-----The most ambitious part of our ambitious journey was the planning of routine car servicing along the route, and amongst the first things we scheduled was an oil change and tire rotation in Anchorage. We'd gotten a quick tune-up in Whitecourt, that simply amounted to an oil change; the tires, which had been rotated before we left, needed no such care. We were able to shift our 9:00 appointment to 8:30 and got there just in time. Within an hour, they'd done a full tire rotation and oil change, and looked at the brakes. Mechanics have some way of ranking brakes, and the Whitecourt folks had put ours at a five—enough to get to Anchorage safely, but not all the way back home. As it turns out, because the Whitecourt mechanics failed to actually take any of the tires off, the Anchorage dealership got a more precise measurement of eight, which is more than enough to get back home. We thanked them and were fortunate to be able to hit the road ahead of schedule.

-----Our first destination was the town of Whittier, which is attached to the road network via the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel. It's a two-and-a-half mile tunnel bored straight through the mountain, constructed for the railroad as part of the war effort in 1942. From then until 2000, it was only open to the Alaska Railroad, when they opened it to vehicle traffic. For fifteen minutes at the bottom of the hour, Whittier-bound cars go 25 MPH, avoiding the train tracks as they go, while the fifteen minutes at the top of the hour are reserved for outbound vehicles. It is the second-longest tunnel in North America and the longest such tunnel to accommodate both car and rail traffic, and let me reiterate that it's one lane. Rocks on either side jutted out, as it was never smoothed after its initial construction, and massive car-rattling fans are situated on either side. The drive in takes you past a lake filled with a flotilla of small icebergs and glaciers sliding ever so imperceptibly off of their snowcapped peaks. The wind was extraordinarily uproarious, but the skies were clear.

-----On the other side of this bizarre contraption of a tunnel lay the trailhead for Portage Pass. Portage Glacier used to be visible from a visitor center situated on the other side of the tunnel, but recent years has seen its rapid shrinkage to where it may only be seen from the pass that bears its name. We took the first right turn out of the tunnel and parked in the very small lot, but luckily, we were the first ones out there. The whipping wind hadn't yet blown its last breath, and it was to such a point that opening both sides of the car created a crosswind that threatened to take our looser bags clean out to Prince William Sound.

-----The path up Portage Pass is more or less perpendicular to the tunnel, and we trudged and hiked through densely forested terrain—keeping ears and eyes out for signs of bear all the while—over every surface from loose rocks to slippery ice to snow that was fast turning to slush and melting slowly into the impromptu creeks which sometimes ran on and over the trail, adding another dynamic element. The entire trail climbed 800 feet—sea level to the pass—in the course of a mile, which works out to an astounding 15% grade, all amounting to a strenuous activity for tired calves. The wind expired almost immediately as we began hiking, and the cloudless sky meant that the sun beat down upon us. As evidence of this, I have a sunglasses-shaped break in my surprisingly mild sunburn.

-----All put together, it felt like one of those excruciatingly interminable affairs whose every brief level respite begat another set of steep snow banks ahead. Yet the principle of just going one step at a time paid off when the glacier and its associated lake lay before us. The beautifully clear green of the lake against the faint blue of the glacier was an incredible sight, though we were well over a mile away and looking down. All around lay further peaks and glaciers, and we sat down on some rocks on the mercifully flat summit of the pass to have a snack as we soaked in the beauty. Behind us lay the docks of Whittier and the deep blue hue of Prince William Sound beyond.

-----While we were seemingly the first to the summit, we were soon followed by several couples with their dogs, which made us feel a bit better about alleviating the possibility of bears on the return journey. Sure enough, we saw none; save for the flocks of seagulls circling high above near the mountain peaks, the closest thing to wildlife that we witnessed were curious bumblebees.

-----In our hiking experience, the principle of "what comes up must come down" holds in a very big way. With the rocks and snow, I was especially dreading this particular return, which accounted for an aspect of my willingness to linger at the summit. But this return surprised me; aside from the ice, which was largely avoidable, the only notable thing about our descent was my dad zipping up his parka and sliding down a snow bank when such a route was the path of least resistance.

-----Upon our return to the car, we exchanged all forms of footwear, stripped our excess layers, and rode a negligible distance into the town of Whittier. As we turned a corner, marinas of epic proportion came into view, as could the town. Whittier is famous in an odd way for being the so-called "town under one roof," as most of its population lives in one building. It was with great distress that, amidst the pier shacks and boats and tinier buildings all along the area, one massive and utterly terrifying derelict came into view. This, we would soon learn, was the Buckner Building, which was the "original" Whittier building, built to house the military presence in the town. It was abandoned shortly after the 1964 earthquake, but it's all reinforced concrete, so it stayed there—and we mistook its squalid husk for the Begich Towers that actually do house most all the Whittierites. (The Buckner Building was open to urban exploration until recently, when someone with a camera and a few skis put footage of stairwell stupidity on YouTube.)

-----We looped around a cul-de-sac just past Whittier's Alaska Marine Highway terminal and ate at Varly's Swiftwater Seafood Cafe. Its tiny and eclectic interior, adorned with everything from NOAA maps to old steamship dinner menus to signed hockey sticks, belied a small menu. My parents got halibut and chips, while I—bereft from my lack of a halibut sandwich in Anchorage—got one of those, which turned out to be a mistake when the puffy bun got in the way of everything else. The halibut was thick and delicious, clearly fresh, and lightly battered and fried instead of thrown into a vat higgledy-piggledy and left to dry. (Though of significant portion, these proved to be the equivalent of a snack to our metabolisms as we would later snack our way through road construction.)

-----It wasn't long before we left Whittier at 3:00, a full hour before our anticipated departure time. Once back through the dark and narrow tunnel, we saw that the heat—a sweltering-by-comparison 60º—had melted the peripatetic icebergs of the lakes. We once again reached the juncture with the Seward Highway and braced ourselves for the drive to Homer.

-----The Seward Highway began one of the most beautiful drives we've had all trip, rivaling the views of anything on the Alaska Highway or even the Parks. The majesty only continued as we fully entered the forested expanse of the Kenai Peninsula, as the forest ran on and on above the rolling hills, giving way only to the jagged peaks that poked at the sky. The danger was compounded not by what I've termed the "Alaskan Pass"—which was mitigated by the plethora of passing lanes—but rather from the wildlife whose presence on the roads would remain undetected if the posted speed limit was so much as approached.

-----Driving along this portion of the Seward Highway—and later, the entirety of the Sterling Highway—struck me as fundamentally different from the stark and barren lands of the vast interior. Evidence of humankind went beyond the occasional trash-strewn hermit's yard into the realm of the small towns and fishing villages which dot the path. There are, for the first time since Illinois, regularly occurring gas stations. Never once today did we enter any stretch of highway in which we could feel alone, which had been a regular feature of our road trip since we swore off the Interstates in North Dakota.

-----The growth along the Sterling Highway is very clearly tied into fishing and tourism. A lot of places don't open until June, when they expect the Great Tourist Descent. Take out the fishing supply stores, and the entire economy crumbles. What are advertised as small towns are small towns ... but they are not small by Alaskan standards where small is well south of the quadruple digits. They are small by Californian or Texan standards, where there are a lot more people to pack in. Some were in better shape than others, and it all came down to image; Sterling, which bequeathed the highway its name, is run-down in comparison to the squeaky-clean Soldotna.

-----We stopped in Soldotna at their visitor center to stretch our legs, and we saw within their nominal museum the largest king salmon ever caught with a line and reel, whose taxidermied remains belie a behemoth of 97 pounds and 4 ounces. It could have swallowed my arm whole with room for more, and within its preserved jaw we could see row upon row of teeth in triangular patterns back towards the black void of his unclosing maw. The lady there was quite friendly, and we got the full brunt of her astonishing helpfulness as she listed off all of the unique places to eat in Soldotna when we come back through and set us up with a library's worth of reading materials and coupon books shaped like passports. In return, we told her about the place we ate in Whittier.

-----As the Sterling Highway cut across the peninsula to parallel Cook Inlet at the village of Clam Gulch, we could see, far into the distance, one massive hulk of a mountain. It was too clear, too big, and in the wrong direction to be Denali, and we later learned that it was Mount Iliamna, over fifty miles away on the other side of Cook Inlet. It and its kin, though covered in glaciers and snow, are on the Ring of Fire, and it isn't uncommon for one or another to spew clouds of ash into the air. The mountains that were to come into view exhibited no such volcanism, although it was very difficult for us to imagine that they were indeed 50 miles away.

-----At one point, we were able to get off at a pullout and walk a path through an open field, and the four highest peaks of this portion of the Aleutian chain could be seen set still against the blue sky. The ground dropped off at the edge, and we could see black sand on the beaches far below. A bald eagle even flew over our heads.

-----Anchor Point was our next destination, as it constitutes the westernmost point on the entire North American highway system, which will be the case into perpetuity unless the legislature in Juneau decide to waste several billion on a road to Nome. If they build it, we will drive ... but for now, we're satisfied with Anchor Point. We got off on the old Sterling Highway which led us over a narrow bridge (affectionately called the "Erector Set Bridge" by locals) and to a side road that led to a series of campgrounds and RV parks. The end of the road was ... well, just the end of any road, albeit one with bountiful views of ocean and mountain beyond.

-----We soon caught first glimpse of the famous Homer Spit, the 4.5-mile line of land that juts out defiantly into the water and truly marks an end of the road much more than the western terminus in Anchor Point. The Spit—and Homer itself—has undergone extensive changes in its recent history, and now boasts over 5,000 people. Its spit is the jumping-off point for a collection of boats so vast that you could probably walk from one end of the marina to the other over the open sea and never once get wet. The aesthetic of Homer is one of generic beach town, and—aside from the lack of beach-bound tourists—could pass for anywhere on the North Carolinian coast if you were somehow able to ignore the mountains that frame the area ... but why on Earth would you want to do that?

-----We went all the way to the end of the spit to fully admire the view, and we arrived just in time for our 8:00 dinner reservations. Upon our arrival, we waited for several highly awkward minutes as our eventual waiter passed us multiple times before the lady who seated guests returned from her outdoor wanderings. We were just to the end of our complimentary bread, admiring the view to the mountains and glaciers across Cook Inlet on an all but uninhabited segment of the Kenai Peninsula, when our entrées arrived—and what entrées they were. My mom and I both got the Alaskan Seafood Alfredo, which was stuffed with huge chunks of salmon, halibut, and scallops. I didn't think myself a great scallop fan prior to arriving in Alaska, but the fresh ones taste so much different from the frozen. They absorbed every flavor in the sauce, which in this case was a buttery garlic. My dad got a filet of king salmon, which he savored.

-----There were many dessert options, but only one stood out as uniquely scrumptious: the white chocolate key lime cheesecake. The white chocolate cheesecake was not overpowering in flavor but had the consistency and richness of pure cream cheese, while the key lime sat in a small upper layer of what appeared to be viscous gelatin. It was very rich and ranks up with the crème brûlée of Knik River as the best road trip dessert of all time.

-----After dinner, we went outside and walked along the smooth rocks of the uppermost points on the Homer Spit. Anglers, armed with the proper gear and buckets of chum, waited patiently with their lines and reels in the water. Beyond, a pier hosted hundreds of squawking seagulls. But what really draws the eye in are the stark mountains just across the water, seemingly close enough to touch.

-----We went back out around 10:30, as the sun was beginning to set in the opposite direction, hurling fiery pinks and oranges across the sky and illuminating the mountains anew. The fishermen were not only still present, but their numbers had grown. We split our time between taking in the sun-sparked scenery and scanning the Cook Inlet for sea otters, which turned up fruitfully; several specimens could be spotted bobbing up and down on the water and diving for their prey. We stood out there for as long as our unadapted thyroids allowed before retreating back to our over-warm room, as there is no air conditioning system to be found—only a small oscillating fan and our meager first-floor window. Tonight will certainly prove a balancing act of temperature.

-----Tomorrow: the return journey begins, as we retrace our steps along the Sterling Highway and make it to Seward.