planned for and so we headed back down. We stopped in Eagle River for dinner and, try as I might, still could not get a satisfactory photo that showed the niceness that I find in Eagle River...

So that was what was down Arctic Valley Road.

-----------------------------

Now, this Tuesday afternoon I decided to try and get an even rarer photo of Anchorage, this being a photograph from Point Mackenzie across the Cook Inlet from Anchorage. This is a VERY back-woods area with only one road heading out there. The point itself, while only a mile or so across the Cook Inlet from Anchorage, is some 35 miles south of Wasilla, the nearest town to the north and the city you have to go through to access the road to Point Mackenzie. There are future plans to build a bridge across the Knik Arm of the Cook Inlet here from downtown Anchorage to Point Mackenzie (which would shorten the driving time considerably) but this is considered by many people to be another Alaskan "Bridge to Nowhere". (The actual "Bridge to Nowhere" was to be located way down in southeast Alaska in the city of Ketchikan...).
I headed north and went to Wasilla instead of Palmer. I've touched briefly on Wasilla before when we went up to view Mount McKinley. Well known as the home of Sarah Palin and where she was once mayor, the city of Wasilla is far more de-centralized than Palmer. The entire city is "centered" on a several-mile-long stretch of the Parks Highway lined with stores, including many big box and mainstream stores and restaurants. I haven't really been able to find the residential area of Wasilla, but I know the city has nearly 10,000 residents, so they're there somewhere.
From Wasilla, I headed south on the Knik-Goose Bay Road, which heads down along the western coast of the inlet. It was a drive through forests and some boggy areas. It made sense...further west of there is the great delta of the Susitna River, which is just one huge swampy bog. This road went south for some 10 miles before there was a turnoff for the Mackenzie Point Road. This road was newly paved--in fact, there were signs indicating that the paving of it had just been completed last year. This made the drive very easy and pleasant.
There were many forests of what we learned on the way up were Black Spruce trees. I think that these are some of the ugliest trees in existence. They are skinny and scraggly and spindly and very darkly colored. They also have these balls of pine-like branches near the top that just look odd. I don't know...I find them sinister.
Anyhow, after a while (some 21 miles) the road headed down the hill back to the Cook Inlet. Alas, the pavement finally ended and it became a very, very rutty gravel road. I didn't want to venture down the steep hill on the last bit of the road as it went down to the Cook Inlet since the road looked absolutely horrendous, so I stayed at the top of the hill and got my picture.
And there is a view of Anchorage that very few have seen. With the mountains behind it and from across the inlet. On the way back, I noted in my topographic atlas that there was a road headed off of the Mackenzie Point Road called Burma Road that looked like it headed up through the modestly-large city of Big Lake on its way to a point west of Wasilla on the Parks Highway. I had seen the turnoff for that and decided that this might be an interesting, alternate route back up. So, I took the turnoff.
A mile in the road became gravel. And narrowed considerably. But, according to my atlas the road went through, even becoming the main road in Big Lake, so I knew that it had to become paved again. The gravel wasn't that bad, either. It was very well-crushed and there were few ruts. I passed several cars going the opposite way, so I knew it had to go somewhere.
The road appeared to have originally been blazed by what I think is some big lawnmower for trees. There are all these old tree stumps and tree debris on both sides of the road in these wide swaths. Beyond these cleared-out swaths were thick, dark spruce forests. Several enterprising aspen or poplar trees had sprung up in these mowed-down strips, though, so I knew there had to have been a few years since this was carved.

Every so often there were also cross "streets" that were other gravel paths off into the forest. Each intersection was very officially marked with street signs and a stop sign, which struck me as so odd--I really felt like I was in the middle of nowhere, but this was laid out like a normal, suburban subdivision before any houses had been put in. So strange.
There were a few houses along the way, including apparently one with some person who races sled dogs. I enjoyed the homemade "Sled Dog Crossing" sign at one point on the road.
This drive went on for 45 minutes down gravel roads. I was really starting to get worried--it didn't look that long in the atlas, but the gravel kept me to a speed of about 30 mph and the road was narrow and winding. Remember my hesitation about driving on gravel roads before? I NEVER would have wanted to do anything like this had I know. It felt like it took hours. And I just kept pushing on for some reason, even as doubts about the road going through where I thought it would really started coming to mind. I had no cell phone service, I took out the GPS but it refused to lock onto the satellites, so...I pressed on. Makes sense?
Finally the road became paved and I suddenly entered the "city" of Big Lake. So much happiness! I'm sure that was not the way most people were introduced to Big Lake. The "city" turned out to be a long stretch of houses and cabins along the shores of a very, very large lake. There didn't appear to be an organized downtown at all--just a bunch of resort-style houses. I was just glad to be on paved roads again.
That was the furthest into "back country" Alaska I have been. There were a lot of lots for sale on that gravel road as well, for some strange reason. At least, I saw a lot of realty signs. Apparently people want to develop it. It just felt way out in the middle of nowhere to me...

I rejoined the Parks Highway west of Wasilla and then headed back towards Anchorage. The marine layer had moved in again, so a low stratus cloud deck had moved in. You can see the base of the cloud deck as compared to height of the mountains.
Looking back across the Cook Inlet (ironically, towards Point Mackenzie) from the Anchorage side, you can see in the distance this isolated mountain called Mount Susitna. The native (and common local) term for the mountain is the "Sleeping Lady" and you can kind of see her in this picture--the profile of the mountain really does kind of look like a sleeping lady.
Of course, my real surprise was when I got back to our apartment and went to park in my parking space. I almost turned in, but then I stopped short.
A moose! For those of you who have been asking if I had seen any wildlife, here you go. Right at my parking space. I parked further down in the lot and as I walked back by towards our apartment, I tried to get a better picture, but the moose was content to hide in the tree and keep munching away.
It was an older moose than the one that haunts the woods behind the forecast office. And this moose was certainly not aggrivated by people being around. Definitely not like the moose at the forecast office. The story of the forecast office moose is best told in person, though. Ask me about it some time and I will share. This moose appeared to be peaceful and content and that's the way we like them to be. But it's just a sample of the creatures that live in the dark forests right outside of my apartment up here. Pretty amazing.

Oh Eagle River...

2009-06-13T14:04:00.019-08:00

This past Wednesday after work, since I have so much sunlight up here, I decided to do some near-Anchorage exploring and see what all of the northern suburbs of Anchorage looked like. I would drive up to Palmer and then come back down on the Glenn and "Old" Glenn Highways, taking every exit and seeing what was there. While not remarkable for any other real means, it did give me a sense of what normal, day-to-day life is like in Alaska.
I started up shooting straight up towards Palmer on the Glenn Highway, but I took this exit for the Old Glenn Highway, which is the last exit before Palmer-Wasilla. This Old Glenn Highway loop (according to my Milepost driving guide book) is a "16 mile scenic back route into Palmer that takes you through the heart of the old Matanuska Valley agricultural area."
Upon turning down it, I though...ok, this could be scenic. I wouldn' t call it agricultural, but it is scenic.... The road wound around through those forests for many miles. After a few miles into it, I noticed this bright yellow motorcycle coming up fast behind me. Very fast. There was an oncoming truck but the motorcycle still pulled out into the passing lane and zipped around me, barely avoiding getting hit by the truck which had slammed on its breaks (as had I...). I have never seen a motorcycle move so fast... Anyhow, the road continued to wind through the forests before coming out on a bridge over the Knik River.
I liked this bridge far better than the one on the interstate-quality Glenn Highway that goes over the Knik River. Mount Matanuska, a prominent point at this end of the Chugach Range, sits on the horizon there. At this point, as my radio was still tuned to Anchorage stations, they began the traffic report, concluding with..."...and traffic is still somewhat slow through the S-curves on the Glenn Highway north of town. We are also getting reports that the Palmer police are currently engaged in a high-speed pursuit with a moorcyclist...so be cautious if you're driving in Palmer at this time...". That HAD to be the motorcycle that had just passed me. So the law finally caught up with him...
Anyhow, I arrived in the city of Palmer again. Palmer is a nice little town, fewer big-box stores than Wasilla and more of a small-town kind of a place, even though their populations are about equal. It has been told that when the Matanuska Valley agricultural area was first settled, the center of which is the Palmer-Wasilla area, the original settlers were people from the northern parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin and the upper peninsula of Michigan. And, you know...driving through downtown Palmer feels a lot like driving through one of those small Wisconsin towns you'll drive through anywhere in the state--it's kind of difficult to describe, but it's that kind of town. Just with mountains in the background. Anyhow, the agricultural region there is known for its lettuce, cabbage, pumpkins, potatoes and corn. Because of the very long daylight hours, often the vegeables will grow to unusually large sizes. I've been told that at the Alaska State Fair in the fall (which is also held in Palmer), there are often world-record setting heads of lettuce, cabbage and pumpkins for their shear size. Unfortunately I won't be around to see that, but it's interesting to learn what other effects all of this daylight has on things.

Next I continued down the main Glenn Highway out of Palmer, going past the Old Glenn Highway exit I had previously taken and now taking the next exit, one for "Thunderbird Falls". Outside of the shared name with Lake Thunderbird east of Norman, Oklahoma, the thought of a waterfall intrigued me. So I took the exit and parked at the parking area for the falls. I recently puchased an Alaska State Parks parking pass for $40 so I no longer have to pay the $5 fee every time I park at a trailhead or any parking area in Chugach (or any) state park. There was a 3/4 mile long trail advertised to go and see the falls, so I took my camera and went in search of it.

This trail has the most mosquitoes I have yet to encounter in Alaska. I haven't had any problems with mosquitoes in the city, nor on any of my other hikes. Perhaps it has something to do with the urban effects or the elevation. Whatever the reason, there were now mosquitoes. I passed many people on the trail, ranging from groups of teenagers to parents with small children. It was a popular hike, apparently, despite the mosquitoes. The trail climbs for the first half mile until you are on top of the gorge overlooking whatever creek this is (Thunderbird Creek, maybe?)
The trail continued for what felt like a lot more than 3/4 mile. The last part of it, though, was on a wooden boardwalk of sorts, finally ending at a big platform where you could see the falls...
And that little area in the middle was all that you could see. You couldn't see the base of the falls, you couldn't really even see the top of the falls--all you could see was a little swath of the water falling down. While pleasant, I had been expecting something more, so I was slightly disappointed. Nevertheless, it was a good hike--got me out of the car for a bit, at least. I walked back rather quickly, taking advantage of the downhill incline and trying to stay ahead of the mosquitoes.
After getting back on the Glenn Highway, the next exit as I headed towards Anchorage was for Mirror Lake. This exit took me onto a parallelling section of the Old Glenn Highway which ended at another fee parking area for Mirror Lake. I didn't stop here, but, since it was a rather warm day, there were many people on the shores of the lake and other people swimming. It looked like a very pleasant, clear lake at the base of the Chugach with many houses and cabins along the shores. A nice spot to go on a hot day.
The next exits on the way down were for Peters Creek. From the Glenn Highway, this looks like a run-down Chevron gas station with a small restaurant next to it and a few roads going back into the woods. I followed the main road back into the woods--and found myself in a very pleasant, suburban neighborhood. Large lawns, nice-looking houses, kids riding bikes down the streets--this looked like a very pleasant place to live. I didn't get very many photos of it that really show it, but...I was just not expecting such a sprawling suburban area randomly out here. Bordered by the Glenn Highway and the Chugach Mountains on the east and Cook Inlet on the west, this entire hillside was one big subdivision.
There was a fun playground and baseball field next to the local elementary school back there as well. I thought about how similar it was to the playgrounds we see in Roscoe or in Norman, but this one had a big mountain behind it. Or, if you were to look the other way, there were kids playing baseball with the sparkling waters of the Cook Inlet down the hill behind them. A very normal subdivision in an unusually scenic location.
Next were the exits for Eagle River, the largest northern suburb of Anchorage. At over 20,000 people, it's fairly populous, at least by Alaskan standards. I really liked the city of Eagle River. The main Glenn Highway goes west of town and you really can't see the town from the highway...just a bunch of trees with occasional glimpses of buildings behind. I took the Old Glenn Highway through town, which ends up being more or less the main street. It has a very nice central business district with a good blend (at least to my tastes) of all of the modern stores and fast food restuarants with local stores mixed in. The surrounding hillsides and foothills of the Chugach are covered in subdivisions and houses going up. There are also plenty of nice subdivisions just off the Old Glenn Highway. Eagle River sits at the mouth of the Eagle River Valley heading back into the Chugagh Range. There is a road, Eagle River Road (yes, they weren't very creative with their names and named EVERYTHING "Eagle River") which parallels the Eagle River way back into the valley to a nature center deep inside the Chugach Range.
Driving down the Eagle River Road was another fantastically scenic drive. You stay above the river on the hillside most of the time but sometimes the road dives down to be next to the river for a while. The valley is broad and tree-filled with the steep slopes of the Chugach rising on both sides. The steep slopes at times make for some very dramatic driving.
The road then ends at the nature center and trailhead. It's another parking fee area, but I didn't stop here either. I plan to go back soon and hike some of their trails, though. Off in the distance is the easy-to-guess Eagle Mountain and apparently out of sight but near its base is the Eagle Glacier, which is the source of the Eagle River.
Driving back is just as scenic as driving out. The hillsides are just covered with dense trees and it looks like this rolling carpet of green-ness. Very beautiful. With all of this greenery, it actually looks somewhat tropical at times. Joe even mentioned on the drive in that it almost felt like were were driving through Costa Rica or something at times because of all the greenery on the lower slopes on the mountains and in the valleys.
The road then, of course, pulls back out into Eagle River. The Eagle River Road is about 15 miles long so it takes around 45 minutes to drive out and back on it. In theory, in this photo you're looking out over the city of Eagle River, but you can't really see it. Also, by this point it was almost 9 PM...and still plenty of light out, with the sun still plenty high in the sky. Such is life here. The city of Eagle River is far more scenic than any of the photos I had of it. Which is a shame because I really liked the way the city looked at the base of the mountains and the entrance of the valley. If I had to live in Alaska, I think I would want to live in Eagle River.
There was one more exit on the Glenn Highway for Arctic Valley Road, but that was so close to Anchorage that I figured I could save that for another day. And thus ended my little foray into the northern suburbs of Anchorage along the Glenn Highway.

In other small news, last night some of us went out to a bar in downtown Anchorage called Humpy's with three guys we had met who just climbed Mount McKinley. One was from Britain, another from Australia, and the last from New York and New Jersey. That was a fun evening, between hearing their stories of mountain climbing and accidentally dropping their bags and watching them go whizzing away down the slope and off a cliff...to hearing about all of the places they had been to, like flying into the capital city of Chad in Africa and them having to divert all of the city's electricity for five minutes just to power the runway lights...to my trying to explain to them just what is radar meteorology and how a radar works... It was a good evening. I learned that there's a whole lot of the world that I haven't seen and a lot of places that I still would like to go to. All from a bar in downtown Anchorage.

Now that things have somewhat settled in here, I've been able to make arrangements for some more out-there excursions in the weeks to come. Look for reports coming from Fairbanks, Juneau, Homer, Seward, and Valdez in the weeks to come as I begin exploring some further-away bits of Alaska. Should be lots of fun.

The Roof of the Continent

2009-06-09T19:04:00.014-08:00

I returned from church on Sunday afternoon to find Tyler, one of my roommates, and Emily, another intern at the forecast office, on their way out to Tyler's newly-purchased, 1990 Subaru Loyale which he found on Craig's List the other day. Being almost 20 years old and from Alaska, it has nearly 200,000 miles on it, a heavily cracked windshield, and it sounds...suspicious...when the engine is started up. Nevertheless, Tyler announced that since Sunday was such a clear afternoon, they were going to pick up Charly (another intern) and drive up to see if they could see Mount McKinley. One of the first things we were told when we came up here was that you have less than a 10% chance of actually seeing Mount McKinley while you are up here, since the weather in that area is almost always cloudy and the mountain remains obscured. Indeed, some of the interns who were up here last year (like Emily) still had not seen McKinley, even though they had tried many times. But, today was looking excellent. They had hoped that I would be interested in going and driving because Jordan, another one of my roommates, and Shannon (yet another intern) (there are a lot of interns) also wanted to go, but there was no room in Tyler's car. I was happy to go along, and thus we gassed up my car and headed out.
Once you get north to the Wasilla-Palmer area north of Anchorage, the road divides into the Glenn Highway heading east (this was the road that Joe and I came in on when we first drove up here) and the Parks Highway heading north and west, which goes through Denali National Park (where Mount McKinley is) and up to Fairbanks. The actual entrance to Denali National Park is some 3.5 hours driving north of Anchorage, with Fairbanks nearly 6 hours north of Anchorage. However, Mout McKinley is so big that you can get excellent views of it (providing that the weather is good) from many miles south of the acual park entrance, particularly in areas north of a town called Talkeetna. (You may recall that my second big hike was in the Talkeetna Mountains north of Palmer--the town of Talkeetna is on the western edge of these mountains in the Susitna River Valley between the Talkeetna Range and the Alaska Range.) (If you haven't noticed by now, I rather like using parentheses...) Contrary to popular belief, though the Parks Highway does go by Denai National Park, that's not the reason it's called the Parks Highway. The road is named after George Parks who was a former governor of Alaska in the early 1900s. However, when trying to keep your Alaskan highways straight, the name makes it easy to remember where this one goes. As seen above, north of Wasilla the road goes into a big forest with lots of aspen, poplar and black spruce stands. Also seen above is the back of Tyler's 1990 Subaru Loyale...
After driving for an hour and a half or so, we arrived in the town of Talkeetna, popular tourist jumping-off point for excursions into Denali. Talkeetna is locatetd at the end of a 15-mile long spur road off the Parks Highway, so it's a decent little detour. We were under the impression that this was a fully functioning town with grocery stores and everything. This was not the case. Talkeetna, while probably at one time serving some other kind of economy, is now completely a tourist town, billing itself as "authentically Alaskan". The "town" was clogged with tourists walking around and had little to no parking available. We ended up parking in the post office parking lot (it was Sunday so the post office was closed) to see if we might inquire somewhere about McKinley viewpoints. A few blocks of gravel streets were cluttered with gift shop after gift shop after gift shop. There were a few bed and breakfasts and a couple of interesting looking restaurants as well. I kind of wanted to join these tourists and walk around a bit (perhaps grab some lunch at one of the quainter restaurants seeing as I had come straight from church and still hadn't eaten yet...) but the popular consensus was to press on up the Parks Highway to see if we could get a good McKinley view. Talkeetna itself if in a river valley and, while there are somewhat vague views of the mountain in the distance, not many viewing opportunities exist within the town. The nearby river offers a place for float planes to dock, though, and many flight-seeing tours of McKinley take off from here. Talkeetna is mentioned in many of the guidebooks I've read as an excellent place to stop, well worth the effort to come and explore. For that reason I wish I had had more time to look around (and to eat). However, our ten minutes in town had to do. On a side note, I have heard said before that the town of Cicely in the TV show Northern Exposure was loosely based on this town, as far as this being the closest any Alaskan town comes to what is depicted in that show. I didn't think it looked that similar...far too touristy.
We got back on the Parks Highway and continued north. We could catch occasional glimpses of McKinley through the trees or poking above the tree tops. Another half an hour or so north of the Talkeetna spur road and we passed a sign saying that we were "Entering an Alaskan Scenic Byway". This is one thing I have learned driving in Alaska: by any other standards of any other one of the lower 48 states, basically every road you will drive on in Alaska is "scenic". There is no question or doubt...it's always "scenic". So, when Alaska decides to post a sign saying "This route is a Scenic Byway", I have learned that what is about to happen is VERY scenic. EXTREMELY scenic. Difficult to drive because you just want to stare kind of scenic. We had this experience coming into Alaska when we entered the Matanuska River Valley on the Glenn Highway. We passed a sign saying, "Entering an Alaskan Scenic Byway", laughed because everything was scenic, went around a corner, and...wow. They're not kidding. Here it was exacly the same. We went around a corner and there was a side street going up a hill that was called "McKinley View Drive". Tyler, ever alert, decided that this street name must have come from somewhere and we drove to the top of the hill on that road.
We found McKinley. Quite the spectacular view. Many, many photos were taken. Though, for some reason, I couldn't get the contrast quite right with my camera. I've tried editing my photos with Photoshop (using my very limited knowledge of the program) and I just think that the mountain always turned out too washed-out against the background. It was definitely more vivid in real life. But anyhow, then after taking photos I remembered that I had my Milepost guidebook which we had used when we were driving the Alaska Highway into Alaska. The book also details all the highways within Alaska, so, upon getting it out, I discovered that two miles down the road was an official Alaska State Parks turnout for "Denali View South". We decided to go there and continue our photo taking.
The viewpoint lived up to its name. A short path led to another viewpoint at the top of the hill. There were a fair number of people there, including many families with small children. It was interesting to watch their reactions. There were three or four young boys and girls, ranging between 6 and 10 years old, I'd guess, who were incredibly fascinated by the whole thing--reading all the signs, taking photos of each individual peak while writing down all the names of the ridges, telling their parents all about what they just read on the signs. Then there were the ten or twelve other young kids who you could tell couldn't care less about the big rock sitting in the distance and were bored out of their mind. Anyhow, Mount McKinley...
There is considerable debate over what to call the mountain. Officially the US Geologic Survey retains the name Mount McKinley, but the local native term for the mounain, Denali, (meaning "the great one") is the name of the park surrounding the mountain and often what the mountain itself is called. I find myself alternating between the two for some reason. I guess I'm just as undecided as the rest of the world. The main peak is some 20,320 feet in elevation and is the highest point in North America. The mountain itself has one of the greatest prominences (in very simple terms, the height difference between it and the next highest mountain on the same landmass--an odd way of saying it sticks out a whole lot instead of being buried in a mountain range) in the world. It also apparently has more mass than Mount Everest. It is definitely one great big rock. The peak and its flanks are so massive that the entire weather pattern of the Alaskan interior is extremely chaotic because of this mountain. At over 20,000 feet it penetrates into the upper-level jet streams and it alone can be responsible for triggering short waves and other instabilities in the flow that lead to significant storm systems down the line. (I've tried running my numerical weather model around the mountain...it usually ends up making the model crash after a few minutes...).
The mountain is snow-covered year round. Signs at the viewpoint tell of the names of the different sub-peaks and whatnot. There are also many accounts of attempts to climb the mountain, including how the first person to claim to have climbed it actually didn't and passed off a cropped photo of him standing on a much lesser mountain nearby as proof of his "ascent of McKinley". Lots of good history there.
I decided to take a picture of my car with McKinley in the background for effect. Tyler decided that he wanted to get some attractive photographs of his new old car to use when he makes his own post on Craig's List at the end of the summer to try and sell it to someone else. He figured that Mount McKinley in the background would be pretty darn good as well. Though, personally, I can't help but think that any Alaskan is going to see a picture of a car in front of a mountain and not think twice about it...

Anyhow, after taking several pictures, we headed back down the Parks Highway toward Anchorage. We stopped and got gas on the way (my car had only used up a third of a tank so far, the 1990 Subaru Loyale had used up 3/4 of its tank...). We also stopped for dinner at 7 PM (my first time eating since that morning) at a Chili's in Wasilla, just north of Anchorage. Wasilla, as many of you may remember, is the hometown of Sarah Palin. While we have not encountered Sarah Palin yet up here (I believe that she has been on the east coast this week giving speeches), all of my roommates and I are looking out for any signs she may be coming to Anchorage soon so we can take picures and see her speak. There are some here who do not agree entirely with her, but...it's Sarah Palin. We just want to be able to have seen her.

So that was our McKinley trip. More adventures to follow...

This is the city...

2009-06-06T18:39:00.017-08:00

This Saturday we decided to stay in town and spend the early afternoon at the Anchorage Artisans/Farmers market. Since until this point I haven't really talked about Anchorage, I figure now is the time.

Anchorage is located on a peninsula of relatively flat land surrounded on all sides by some sort of geographical barrier. To the west and southwest is the Cook Inlet, which stretched in from the Gulf of Alaska on the Pacific Ocean. The Cook Inlet separates into two branches or "arms"--Knik Arm to the north of Anchorage and Turnagain Arm to the south of Anchorage. The city itself lies on the peninsula of land in between them. To the east are the Chugach Mountains. The Chugach continue on the south side of Turnagain Arm as well. To the north of the Knik Arm are the Talkeetna Mountains (where I last went hiking) and to the west of the main Cook Inlet is the southern end of the Alaska Range. This has the effect of putting Anchorage in a "Bowl" with mountains rising up on all sides (even if some are across the water). You'll often hear the Anchorage area referred to as the Anchorage Bowl.
Above is a look down Northern Lights Boulevard, one of the main streets in town. Anchorage seems a lot like any other American town, despite its relative isolation. The city is very spread out geographically, but the main part of the city doesn't seem too big. Perhaps that's because there are only two roads out of town--the Glenn Highway to the north and the Seward Highway to the south. All the other streets funnel into these two roads eventually, so there's really only two directions to go.
There are a lot of trees, parks, and greenbelts in Anchorage. All of them have moose and bears so people are always being told to watch out. Two creeks--Campbell Creek and Chester Creek--run across the city flowing from the Chugach down into the Cook Inlet, and they provide the focal points for the two main greenbelts. The above photo is near Chester Creek as you are approaching downtown. The city itself is very nice and cool, lots of shade, minimal traffic problems. You can usually get where you need to go with no trouble. The only issues I have are with the construction and the "highways". It literally seems like, with all the construction and random road closures, the city completely rearranges itself every day, and you have to find different alternate routes nearly every time you go out. The second are these "highways". It appears that the city planners couldn't decide between limited access roads and roads with stoplights. The Seward Highway and Minnesota Drive (another major street in town) both alternate between having exit ramps at cross streets and having stoplights. I makes knowing which lane you have to be in a nightmare. But otherwise, no complaints...
Downtown Anchorage is planned in a grid with the extraordinarily easy to figure out (but dull to think about) street pattern where all the north-south streets are named with letters and all the east-west streets are named with numbers. So you end up going to the corner of C and 8th. Or L and 12th. I wish they were more clever. There are a smattering of tall buildings throughout the downtown area, but no real organized center of them on the ground (despite what you may think looking at the webcam images below). Most of the tall buildings are the buildings of oil companies. The tall brown building is the Conoco-Phillips building, for instance.
Really, most of downtown Anchorage looks like a very normal, nice town. When the weather's nice like today, there are scores of people out there, tourists and locals alike. Most were headed toward the same Artisan/Farmer Market we were, as that's the main event in downtown every weekend. Lots of people have bikes here and it's definitely a favorite mode of transportation. You can see the Chugach Mountains rising up behind the city in the photo above. The clouds hadn't completely cleared out yet, but it was still a very sunny day...
After finding a place to park, we headed for the Market. It was easy enough to find with the large number of white, pointy tents all grouped together. With the Chugach Mountains nearby and everything, it halfway reminded me of the Denver Airport with its tent-like roof trying to resemble the Rocky Mountains. I wondered if they were trying to do the same thing here. The market was far larger than I thought it was going to be.
There was a brass band, the "Alaska Brass", who were from the Air Force Base north of town, playing at the entrance to the Market. Ironically, as soon as I entered and turned to take the picture, they began playing a set of songs from the Rogers and Hammerstein musical "Oklahoma!" including the rousing finale song which is also our school song. Apparently I cannot escape Oklahoma, no matter where I go...
There were a lot of people there. And a lot of vendors. And a lot of tents. Here we see two of my roommates, Matt and Jordan, pausing to take it all in. The vendors had everything you would expect from Alaska...and some things I had never heard of before. There was an entire tent devoted to syrup, candy, and wine all made from birch sap. Another tent featured "Aurora Chasers" and looked exactly like the booths I've seen set up in Oklahoma by Tornado Chasers.net. They offer Aurora-finding tours and lots of photography. One vendor was selling wooden ties--neckties made out of wood. Another often-sold item were these Inuit-inspired knives called Ulus. They look like miniature axe heads, but with the thin-ness of a knife. They have a wooden handle where the butt of the axe-head would be. Apparently they're a big deal up here--everyone was selling them and a lot of people have them. They're supposed to be highly efficient for cutting and chopping all kinds of things. Wikipedia has an article on them here. I might be tempted to get one at some point...they're not too expensive...
One of my favorite tents was the "Alaska Pissin' off Texas" tent, with their wide variety of anti-Texas merchandise. Coming from Oklahoma, and knowing a lot of Texans, I was very amused by this whole thing...particularly because they had a whole tent. I may go back some week and buy a shirt or something. They had a bulletin board of all these reasons why Alaska is bigger and better than Texas that unfortunately isn't very readable in the picture I took of it. Still, very funny...
One whole "street" in this event was devoted to food. Lots of food. There had been many vendors elsewhere in the Market selling dried or packaged meat from the "exotic" animals up here--reindeer, buffalo, musk-ox, caribou--but here there were people selling the food cooked and ready to eat for lunch. In the first episode of the television series "Northern Exposure" (an excellent show set in Alaska that I am working my way through on DVDs) there's a point where someone offers to serve either Moose Burgers or Caribou Dogs. I thought it was exaggerating or trying to be funny in the film. Oh no...they do exist. And were sold in this row. We ended up going to a pizza place for lunch because some people in our group wanted that, but I intend to return here some weekend and sample some of their local cuisine. They also had the typical sort of fare for this kind of thing--popcorn, grilled corn on the cob, funnel cakes, chicken strips--along with the more eccentric stuff. Anyhow, good eats.
After spending quite a bit of time in the Market we headed back to go to the pizza place people wanted to go to for lunch. On the way back to the car we passed a few totem poles outside a government building. I forgot that this was totem pole land. Though that's more near Juneau and in that area of Alaska. I've been considering taking some of the money I make this summer and flying to Juneau for a weekend, just so I can see it. It's not too bad of a flight and you can't get there by road. Something to think about.
We passed a place that advertised glacial cruises out on Prince William Sound far east of Anchorage. That's another thing that several of the people up here want to do--go on one of those day-long glacial cruises to see the glaciers by the water. There's also supposed to be good whale viewing on those cruises as well. Anyhow, this place had a chunk of ice on a barrel out in front of it. The sign read, "This is actual, real, genuine glacial ice, taken from an iceberg in Prince William Sound." I just found that amusing...and wondered if they had their ships bring back a new chunk of ice every day. That ice cube is not going to last in the sun...
Finally, we just drove across Anchorage towards the pizza place. The mountains are always visible in every direction when you're driving (unless it's really foggy). When there's a very low stratus cloud deck but it's clear underneath, you just see this dark wall rising up into the cloud ceiling in every direction. It's almost enough to make you feel claustrophobic. But today was a partly cloudy day, warm and happy. A good day to be in Anchorage.

A day off...to Mint Glacier Valley

2009-06-02T20:12:00.016-08:00

It turns out that, since I actually don't work for anyone up here, I don't have a set schedule. As long as I get my hours in and my project gets done, all is well. Tyler, one of my roommates and another Hollings scholar, has a similar situation. Since the forecast for this week all said "mostly cloudy and cool" except for today which was "mostly sunny", he decided that today he wanted to go on an extended hike and he invited me and a girl named Emily (who is also an intern at our office) to go along. We conferenced the night before and decided to try the "Mint Glacier Valley" or "Gold Mint Trail" which is located some ten miles north of Palmer, Alaska. This trail was said to wind through the Little Susitna River valley in the Talkeetna Mountains, pass an abandoned mine and then head up to a cirque of mountains at the head of the valley with "starkly beautiful views" of the Mint Glacier. So, at 8 this morning, we headed out.

On the way up, we stopped to get some supplies at a Fred Meyer store in Palmer. I have done most of my shopping during my time here at Fred Meyer, mostly because it's like a Target Greatland or a Walmart Supercenter--more than just a grocery store, it sells electronics, appliances, clothing...everything. I also soon discovered (which was then confirmed on Wikipedia) that Fred Meyer not too long ago merged with Kroger. I was wondering why all of the logos and names ("Kid-Os") looked familiar... One item bought by Tyler was a can of bear spray. Apparently bear spray is a kind of highly-powered pepper spray. The canister is slighly smaller than a bottle of water and has a nozzle at the top. In theory, if a bear decides to charge you, you can point this thing at it and spray it (up to 30 feet!) and the high-powered pepper spray will deter the bear. The entire thing was supposed to discharge in 4 seconds. Potent stuff. In Alaska, there are no native snakes, no poisonous spiders, no ticks, no poison ivy or oak, no mosquitoes away from the low lands...really the only things you have to worry about in the higher country are bears and moose--very large things that you can usually see very well. But, short of carrying a firearm, bear spray was the best we could do. So we set out.
The trailhead is well-maintained by the Alaska Bureau of Land Management (they have a BLM whereas back home we have the DNR). Nice parking, restrooms, a pump with drinking water, the $5 fee again...typical for a trailhead, or so I've learned. The valley is straight ahead, going between the mountains.

This trail, in Tyler's guidebook, was rated "moderate to strenuous" and is 8 miles long with an elevation gain of around 3000 feet total. We started around 10 in the morning. At first, the trail was fairly nice--well-maintained, gravel-covered, nice wooden bridges over the various stream crossings--as it wound through low trees and brush. We immediately started following the Little Susitna River, which the trail claimed to follow to its source.

The rushing sound of the river was always present, even when the trail meandered away from it. After the first mile or two, I really started feeling the effects of walking uphill for so long, just like I did the last time I hiked. This wasn't even sharp uphills. Just a simple, gradual, uphill slope. Still started feeling it. After the first two miles, we came across two round beaver dams in a pond. This photo was taken while I was standing on top of one of them.
The very industrious beavers in this area made a whole lot of dams, and we saw many on our trek. The trail, as it went on, became less well-maintained, becoming more of a well-worn dirt track through the brush. Still, it was very easy to follow and we pressed on without really getting lost. As we rounded our way into the valley, the view opened up far more and we were awed by the towering mountains on all sides of us. The Talkeetnas, while not a particularly tall range, rise up from the tidal flats at the end of the Cook Inlet north of Anchorage, so they more or less rise right up from sea level. This makes them an impressive site from any point of view. Here we have Emily and Tyler adjusting their cameras to take full advantage of this view...
And yes, the view opened up...
Of course, by the time we got to mile 5, the trail had really wound down until it came out on this kind of sandbar in the middle of the river. Gone were the nice river bridges and gravel trail; from here on out we had to pick our way up narrow dirt tracks embedded with stones up and down, but mostly up. So many little runoff streams coming down from the mountains made their way across the trail and we had no option but to leap over them or try to pick our way across the rocks in the stream. With my tennis shoes, this wasn't exactly a picnic, though my height and longer strides definitely helped. Part way down the valley we could see the "ruins" of the old mine on the opposite hillside. There is a run-down shed in the middle of this picture and we were told in a guidebook that that was all that remains of the "Lonesome Mine" that once operated in this valley. The trail we were on was part of the original trail made by the miners to access the mine. Apparently it was also noteworthy because it was started as a gold mine, but produced far more silver than gold. The entire Talkeetna range is littered with these abandoned mines and there are dozens of trails open to the public leading to the mine sites. No one ever recommends entering these mines, but a lot of people find it fun to explore. I almost wanted to try and head over there to see what we could see (not go into the mine, but just to see the entrance) but with the way I was feeling...no way.
Deeper into the valley, the terrain started getting far rougher, as boulders appeared in the middle of the trail and we had to navigate around or over them. After a time, we stopped and ate lunch, shortly after coming across this beaver dam. This was amazing...the dam retains a pond that is almost ten feet above the river running next to it. Not a leak in sight...
Also in this photo, you can see this ribbon of white ice and snow running across the mountains at the end of the valley. Was this the glacier? We couldn't tell. It was the most glacier-looking thing we had seen yet. Still, those mountains were spectacular.

Finally we reached a point near the end of the valley, after gaining almost 2500 feet in elevation, where I felt the effects of my altitude sickness coming on. I have known since I have gone to Colorado that I can get a decent amount of altitude sickness, but those occasions were upon driving to the top of 10,000 plus foot peaks. I assumed this was way too low. But the symptoms with my pounding headache and slight nauseousness seemed exactly the same. After a long break at the foot of a talus slope (a slope covered with broken rocks) at the far end of the valley where the trail really began doing a lot of winding around boulders, Emily and I decided that this was as far as we wanted to try and go (Emily wasn't feeling too well either). Tyler, who is on a mountaineering club at his school and has gone on hundreds of hiking trips said he would just scout the trail up ahead while we waited there to see if he could see the end of it or what. 45 minutes later, Emily and I started getting terribly worried about him, since we assumed he was just going around the corner and he still wasn't back yet. Deciding to assume the worst, we continued on the trail looking for him. About five minutes later we spotted him up ahead scrambling back our way. Apparently he had made it to the end of the trail, which was high up on the slope of one of the mountains. There was a "hut" there with some supplies in it for people who decided to camp in the area to use. No glacier though. Apparently there was some snow, but that was expected. No glacier. Perhaps global warming has claimed yet another victim.
So then we started back. Going back was a lot easier and far faster. Downhill always is. Still, my feet were killing me for most of the hike back. We ran into a few other hikers on our way back, but that wasn't until we were back near the parking area again. Very little wildlife was seen on this trip, which kind of surprised me. Obviously we're rather fortunate we didn't run into a moose or a bear, but otherwise all we saw were some ducks in the river. On Tyler's scramble up to the hut, he saw a marmot which is like a squirrel, but otherwise...that was it. Unless you count the dog that some people we passed had with them. Kind of a shame.

I survived this hike, but it left me far more sore and exhausted than the Flattop hike did. Round trip it was over 14 miles and it took us 8.5 hours, so it was an all-day sort of thing. I got slightly sunburned, but it really doesn't look bad at all...it actually may not even be sunburn, just a "little sun". My legs and feet feel like they've been run over by a steamroller, and I'll be quite happy to just sit at my desk tomorrow and not move around much at all. All in all, I really enjoyed the trip. Great scenery, great friends, great memories, good conversation, exploring, and being out in the middle of scenic nowhere in Alaska. Even if I don't want to walk for the next week, it was still good. The altitude sickness cleared up as we descended, no problem. I believe it will take a bit of scrubbing, though, to clear up my mud-covered shoes...

Flattop Mountain

2009-05-29T20:12:00.015-08:00

Joe left yesterday evening. It was a gray and dreary day in Anchorage, and so it only made it sadder to see him go. But he made it back to Oklahoma today, so all is well.

Today began all gray and gloomy again. In fact, the forecast is calling for it to stay gray and drizzly for the next five days, at least. However, I was sitting in the forecast office this afternoon, doing my work, and lo and behold the sun came out. And stayed out. And started coming out everywhere. As one of the forecasters put it, "You know, you look at the moisture advection and you're almost certain there will be clouds all day. Then a little hole develops in the clouds. And before you know it, that little hole is a bigger hole. And then...the entire Cook Inlet is one big hole in the clouds...". Needless to say, as I got off work today at 4, I was determined to take advantage of this pleasant weather, particularly with the ominous five-day forecast I had been looking at all day.

I decided that I really wanted to climb a mountain. Naturally, when I move to a city that is right next to a major mountain range, I want to take advantage of this new "thing" sitting next to me. The majority of the Chugach Mountains immediately east of Anchorage (they call this area the "Front Range". Not to be confused with the Colorado Front Range...) are in Chugach State Park, and there are dozens of trails back there. The only one I could find that actually claimed it went up a mountain was a trail that went to the top of Flattop Mountain (Which is very appropriately named when you look at it). It is "easily accessible from Anchorage" and therefore the "most climbed mountain in the state". It even has a Wikipedia page here. For me who comes from Illinois and Oklahoma (not particularly known for their mountains), I figured this would be a pleasant little hike and not pose much of a problem. So, immediately after work got out, I stopped at the store, bought a backpack, a few water bottles and a box of granola bars (it was so stereotypical that the girl who checked me out said, "I only need one guess to know what you're doing this afternoon...") and drove out to the trailhead.

Got to the Glen Alps trailhead at about 4:30. There were some 25 other cars there so there were other people around. The daily parking fee there was $5, so not bad at all. I strapped on my backpack (it's been years since I've worn a backpack) and set out at a brisk pace down the trail.

Flattop Mountain is only some 3500 feet tall and you're already halfway up when you actually get to the trailhead in your car, so it's even less that than. Laterally, the trail itself is only around 3 miles long, so that doesn't sound bad either. I started up the well-marked gravel trail going through the trees up the hill. Five minutes later I had to stop and was huffing and puffing and weak feeling and...wow. In the meantime, several other climbers kept passing me going the other way, just casually walking down with their dogs or families of small children, completely nonchalantly. I, of course, desperately tried to hide my gasping and heaving and say "Hello!" as if nothing was the matter. Here I was five minutes in, and already I was feeling completely spent. But I pushed on.

Five minutes later, I had to stop again. By this time I had reached a trail junction with an informational sign, so now when people passed me I could just act like I was intently reading the sign and so it looked perfectly natural for me to stop. The trail has four stages--the short first part I had just come up through some low pine trees, this next stretch where the path splits into a loop around a tall hill, a third stretch on the far side of this hill where the trail follows a ridge through the saddle point between that hill and the actual peak of the mountain, and the last leg which is the final ascent to the peak. Ok. So I continued down the trail, being very thankful for every level or slightly downhill stretch their was. How were people bringing their dogs or their very young children down this trail? It just amazed me. But every person who passed me re-srengthened my resolve to keep on going. The trail was well-marked and gravel, followed the hillside around the top of that hill and all the while giving spectacular sweeping views of the city of Anchorage below and the Cook Inlet beyond. I started seeing my frequent breaks as being well-worth it, just so I could stop and look around. A few times I actually sat down on a nearby rock (gulping down my water) and just looked around. I was well above the treeline by this point, and there was no interruption to the view. At least, until someone came by, still as easy-breathing and nonchalantly as ever, and I became embarrassed for sitting there and got up and moved on.

Finally I arrived at the other side of the hill and got to the turn off for the next leg. There was a sign here that read, "This section of trail rated: MODERATE. Adult supervision of small children and pets is highly recommended." After debating how small children or pets would have gotten up here without parental supervision, I looked up at the hike to come. "Moderate" to me implied "worse than it has been so far". Ugh. But the summit looked deceptively close. That's the funny thing about looking at mountains, at least for me. Whenever I see them, it just looks so easy to get through them or to climb them. Oh, just go up...not that hard. Distances seem a lot less from mountain to mountain than they actually are. Heights are distorted to seem smaller and closer than in reality. I decided to let myself be deceived this time, though, which gave me the confidence to press on.

This section of the trail winds up a ridge connecting the hill I had just come around with the main summit. Far from being easy, this section is so steep at points that the trail builders put in steps. Hundreds of them. It is the most disheartening thing ever to see this toddler hopping down the steps toward you, saying, "...one hundred twenty...one hundred twenty-one...one hundred twenty-two...". That much more to go. I started taking ten steps at a time then pausing to catch my breath. I'm sure we could ascribe some of this to my not being used to the air at that altitude or whatnot, but it really just boils down to my being out of shape. Which I am. Something I might try to change this summer. Anyhow, looking up towards the summit, I could see brightly-colored objects moving around, so I knew there were people up there. So I kept pressing on.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, I reached the end of the third leg. There was an elderly couple stopped there who were from England. Both of them had these ski-pole-looking things they were using to help keep themselves steady. It was somewhat interesting watching them trying to use those poles. Anyhow, at the immediate beginning of the final leg, there is a sudden, sharp upclimb of about 20 feet that was completely covered in snow. Slipperiest, sliding-est sort of thing I ever tried to climb. A sign followed that read, "This section of trail rated: DIFFICULT. Young children and pets not recommended." So I sat down and thought long and hard. And then thought even harder. I almost turned back. But then something in me said I couldn't turn back then (and all of that sitting and thinking had given me a decent amount of rest). So I moved on.

The trail then winds back and forth of the very steep slope in a series of switchbacks. Partway up I got a phone call from my parents (I somehow had cell phone service up there...) and took that call very happily since it gave me a break. While still mostly gravel, there were some small sections where you had to scramble over rocks. This slowed me down a bit, but that ended up being a good thing. I am someone, and I think many people are like this, who focuses a lot on the destination and not so much about the journey to the destination. I realize this is a very cliche sort of observation, but still... As such, I often try to get to that destination as quickly as possible, because the destination is all that matters. I was really pushing myself up this trail, because I had to get to the top of that mountain. Sure, the views were nice, but I had to get to the top. So I forced myself on.

However, as I got up the trail further, suddenly there was a point where the gravel disappeared into a steep slope of boulders and other large rocks. I had no idea where the trail was. Part of me thought, "Yes! Trail has ended. Can't go any further. I'm done." But then I noticed up a ways there was a rock where someone had spray-painted a large green dot. And further on there was another rock with a large green dot on it. So I figured that that was now the "trail" and began following the green dots. This started involving some climbing. Actual climbing. You had to scramble over rocks and, as the trail progressed, scramble UP the rocks to keep going. I've done some rock climbing, but this was just amazing. I got slowed way down, but that was perfect. It became a matter of going green dot to green dot. And that's all I had to do. I'm a problem-solving sort of person. There's nothing I enjoy more than developing a plan to solve some dilemma, then putting that plan into action to see how it works. And that's all this was. I get to a green dot. Stop. Look around (in EVERY direction, I learned...) and find the next green dot. Then, figure out what way I want to go over or around the rocks to get to that green dot. Find hand and foot holds and then do what I can to get there. After a few seconds, I'm there. Then repeat the entire process. The hike became so much fun. No hard breathing or feeling fatigued or anything like that. I was going slowly and solving these puzzles. So much for this section being "difficult". It was just a different kind of difficult. A kind I could deal with. The final bit of the trail was very steep going right up to the summit. A lot of vertical climbing.

Then, suddenly...I was there. On the relatively flat top of Flattop Mountain. Not another person in sight. It was so quiet...no wind, nothing. I walked around a bit on the top, taking pictures. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, this other climber was up there heading towards me (I literally for a few seconds in my mind thought it was going to be Josh King, but it wasn't...) and he asked if I wanted my photo taken up there with my camera. So I said "sure" and got my photo taken up there, which was very nice. After he left, I wandered around for a few more minutes and enjoyed this. I had made it to the top. All of that effort, and I had made it to the top. How many times there were that I wanted to turn back and I made it to the top. Every green dot of the way.

Then I had to head down. Which, for the first part of the descent, proved far more harrowing than going up as I had to let myself down on these boulders while still following the dots. But I managed to get down there. And then as I descended down the stairs and everything, it's all downhill so it didn't take much effort. And I was able to casually walk down the hill, nonchalantly. Then I noticed I started passing a whole lot of people heading up. And these people were heaving and huffing and panting and looking like they were about to collapse. So I nonchalantly walked by, saying "Hello" and breathing easy.

Port Alcan

2009-05-26T21:07:00.003-08:00

Well, as my last post indicated, we have made it to Alaska. I am now settled into our apartment on the campus of the University of Alaska--Anchorage and have begun my work at the Weather Forecast Office here in town. But first, a recap.

Pictures aren't ready yet, but as soon as they are available I'll share a few with you. Our story picks up where I last left off. Joe and I left Whitehorse, Yukon Territory at 7 in the morning on Monday. What followed were 5 hours of the most desolate highway we had seen yet. There are VERY few towns...only two or three between Haines Junction an hour out of Whitehorse and Beaver Creek by the Alaska-Canada Border. The road winds up between the Kluane and Dawson ranges of mountains on this stretch. We were in pure taiga land, with all coniferous forests and (according to our guidebook) areas of permafrost underground. The centerpiece of this leg of the drive was the great Kluane Lake, the largest lake in the Yukon Territory. The road follows a narrow strip between the Kluane Mountains and the lake. There were two towns--Destruction Bay and Burwash Landing--both on the lake. These, along with Haines Junction, were the only towns on this stretch. Calling them towns is also a stretch--most were a small collection of buildings with a gas station and a "closed for the season" lodge or RV park. From the lake, the highway continues to wind westward, approaching the Alaskan border. There are numerous frost heaves, where freezing and melting have caused severe dips and buckles in the pavement. This required some very attentive driving and several gut-swooping moments during the drive.

After gassing up in Beaver Creek, another 15 miles or so down the road was the Alaska-Canada border at Port Alcan. We stopped and took several pictures on the actual border, which is marked by a swath of trees that have been blasted out in a line stretching north to south along the border. The US Customs station was right after that, and the man there let us through in just a minute or so. No being searched or any ordeal like we had when coming into Canada. Of course, it looked like this guy may have been the only guy working that day, and we are way out in the middle of nowhere. Maybe these all contributed to the ease of our crossing. But anyhow, with nothing to hide, we were let through and got into Alaska. Clocks were set back an hour. I am now 3 hours behind Central Time (in case you were wondering).

Wow! What a difference that border crossing makes! For such an arbitrary border line, there is a drastic difference between the American and Canadian sides of the border. In Alaska, the highway moves away from the mountains (though the Saint Elias Mountains are still quite scenic and visible on the southern horizon) and into this vast open plain, filled with forests of pine and deciduous trees. Whereas it seemed like the trees had become all coniferous in the Yukon with any deciduous trees having no leaves, here the trees were all fully leafed out and it was beautiful. The road stays on the north side of the plain, riding along a hillside of a low ridge of hills to the north. It felt like a nice Sunday drive in Wisconsin or something through the woods. Even though it was still another 90 miles to the city of Tok, it didn't feel nearly as isolated as things did in the Yukon. There wasn't much more traffic either, nor any stops or gas stations, but seeing "Speed Limit 55" and American signs...I don't know. Perhaps the feeling of home removed some of the loneliness of being in a foreign county (if you can consider Canada foreign). Anyhow, we much more optimistically cruised the 90 miles into Tok.

Tok is the first major town you come to in Alaska, and the first place I had cell phone service since we crossed the Canadian border when this trip began. The city is pronounced like "Toke" as in "Token" and not like the word "talk". With familiar gas stations and other conveniences all being American brands and gas prices being $3.00 per gallon on the signs (they are at around $2.60 in Anchorage) instead of $1.00 per litre, it was more reassuring.

We left the official Alaska Highway in Tok, having travelled some 1300 miles on it. We took another highway called the Tok Cutoff that leads from Tok to Glennallen on the way to Anchorage. The actual Alaska Highway continues north to the city of Delta Junction where it officially ends (though for most people the actual ending is in Fairbanks after following the Richardson Highway north from Delta Junction). The Tok Cutoff winds between a few smaller mountain ranges unil you clear the Mantuska Mountains and then...then you see the Wrangell Mounains. Now, most of the mountains we have seen thus far on our trip, even in Canada, wer around 8,000 feet tall. As you come into view of the Wrangell Mountains, the primary peak is called Mount Sanford and it is 16,300 feet tall--one of the ten tallest mountains in Alaska. And it is just massive...massively huge. And all covered in snow. Behind it and to he left of it are several other 10,000 foot plus mountains, though they are all separated by a little bit, so each mountain is distinct in its own massiveness. They are all dormant volcanoes (except for Mount Wrangell, which is somewhat active at times). Just massive mountains. It makes me really want to see the even taller Denali/Mount McKinley at over 20,000 feet...it just has to be massive as well. I will get pictures up of this soon. Views of those mountains continued on the Tok Cutoff into the city of Glennallen.

Glennallen marks the beginning of the Glenn Highway, which goes all the way into Anchorage. After fueling up and leaving the Copper River valley that we had been following (including leaving the views of the Wrangells), we began to catch glimpses of the Chugach Range to the south in the distance. As we approached, the highway becomes an "Alaska Scenic Byway" which I found funny because pretty much every highway in Alaska was scenic. So I thought it was kind of a joke. I was wrong. The Glenn Highway dives into the Chugach mountains, in between the body of the Chugach and a smaller range to the north. A large glacier sits at the head of this valley called the Matanuska glacier. Meltwater from the end of this glacier forms the Matanuska River. This river carves an IMMENSE valley between the tall Chugach mountains and several slightly smaller mountains to the north. The River is a rushing river, winding back and forth at the bottom of the valley with rapids and white water. The hill sides are densely forested with so many trees that it actually looks like it's tropical. Like images you see of rainforests on mountainsides in Cosa Rica. Simply amazing. And the highway dives down into the valley by the river, then jumps up to high on he northern hillside giving grand views of this valley. Spectacular.

We followed this valley, being awed by it all the way, into the city of Palmer which sits on the northern end of the Cook Inlet of the Pacific Ocean about an hour north of Anchorage. Palmer is actually an agricultural area and was settled by farmers from Wisconsin and Minnesota, so it reminds me a lot of a small Wisconsin farming town. South of Palmer, the highway becomes an actual "highway" and becomes four lanes and divided up to Interstate Standards. This passes through the northern suburbs of Anchorage and into the City of Anchorage itself, which lies on a peninsula of flat land between the end of the Chugach Mountains and the Cook Inlet. It's a city of around 250,000 people, so rather populous with all of the conveniences we've come to know down in the lower 48. It's amazing to travel all this way and end up in an isolated enclave teeming with Americanism. The Matanuska Valley drive there really provided a stunning, unexpected and spectacular end to our trip. Just when we thought we had seen it all, all the days of looking at mountains after mountains after mountains...we were amazed again.

So I have triumphantly arrived in Anchorage with Joe. We now join that elite group of people who have driven the Alaska Highway to Alaska. I'm amazed at how far we've come. My car needs a car wash.

I've also begun work at the Weather Forecast. But that's a blog for another day. Hope you're enjoying this so far!

Anchorage!

2009-05-25T21:00:00.001-08:00

I've made it into Anchorage and into my apartment. Lots going on tonight, I'll post a full descripion later!

Rocky Mountain High

2009-05-24T21:38:00.015-08:00

This evening finds me in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. It was a long day of driving. A long, but spectacular day. I’ll end up letting the pictures do a lot of the talking.

Joe and I had decided that we were going to take a three-hour detour (sounds a lot like a “three-hour tour”…) and go up a highway called the Liard Highway to the border with the Northwest Territories. Sure, it was completely out of the way and involved driving an hour and a half out of Fort Nelson and then an hour and a half back again, but I think it was worth it. Joe did all of the driving on this little trip down a winding but paved roué with very little traffic and no buildings all he way up to the Northwest Territories border. As we drove down, it began raining, but by the time we approached the border, that rain had turned into snow. Quite the thrill…driving through snow in late May. We made it to the Northwest Territories border and drove just across it, took some pictures, then drove all the way back to Fort Nelson. It wasn’t very spectacular (though we did see a buffalo and some black bears on the drive), but it is nice to be able to say I’ve been to the Northwest Territories.

This detour meant that we didn’t really get going until ten in the morning (Pacific time). The sun had been up since 4 in the morning so we were well into the day when we got going. Within an hour out of Fort Nelson, the road turned west and began heading towards the mountains we had seen yesterday. Spectacular…just spectacular. I now know why people have raved about the Alaska Highway with all of its scenic glory. Going northbound, it started out with a lot of steep climbing and winding around mountains. After that, we passed between two different mountain ranges following a river valley. The highway then went on by leapfrogging through gaps in the ranges from river valley to river valley. In this way, there are relatively few steep climbs or hairpin curves; the highway is very well designed. But never do you leave the scenic mountains and seemingly endless forests.

After about three hours going through those mountains, the road wound back out into the foothills to the town of Watson Lake where we gassed up. The lady at the counter when I paid for gas maintained that she could tell I wasn’t from around the area because of my accent. She then said that she thought it was one of the most pleasant sounding accents she had heard. I found that to be somewhat flattering. After leaving Watson Lake, the road re-entered the mountains, following a variety of river valleys and passing by numerous individual mountain ranges. We crossed the continental divide and entered the Yukon Territory (for the final time—the road actually crosses the British Columbia/Yukon Territory border seven times in its winding journey) by early evening and followed a series of lakes and mountain ranges into the city of Whitehorse. Whitehorse itself is an eccentric town—busy, populated, but still looking very touristy. Still, I rather like it.

It’s now almost ten a night here, but the sun is still up. I think we still have an hour or so of daylight left. If this post seems short or lacking in details, I’m just going to let the pictures do the talking. It’s really a sensory overload—Joe’s camera had 537 new pictures on it just from today. With the time we were driving, this works out to about one picture every two minutes. Imagine nine straight hours of non-stop scenic vistas of mountains and rushing rivers and forests…sensory overload. It all kind of blends together after a while. But it was an exciting sort of day. I’m glad to be going to sleep tonight. Tomorrow we will cross into Alaska and end the day in Anchorage!

Northern Oasis

2009-05-23T18:35:00.015-08:00

This evening finds me in another Super 8 hotel room, but this time in Fort Nelson, British Columbia. Now being on Pacific time, I know people may be going to sleep by the time this gets posted. It's still very light out here (though it is only 7:45 PM locally) but we're so far north I'm curious how late it's going to stay light tonight. I'll recap today's adventures.

We began at 7:30 this morning (Mountain Time) leaving Edmonton, Alberta. Oddly enough, the two hot air balloons we saw the night before still appeared to be up in the air...either they were up all night or they were just going up again. Anyhow, after we got out of Edmonton, the first place we stopped was...Tim Hortons. We got half a dozen assorted doughnuts and I got an orange juice while Joe got an iced coffee. I didn't think the doughnuts were that bad, but Joe was not impressed. Neither was the iced coffee to his liking. So, now that we've had our Tim Hortons experience, we could press on...

Today's drive began continuing through the hilly, semi-agricultural areas northwest of Edmonton. The hills became steeper and the farms more spread out the further we got to Edmonton. After a few hours we arrived in the city of Grande Prairie, which was designed and looks exactly like an American city. Lots of big box stores, fast food restaurants and car dealerships lining the bypass around the town. Grande Prairie was situated in a broad valley between the surrounding hills and had many farms surrounding it, so the name was appropriate. We stopped at a Wendy's for lunch there.

From Grande Prairie we headed north toward Dawson Creek and the start of the Alaska Highway. They had signs in town that pointed towards "Alaska" so it was easy to know the way. As we left town, we got our first glimpse of the Canadian Rockies on the horizon. They were only identified by the fact that the odd white smudges on the horizon didn't look much like clouds, so we concluded they must be snow-covered mountains. As we got closer we saw that we were correct. But first we had to wind our way through the ever more hilly and ever more dense forests approaching Dawson Creek. We crossed the border into British Columbia just before reaching Dawson Creek. For a city that I had always pictured as rustic and deep in the forest with a small mountain stream running through it, Dawson Creek looked more like a city from southwestern Wisconsin. Surrounded by farms on hills and just the main highway winding through a small downtown. Joe got a picture of the sign saying "You are now entering the Alaska Highway", but apparently the ceremonial "zero mile" milepost is somewhere off the highway and in the downtown area of Dawson Creek. Therefore we didn't get to see that specifically. But, needless to say, it was an exciting moment after we got gas and headed out of Dawson Creek.

It was a short drive to the city of Fort Saint John which was on the shores of a very large lake. Most of that drive was much like the rest of our earlier driving today with hills and some farms. The number of pine trees and poplar/aspen trees started increasing, though. As the road was now down to two lanes, it became somewhat difficult to pass other vehicles on the highway. The speed limit is 100 kph, which works out to somewhere between 60 and 65 mph. However, large trucks and RVs and people towing things tend to go more slowly and often you'll see a lot of people passing one poor slow moving vehicle. After we left Fort Saint John, things really started changing. The road was going up and down and up and down all of these hills through a very dense forest of tall, spindly pine trees and occasional aspen and poplar groves. The highway itself has all the trees removed in a hundred foot wide swath on either side of the road, so the forest did not come all the way up to the road. However, it is a dense and dark forest beyond the road.

As we moved on, we went through several small towns or outposts with just a gas station and small convenience stores. Most of the time, though, there is nothing. It was very fun to drive it (particularly after Saskatchewan the day before...) and the scenery was amazing. Every time we came across the top of a hill we could look out over the other hills to the mountains in the west getting closer and closer. There were a few very steep gorges leading down into river valleys that we had to traverse and which required me re-shifting my car to a lower gear, but in between it was usually clear enough and easy enough that I could leave the car on cruise control for extended periods. Finally, 2 hours or so north of Dawson Creek, we pulled into a relatively straight stretch following a river valley and were presented with these sweeping vistas of a range of mountains to our west. This was on a great stretch of road where there was 104 miles between gas stations (or any other sort of outpost). Just us and the other cars on the highway and the scenery. Amazing.

The road, while not heavily traveled, still had its fair share of cars. Every few minutes or so one would pass the other way. There were also some cars we became very familiar with heading in the same direction as us as we watched them slowly approach in the rearview mirror or watched them slowly move further away from us after they had passed. The road itself is in very good condition. While the stripes and paint have worn off in some places, the surface itself was surprisingly good. I don't recall any areas where the pavement was in bad shape. I wouldn't say that the drive is lonely, particularly with all the traffic we passed. However, it's amazing after driving 104 miles without having any sort of real substantial buildings or other places to realize just how far away from things you really are. There are a lot of areas where there are cuts through the forest where they've put a pipeline or random microwave towers for communications, but for the most part it's just land and trees as far as you can see...

After traveling within view of that range of mountains for a while, the road turned away and the mountains disappeared behind some hills as we headed towards Fort Nelson. Aspen and pine forests continued for another hour before we finally arrived in Fort Nelson. It's an interesting little outpost way up here in the middle of nowhere. The nearest other town is dozens of miles away and there's only one road into and out of town. But for the main little strip where the highway goes through town, there's a lot--several gas stations, three hotels and a bunch of restaurants. After going through wilderness for the previous several hours, it's somewhat of a shock to see all of these modern conveniences. We checked into our Super 8, which is one of the fanciest budget hotels I've ever seen. Right next door was a restaurant called Boston Pizza which we had seen a few times before in our trip and so we decided to eat there. Apparently the restaurant (which is just like an Applebee's or something like that, but with their own special pizza) is purely Canadian and is from the Edmonton area...no idea what that has to do with Boston. However, the food was very good, and the atmosphere just like we were in an Applebee's or so down in the US. So odd out here.

So we walked back to our hotel, enjoying the strange, relative warmth (it's 66 degrees out...oddly the warmest I think it's been anywhere on our trip...and this far north too. Must have something to do with the mountains...downslope heating or something...) and, at least to my observation, the pervasive silence. I'm sitting in our hotel room with the window open and it's so quiet outside...no background sound of traffic, no people playing basketball...just quiet. And I sit and it's just strange...sitting in this little bastion of modern conveniences surrounded by miles and miles and miles of forest and nothing else. Just a little oasis in the middle of a vast wilderness. It's very quieting and humbling for me. I rather enjoy it...

An American in Saskatchewan

2009-05-22T20:06:00.005-08:00

So, even though it is just after midnight on Central time, it's 11 PM here in Edmonton, Alberta, where day two of the driving has just ended. Here's the gist of what came to pass.

We began with an overcast and drizzly morning in Winnipeg. The temperature was in the 40s and it just seemed awful. But, by 7 AM, we were all ready to go and started heading out of Winnipeg. The first thing we wanted to do was to get gas since we hadn't filled up since North Dakota yesterday. This was to be my first attempt to purchase gasoline in Canada. Now, somehow in all of my driving to all of my random places, it has always been the case that I've paid at the pump for my gasoline. I've never had to actually go in and pay for the gas. (Except for the one time I was in Boulder, Colorado, and the guy working at the gas station deliberately suspended the transaction because he thought I was shady for some reason...but that's different). So we pulled into a nice looking Petro-Canada with modern pumps and I try to use my Visa card and...it's rejected. So we went down the street to a Shell station, thinking...Shell is an American brand...they'll accept my card. So we pulled up and the pumps have no interface for swiping credit cards or anything. So, for the first time ever, I went inside to pre-pay for the gas. The man asked how much I wanted and, since I had just under a half a tank, I said "ten dollars", completely forgetting the whole conversion to Canadian currency and whatnot. This ten dollars bought me just under a quarter of a tank of gas. Darn it. But it was enough to get us on the road and on our way.

Driving out of Winnipeg, Joe had his first site of the Canadian phenomenon that is Tim Horton's. Tim Horton's is like a Dunkin' Doughnuts sort of place that sells...coffee and doughnuts? But they are more numerous than McDonald's in Canada and are immensely popular. We saw three on our way out of Winnipeg, all of which had lines of cars in the drive through backed up around the building and full parking lots. We kept being amazed... As we left the city, we also stared seeing a lot of A&Ws. We found this odd since they pride themselves as being "American" food. But anyhow, in a lot of the towns we passed through, Tim Horton's and A&W represented the total food available...

We went through the town of Brandon, Manitoba, and I tried again to get gas. This time I pre-paid for $20 dollars and, having not paid attention to how the price of gas had increased after we left the city, this ended up buying me around a third of a tank. Still without a full tank, we crossed into Saskatchewan on our way through that great empty province. Saskatchewan was just as flat as I thought it would be. It reminded me of the flatness of the Oklahoma Panhandle or the rest of the high plains. Or North Dakota. All farm fields and every ten miles or so a small town, always with a very large grain elevator. Each one of these towns had their own "Welcome to..." sign out front, often with very humorous slogans. Joe began cataloging them all in photos while I continued to photograph them after he started driving. Some of our favorites were "Welcome to Davidson. Taste our water." and "Welcome to Craik. The friendliest place by a dam site." I suppose these towns had to come up with something.

After driving for several hours through the farmland we arrived in Regina, the capital and second largest city. Before arriving there, we stopped to get gas at a very rural Esso station outside of town. This time I did some math in the car and (since the tank was 3/4 empty and the price was right at a dollar a liter) I put $35 on the pump, which was finally enough to get the needle to go to "Full" when I restarted the car. We didn't spend much time there, partially because it seems like you often have to go into a city to get services instead of just seeing all the restaurants and fuel stations out by the highway. I wanted to take a small detour to the town of Rouleau, Saskatchewan, which is about 15 miles southwest of Regina. It was in this town that the immensely popular Canadian television series Corner Gas was filmed, and they left many of the sets up. Having been a fan of the show for several years but also having to buy the DVDs to watch much of it (until WGN and now YouTube have started showing full episodes), it was a thrill to me to be able to actually be at the Corner Gas (even if they have stripped it down quite a bit) and to see the town of "Dog River", which is what the town is called in the TV show.(You can see their opening credits on YouTube to compare...) It's always quite amazing to be able to step into the world of a TV show and make it real...even if I found this out in the middle of nowhere in Saskatchewan...

We then continued north through the city of Moose Jaw, which is a funny name for a city but I haven't looked into why it is called that. From Moose Jaw, we went the the Qu'assail River valley (a slight break from the flatness) and then proceded a few hours further north to Saskatoon. Saskatoon is the largest city in Saskatchewan and, as Joe described it, the first Canadian city that he had seen that "actually looked and felt like an American city". It had a bypass highway and stores and restaurants fronting the highway and a nice downtown core and everything. A very pleasant city. With several Tim Horton's that still had lines at them, even at 4 in the afternoon. We gassed up again here (this time I discovered I could fill up my tank and then go in and pay...brilliant!) and set out west toward Edmonton.

Saskatchewan remained flat, though we started paralleling the Saskatchewan River which provided a valley to look at. We passed through the towns of North Battleford and Battleford (collectively called on all of the signs, "The Battlefords") and I resumed driving when we arrived in Lloydminster on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border. (Lloydminster had an A&W and a Tim Horton's right next to each other.) I bought gas in a few minutes in Lloydminster by filling up the tank and going in to pay for it. I'm getting good at that now.

Alberta suddenly had hills. I don't know what happened, but it's like we crossed the border and then there were hills. There was still a lot of farmland, but many cattle herds started showing up and several oil wells. It started looking a lot like Oklahoma, but an Oklahoma moved to the foothills of the Rockies. This made the drive slightly more scenic, or at least kept the driver occupied. We passed through the town of Vegreville, Alberta, which had several signs billing itself as the home of the "World's Largest Pysanka". We had no idea what a "pysanka" was, so Joe started taking pictures of everything that looked remotely large or out of place that we could see from the road. It turns out that a pysanka is one of those highly-decorated Ukranian Easter Eggs and they have a large statue of one in Vegreville. Who knew.

We got into Edmonton this evening and checked into our Super 8 on the far side of town. It was still light at 10 PM here...we're getting to be far north. Edmonton looks like a very, very large city (it has over half a million people in it) with a very nice skyline and many oil refineries. There were some hot air balloons over the city as we drove in and it looked very pleasant. It also had a lot of traffic. But we're here now and looking forward to tomorrow. Tomorrow we really start leaving civilization, heading north and seeing mountains for the first time. We've already switched over to Mountain time, but I have yet to see a mountain. Once we see them, they'll follow us all the way to Alaska. The Alaska Highway itself will start on tomorrow's drive in Dawson Creek. Lots happening...

Winnipeg is not spelled like Winnebago

2009-05-21T18:46:00.007-08:00

The first day of traveling has ended, and I am now in a hotel room in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I will get some more pictures up as soon as possible, however I left my camera out in the car and don't feel like going to get it at the moment. Joe took most of the pictures. I also didn't want to take a lot of pictures while I was driving, so tomorrow (as we begin the trek across Canada) I'll be sure to take a lot.

The drive began around 7 this morning as I left home on my way to rendezvous with my friend Joe in the Twin Cities so he could drive the rest of the way up with me. It was an interesting drive, as up until I went to Oklahoma, the 5-hour drive from home to Minneapolis-Saint Paul was the longest drive I had known. I had never driven it myself before, but was looking forward to doing it now with several 13-hour runs from Oklahoma to home and back under my belt. The drive felt like a breeze. I made it all the way up on one tank of gas (even with the car completely full of my stuff) and with no real delays. Got up there around noon and was able to meet up with Joe (and his girlfriend Megan) in Eden Prairie at a Cub Foods store near the interstate. (Apparently they closed the Cub Foods store in Beloit, so I was amazed to see a Cub Foods again. There also was a Don Pablo's that was still operating by the Cub foods, which is stranger seeing as all the Don Pablo's in Rockford AND Oklahoma have closed...apparently this is where my childhood escaped to...). After meeting up with Joe and Megan and saying our goodbyes, I continued with Joe northwest on I-94.

The furthest I have been on I-94 is just northwest of Saint Cloud to Saint John's and Saint Benedict's University, so I quickly was into territory I had not been to before. I somewhat expected as we took I-94 further and further northwest that we would get into lake country and there would be lakes and hills and trees and all like near Brainerd. Not so. Not so at all. The further northwest we got, the more and more it looked like the hilly farmland of southwest Wisconsin, and as we really got out there, it got flatter until it looked like downstate Illinois flat which...I did not expect. Going north means lakes and trees to me, not open cornfields. So that proved to be several hours of dull driving... As Joe put it, the most interesting thing to look at there was his can of nuts...

By five in the evening we had arrived in Fargo, North Dakota and the Red River of the North. Not to be confused with the Oklahoma-Texas Red River (of the south). For a river that is supposed to be flooding its banks all the time, it looked very peaceful to me. By the time we go out to Fargo, it was clear that we had gotten back to the Great Plains again, something I thought I was getting away from by getting out of Oklahoma! Flat farmland out west as far as the eye could see. The cities of Fargo and Grand Forks further north are clearly what I call "Plains" cities. They seem to rise up in the middle of nowhere on the plains with no suburbs or anything buffering them. It goes from farmland to urban city with random tall buildings and back to farmland in a just a few minutes as you drive through. North of Fargo Joe was on the lookout for a TV transmitting tower that, until the Burj Dubai was built a few years ago, used to be the "tallest thing in all of man's creation", standing nearly a half a mile tall. We saw it from a distance as we traveled up I-29 and Joe got a photo or two of it, though it's nearly impossible to see in those pictures. Otherwise, everything was just empty. Empty fields, no cities, no reason for the highway to be here. However, the speed limit jumps to 75, so we got through there pretty quick.

As we approached the Canadian border, the number of farmers who had started fires in their fields to burn down the remaining crop stubble increased. The air was filled with plumes of smoke as we drove on. There wasn't much else to look at...

At the Canadian border, we were forced to wait behind some farmer towing a large piece of farm machinery or mower deck that didn't look like it could fit through their customs booths. Several times the guy nearly ran that machinery into the trucks waiting in the next lane. When it got to be our turn, they asked the usual questions, beginning with, "What business brings you to Canada?" to which I responded, "We are driving to Alaska." This got raised eyebrows both times I responded that way to different people. As I somewhat expected, with my back seat completely full of random bags and boxes, we were asked to pull into a garage so they could do a thorough inspection of the car while we waited. Joe and I sat on these two chairs watching while they took out all of our bags one by one and searched them, as well as the car itself. I was amazed that they went through and turned on our laptop computers (and was wondering if they could figure out my dual-boot Linux and Windows operating systems) and also turned on and went through the photos on our digital cameras. It was quite the thorough search. However, as I had been driving since the Twin Cities, I enjoyed the break. After a good 15 or 20 minutes, they finally said we were good to go and we grabbed all our stuff and continued on. I must say that the guy who inspected my laptop bag re-packed it in a far more efficient way than I had originally packed it. I was very happy about that.

We still had another hour and a half drive up to Winnipeg after that, and even though it was around 8 PM when we got out of the border crossing, we had sunlight all the way until we arrived at our hotel in Winnipeg around 9:30. The speed limit on the highway was 100 kph, which worked out to around 63 mph. I'm assuming this will be the speed posted for most of our travels through Canada. The flat farmland to the west continued, I think becoming even flatter as we approached Winnipeg. I was completely taken by surprise--Winnipeg is a plains city. It has flat farmland going right up to the outskirts of the urban area. I had always pictured it, since it was further north than Minnesota, as a great city of the North Woods, filled with lakes and surrounded by vast pine forests. Not so at all! Definitely farmland. It's got a decent enough skyline, though.

The flatness to the west, though...that's what we have to cross tomorrow.

So here's the plan...

2009-05-20T12:42:00.004-08:00

To begin, in short, I have an internship I must fulfill this summer, connected with my Hollings Scholarship received from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I have chosen to do this internship for nine weeks working at the Weather Forecast Office in Anchorage, Alaska. I will be rooming with four other interns up there at the University of Alaska--Anchorage. Because Anchorage is a very spread out city and also because I want to do a little exploring while I'm up there, I've decided to take what has been called a once-in-a-lifetime, thing-to-do-before-you-die adventure and drive up there on the Alaska Highway. After months of planning, I will leave tomorrow. It will take five days of driving an average of 12 hours per day to get up there in time to begin my internship the day after Memorial Day. Here's the breakdown:

Day 1 -- Home in Roscoe, IL to Winnipeg, Manitoba (I will stop and pick up my college friend Joe in Minneapolis to drive with me the rest of the way up.)

Day 2 -- Winnipeg, Manitoba to Edmonton, Alberta (This will cross Saskatchewan and the Canadian Prairies going through the cities of Regina and Saskatoon as well.)

Day 3 -- Edmonton, Alberta to Fort Nelson, British Columbia (We will actually pick up the Alaska Highway on this day in the city of Dawson Creek, BC (which has nothing to do with the TV show).)

Day 4 -- Fort Nelson, British Columbia to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory (We will cross through the Rocky Mountains on this leg and really start being out in the middle of nowhere...)

Day 5 -- Whitehorse, Yukon Territory to Anchorage, Alaska (Yes, you can make it all that way in one leg. We'll cross half the state of Alaska, including the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and round our way into the city of Anchorage by that evening.)

Total trip distance works out to be about 3500 miles. Should be spectacular scenery on the way. Or so I've been told...

The purpose of this blog is to chronicle my journey and my time in Alaska this summer, particularly for all of you who have insisted that I send back lots of pictures and tell you everything I'm doing while I'm up there. I plan to do a lot of exploring, so hopefully you'll get to see a lot of what I will see. Maybe this will help some of you who have been considering planning an Alaskan vacation to see what there is to do and what it's like up there. This blog is intended to serve a wide audience, from all of my college and high school friends to the 50-some aunts, uncles and cousins I have, many of whom have also expected to hear from me. I'll try to post what pictures I can and plan to update this once every other day or so. So, you should be provided with a small bit of entertainment every few days this summer as you read on.

The blog is opened for comments, so feel free to comment on whatever you want. I also welcome you to contact me in whatever manner you want--email, text messages, Facebook, whatever--with any comments or questions or things you want to talk about.

I look forward to hearing from you and look forward to a fantastic summer!