-----Over the past several days, our hotel breakfasts have been slipping from the upward side of mediocrity down towards the barely edible. After a couple of pancakes that hardly deserved the name—and how on Earth do you mess up a pancake?—we headed out of Champaign towards the Indiana border. We picked up much traffic en route to Indianapolis, and instead of skirting around it, we went directly into its heart to Victory Field, home of the Triple-A Indianapolis Indians.
-----But what was to become the enduring theme of our time in Indiana is that you can't drink the water. Something—I know not what—happened to the water supply in the entire region. A sign was posted on rest areas saying that water should be boiled for five minutes before using, and that same rest area featured a man mumbling to himself in one of the stalls.
-----We entered Indianapolis on the bad side of town, and made it around heavily tilted buses to the downtown complex that includes Lucas Oil Stadium—home of the Indianapolis Colts—as well as Victory Field, which we were after. Being Saturday, they were using the stadium for the high school championship tournament, and it had a decent-sized crowd. We explained our inexplicable quest to the folks letting people in, and they allowed my dad to idle the car outside while my mom and I ran in to get a pennant.
-----They had no pennant, but they were nice about it and we got a hat instead. They're between styles of pennant and as of yet have not received their new shipment, but since we've been there—finally, after three times in the immediate area—we'll allow ourselves the luxury of ordering one.
-----If there is a more heinous and hideous stretch of Interstate in the country than the one between Indianapolis and Louisville, I've yet to witness it. Trucks would seemingly make a game of passing each other, nearly swiping oblivious and speeding cars off the road and nearly tipping over themselves. Not a single highway patrol car was so much as parked on the side of the road to enforce the rules and customs associated with a pleasant highway experience. On top of all this, the road surface itself was so pockmarked that I longed for the Klondike Highway for the second time in as many days.
-----We exited the highway in Columbus in pursuit of our daily Jimmy John's lunch, but it was much too far off of the highway. The built-up area featured a menagerie of restaurants and gas stations, so we pulled into a Culver's only to realize that not only was it closed, but every other eating establishment was as well. In the door was pasted a sign saying that they were closed due to the water contamination. Gas was the only thing we could get before we got back on the infernal road south.
-----There was a toll bridge across the Ohio River to Louisville, but the toll never materialized. Instead, the nastiness of the Indiana road was now the nastiness of the Kentucky road, and the worst offenders were those who were hauling things that they ought not to have been and/or had University of Kentucky paraphernalia on their bumpers or back windshields. There was something decidedly unpleasant about having to drive through it, but the sheer amount of traffic had cleared out significantly.
-----We got off in the suburbs of Lexington for a Culver's dinner, as it is the last time we'll eat their cheese curds and burgers and pot roast sandwiches for a long while. It wasn't crammed with the screaming kids we'd come to expect, and it was not long before we were working our way through the pastoral Kentucky countryside, past horse farms and rolling pastures, to the suburb of Winchester, where our hotel's miserable exterior belies one of the most updated and fancy interiors we've been at. (They even have a small spread of hors d'oeuvres near the front desk.)
-----There were no clouds when we left West Des Moines, and post-mediocre waffles, we set out for downtown. The fastest route was through the city, and along the route lay the stadium of the Iowa Cubs, Chicago's Triple-A affiliate. With no game on the docket, we waltzed past the silent front desk people and straight into the team store, where there was no one there. My dad's timid "hellos" would have echoed eerily had the store been larger.
-----Most of what the Iowa Cubs sell is just regular Cubs merchandise with "Iowa" in script stuffed in somewhere nearby. It's a half-cooked aesthetic and prevents the team from having its own identity. Their pennant was in this vein—though cheaper than most are—and we were checked out by a college intern who looked half-asleep, which added to the dreariness of her already pancake-flat personality. I would usually diagnose an especially rowdy party on the prior night, but she seemed the type for whom a slightly different shade of mayonnaise would provoke a faint.
-----Pennant in tow, we were back on the road, and it wasn't too much longer that we got out of Des Moines. The downtown area was cute—in as far as downtown areas are concerned, as I view most cities as basically the same sort of thing anyway—but we had the rest of Iowa and most of Illinois to go. Our next stop was the college town of Iowa City, whose signage heavily implies that it used to be the state capital. Being a college town, there was no Jimmy John's shortage. I don't want to abandon forever the idea of going to local places, but sticking to an eating schedule has really helped us make tracks back across the country.
-----Not far from Iowa City is West Branch, best known for being the birthplace of Herbert Hoover. History tends to make his presidency out as ineffective at best and malicious at worst and his legacy is relegated to being amongst the five or ten worst to ever hold office. He was known as the Great Humanitarian for his civilian work in bringing large-scale food relief to Europeans during World War I, putting in long days to help them through the crisis. When the Great Depression hit on his watch, he turned back to the way his family would weather the periodic recession or depression, and assumed that wealth would be infused into the economy much as he had helped in Europe. By the time things got worse, he was too unpopular—and too much of a lame duck—to get anything done.
-----Hoover rehabilitated himself in the public eye until his death in 1964, mostly by temporal distance from the Depression era. He had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and possessed an optimistic ideology about the elimination of poverty. Yet his work in the public eye went well beyond the public perception of his ineptitude, even in the Depression, when he sought to bolster the financial infrastructure in subtle ways and at arm's length.
-----His birthplace, which is integrated into the cute and historic West Branch, is next to his Presidential Library and Museum. We hadn't the time to visit that part of things, but we spoke for a long while with a park ranger stationed outside Hoover's reconstructed two-room boyhood home, where we picked his brain about Hoover's reasons for being ineffective despite being the "Great Humanitarian." In West Branch, they're all fans of a usually disliked figure, so I get the sense that they enjoy getting to dig into the details of his life.
-----About a half-hour's drive from West Branch is the Quad Cities area, and we were after a pennant from the Quad Cities River Bandits, whose historically located stadium—literally right across the train tracks, and with a view of the Mississippi River and Illinois beyond—was ranked the best in the Minor Leagues by USA Today. Its size and amenities made me guess at least Double-A, but they were in fact Single-A. The three people with whom we shared interaction had the kinds of monotone voices that could put inanimate objects to sleep, and I realized then that they weren't bored or upset with us ... it was—unfortunately—just the way they talked.
-----The ticket office guy sent us inside, where the secretary gave a call to someone else, who came down the steps and shuttled us up the elevator to the team store on the main concourse. Their hats were quite cool and we got one for that collection as well as our requisite pennant. Their store even had an enormous bobblehead of their mascot, who cheers on a team that the man who checked us out called "somewhat competitive." They even had a lounge—well, an upscale bar—on the concourse behind home plate, where motion-filled quasi-abstract paintings of River Bandits players adorned the brick walls.
-----Upon returning to our car, I'm sure those involved with the process of getting us in to get our pennant were stunned—for several completely silent hours, no doubt—about the fact that three people came in with actual inflections in their voices. (Perish the thought!)
-----We went over a rather rickety-looking bridge—which we were told was erected before American involvement in World War II—and went into Illinois. We ended up going through three of the Quad Cities. Illinois, though it may be about to default on its debt, still has room for expansive road construction segments all over I-74, and there were seemingly more of those infernal things than actual road—which was itself in bad shape. I've seen better Yukon roads, and I shouldn't have to say that.
-----After skirting around Peoria, we got gas in the town of Carlock, which is quite a funny name for a place to get gas. It wasn't long thereafter that we reached the Champaign-Urbana area, where we got the scenic tour of about two miles through the heart of downtown. I can't figure the place out, as derelict buildings and questionable characters are perhaps only a few hundred feet from extremely affluent sections of uppity restaurants and outdoor concerts. The whole place, as far as I've seen, is a patchwork city.
-----We drove through the local Culver's. We had every intention of getting out and going inside, but several large families were already in there and we could see writhing masses of children cooped up inside. What really sealed the deal against going inside was a girl who let out a blood-curdling scream at us while being driven by, apparently just for kicks. Crazed Champaigners were not the kinds of Champaigners with which we wanted to interact.
-----Tomorrow: we finally get that pesky Indianapolis pennant en route to Lexington, Kentucky.
-----We left Mitchell at 10:00 and hit I-90 towards Sioux Falls. For the first time since the day we left Olympia, we spent time off of that particular road, as we merged onto I-29 southbound towards Sioux City. But before Sioux City, we got off on ND-50 towards Vermillion, home of the National Music Museum. Like many of the great museums, it's one that withstands repeated visits and elicits the same stupefied fascination each time, even if a great many of their exhibits stay identical. Their Javanese Gamelan—one of the most complete outside Indonesia—had been brought down to the main floor for a recent performance by the local ensemble, and their front desk area was altered, but other than that it remained exactly as expected (and previously described in GART4: VI – "Clarinet on the Cob").
-----My one complaint about the NMM is that, while the girl at the front desk was very pleasant, their Web site—only recently refurbished from the completely inadequate husk of one that they'd had theretofore—is filled with some of the most execrable pretentiousness this side of a tattooed hipster who passes off pieces of gravel as deep artistic expression. NMM policies prohibit returning e-mails of any kind to anyone who doesn't give them at least $100 per annum. Their communications director was, I have reason to believe, the leader of a tour group of entirely out-of-control kids who, despite being of small number, more than made up for it in complete obnoxiousness and loudly voiced desires for two demonstrations of an equally loud nickelodeon-style harmonium, which they got.
-----Road construction marred the South Dakota-Iowa border, and it was the very road construction that, in 2015, gave us the pesky windshield crack that eventually forced us home from southern Utah in the course of three days. They've not made a lick of progress in as far as I can tell, but we got through it unscathed all the same. (It continues to bother me, however, that North Sioux City is the southernmost point in South Dakota.)
-----We came down the western side of Iowa and split off before the Omaha metropolitan area—which we could see in the distance—and then headed halfway across the state to Des Moines. It's stereotypically Iowan countryside, with farmlands of corn and occasional cattle going up and down rolling hills as far as the eye could see. Various two-story houses—not skimpy on size—were placed under the shade of small groves of trees. It's one of those drives where the most exciting thing about it are some of the signs for the minor attractions situated a county away, such as John Wayne's birthplace. (We found the occasional deer sightings much more interesting.)
-----We navigated through the residential area of West Des Moines to our hotel. Upon checking in, my dad almost immediately asked the girl at the front desk how close the nearest Culver's was, and she seemed a little concerned for his Butterburger® craving until we told her of our recent whereabouts and the fact that we can't get them at home.
-----It was Culver's indeed, though to get out we had the issue of construction, which necessitated ... yes, you probably guessed it—a gravel break. (And in true gravel break fashion, we had to pass someone on its 1.5 lanes.) It was pleasant to be in an establishment where there, for once, weren't any rowdy kids under the watch of ineffectual parents. Most patrons seemed to be at the drive-through, and there seemed to be quite a few of them—though we looked out beyond them into the unusual sunset colors against the storm clouds of the south. They seemed to be further south and moving due east, but we didn't want to take any chances where hail two inches in diameter may be involved—and, sure enough, they soon called for such hail in Des Moines. Fortunately for us, the rest of the patrons of this hotel had not had the bright idea of moving their respective cars to shelter under the overhang of the adjoining—and currently unoccupied—convention center.
-----We flipped the TV on, and it took us a while to locate the local channels. When we did, we soon learned that hail of such diameter—baseball-sized now, they warned—was not really much of a concern to them. If anything, the anchors treated the subject with detached fascination as opposed to the programming-preempting red alerts that such weather would warrant in North Carolina. Not even a ticker on the bottomline kept us informed during the commercial breaks. We waited for the hail to come, and the worst-looking cell passed with much lightning and much wind, but not a stone of hail.
-----My dad, when realigning the car underneath its protective awning, let another car park behind, who turned out to be one with an Alaskan plate. As it turns out, the man who drove it was from Fairbanks and was familiar with the barbecue at Big Daddy's. He was shocked to find out that we drove the Alaska and Top of the World Highways with no punctured tires, no dings in the paint, and no cracks in the windshield.
-----Tomorrow: across the rest of Iowa to Champaign, Illinois—unless, of course, we catch up with the slowly moving storm.
-----We've put around three thousand miles on the vehicle since its last oil change/tire rotation in Anchorage, and the intervening three thousand include the Tok Cut-Off, the Top of the World Highway, and the vicious hills and traffic in the state of Washington. We wouldn't be able to get back home without a last stop at a dealership, and luckily, one was about a mile from where we stayed in Bozeman. My dad returned about forty-five minutes after leaving and reported that somehow, the brakes were in exactly the same condition as they were in Anchorage, i.e. nearly completely intact. The tires, having been worn down through our travels, have reached their half-life, meaning that we'll be able to get home on them with no problem and tens of thousands of miles left after that.
-----Interstate 90 was again our route, and it was again surprising how familiar we were with it. Rain was again our companion for the first half of the journey, east to Billings before dropping south into Wyoming, but it stopped prior to our lunch in Sheridan at the Jimmy John's at which we ate last time. The gravel breaks came back again, this time as road work diverted traffic up and over an exit. We saw some pronghorn, but little in the way of other wildlife. Transitioning from the Rockies to the plains isn't a sudden flattening-out, but rather the rolling and meandering hills which we saw much of today.
-----Past Sheridan lay Buffalo, and past Buffalo lay over sixty miles of nothing. When you look on a map, there isn't a single settlement between Buffalo and Gillette. This was where 80 MPH on the roads actually made some sense—or it would have, if it weren't for the wind which gusted up to 40 MPH. The few exits were local ranch access routes where the posted speed limit was a rip-roaring 10. But it took less than an hour to make the trip and we made it to Gillette. The hotel, as we'd figured from our reservation snafu, is not well-run, but their rooms are new and clean ... even if we had to fix the clock so it'd be the right time.
-----Two years ago, we stayed here in Gillette and ate at a Mexican restaurant called Los Compadres. We remembered great salsa, huge portions, and tasty food, and this time we only got the first two. The fajitas had gristly meat steeped in standing oil, watery refried beans, barely-cooked tortillas, and utterly tasteless everything else. It's still the #1-ranked place in all of Gillette, which means that they either had an off night or have gone way downhill. It just was, and for their quasi-effort at a flavorful meal, I shudder to think of the product of whatever's ranked second to them.
-----(Side note: when we started on this journey, we fully expected our worst meals to be on the Alaska Highway for its captured audience, but as it turns out, our worst experiences by far have been our return journey, from the putridity of Haines to the "pizza" of Forks to whatever this was. There's a reason we're sticking to Jimmy John's a lot!)
-----Tomorrow: a return to the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota.
-----From Spokane, it was all I-90 today. We crossed the state line, through the treacherously mountainous fifty-odd miles of the Idaho panhandle and then downhill on precipitous curves into Montana. We were hit with our first heat wave of the trip, as the high was 80º as we went through the mountain passes. After the Rocky Mountains conclude, it'll be some smooth sailing ... but getting through them proved more difficult than initially imagined.
-----The first city of much size in Montana along the eastbound I-90 corridor is Missoula. As we retraced our route from the first trip, it was surprising what we remembered of Missoula, although what's new is a road construction section along a roundabout in town that featured—of all things—loose gravel. We never saw loose gravel before this trip and, post-Alaska Highway, it's just following us for the express purpose of taunting us. If our driveway has mysteriously turned to gravel when we get back, I'll really know something's up.
-----We've had more than our fair share of heavy meals on this trip, and on the way back we have a great interest in eating light, so we had a Jimmy John's downtown. On the way back out, we got gas, and from our vantage point we caught a glimpse of a bearded man plucking away on a small bright red ukulele, and around him was a dog and a creature who appeared for all the world to be a bear. It had to have been a dog, but it looked exactly like a bear cub. Missoula's one of those weird and unusual places where you'd find stuff like that.
-----As we drove along, we recalled our adventures on the same road five years prior, when we'd been hit with a thunderstorm of epic proportions and had to duck into the very Bozeman hotel from which I am writing this to check the weather, being entirely free of smartphone tyranny at the time. This time, we were armed with the foreknowledge of the route ... and the fact that there was, once again, a storm on the horizon. My mom kept us updated from her backseat post as we inched further to the storm, and spotted a sole bald eagle out the window as we did.
-----Montana's roads are neither better nor worse than the roads of the states that surround it, but they effectively have no speed limit, because for most of the day, it was set at 80. Mountain roads, curves, and the occasional chipsealed section made for some hairy driving in spots. They do care about the speed limit in their unnecessarily long road construction sections, where—moments after a sign reaffirming 80—it drops to 35. What's worse is that they expect you to actually pull it off, which leads me to wonder how quickly dealership maintenance departments go through brakes. (You can't go 80 up the hills because it'd bust your engine, you can't go 80 down because you'd go straight off the cliff, and you can't go 80 around a curve because the guardrails would shred you up before you could say the words "antilock brake system.")
-----The rain dropped slowly, but the temperature plummeted quickly, going down to a low of 47º. The rain came down in torrential sheets, and lightning struck the mountaintops around. On several occasions, we were certain that a enormous thunderclap was imminent due to the apparent proximity of the strike, but there was barely a sound. It was in this rain that we went through Butte and went over the last section of treacherous mountainousness: the Continental Divide. We passed over as quickly as was safe because we didn't want to get toasted by an errant bolt from the gray, but all the same, there were small rivers that appeared to be flowing over the road. Hydroplaning never happened, but appeared imminent throughout.
-----Once past Butte and towards Bozeman, the temperature warmed again, reaching into the 50s, as the northbound storm broke up. Things still looked dark and dreary, so once we were safely at our hotel, we set out for dinner ... at a nearby Jimmy John's. I wouldn't be surprised if the steaks from the Rusty Moose in Spokane constitute our last heavier meal.
-----My dad then next wanted to modify tomorrow night's reservation in Gillette so as to get an entirely free room instead of a heavily discounted one. In order to do so, he had to create a second reservation and then cancel the first. When he went to cancel the first one, it was ever so slightly past the cancelation deadline. Usually this isn't a problem, as we've done it before with no issues at all, but to do so, he had to call the hotel ... which is where things got real fun.
-----The girl at the front desk immediately put us on hold, and then for five minutes flirted with another customer—as we could hear the whooooooole thing—and only picked up the phone when she remembered that she'd put it down. She said that, despite what the web site said, she had no authority to do cancelations, which had to be done through the main hotline. My dad got on the phone to the main hotline and was given the severest of run-arounds before getting to some guy who told him that there was no way the policy would allow a late cancelation unless we had the name of the girl in Gillette. My mom called the Gillette people on her phone, and—as my dad was conducting the other conversation from my phone, we stuck the two phones face-to-face so she could say "I give the approval for the cancelation," which was all that was necessary in the first place.
-----The Jimmy John's was not satisfying, so we went to the hotel restaurant for an appetizer, which were bacon gorgonzola fries. The sole waitress had no other patrons and we had a good time asking her random questions about Montana. Dessert was huckleberry ice cream, and it was extremely good, almost like a blueberry crossed with a strawberry.
-----On the way back to the room, we explained the Gillette run-around to the guy at the front desk, and he was flabbergasted that any hotel would have such unusual policies regarding cancelation, especially considering that we were still staying at the same property and effectively just altering the payment. Whoever was at the front desk in Gillette was clearly not following procedures, and heaven help her if there's the slightest of problems when we get there.
-----Our early mornings have finally become routine, I suppose, as we were able to get up bright and early in Forks. They call themselves the rainiest town in America, but regardless of that statement's truthfulness, it was sunny and nearly cloudless as we headed southbound.
-----Olympic National Park is massive, as it covers nearly the entirety of the peninsula. It gets multiple entrances and thus multiple visitor centers for its myriad natural wonders. We'd seen mountains and gotten top-of-the-world views on highways so named; what we were after in Olympic was something new. Something new came in the form of the Hoh Rain Forest, a remnant of one of the oldest and largest of the temperate rain forests that once spanned the western coast of the continent from southeast Alaska to California.
-----The road in was in good shape, and as we rolled through towards the park boundary, the trees got bigger. The average height for a tree in the Hoh is 220 feet, and many reach over 300 by the time all is said and done. By the time we parked, we were surrounded by a fairytale jungle.
-----The longest trail at the Hoh Visitor Center is one that takes overnight hikers 18 miles to the base of Mount Olympus, and it is a testament to how verdant and green everything is that it couldn't be glimpsed even in the clearings. Huge trees were everywhere, and where they'd fallen had provided fertile ground for new growth in a straight line. The forest floor was drenched in ferns, and I do mean drenched—one touch, and your whole hand would be soaking wet. The humidity kept the relatively low temperature in check; when it heated up, the bugs started to come out to play.
-----It was strange, walking around on these loop trails that go into natural "clearings" where the trees aren't quite as close together. Moss, wet as could be, hung down like loose locks of hair from every available hanging surface. On one occasion, the trail even curved underneath a tree that had naturally grown in an arch.
-----The Hoh Rain Forest is so named for the Hoh River, which—in the native tongue—means "swiftly flowing." That remains a very apt description, as its vibrant blue waters—icy cold, I'd imagine—rushed past, carving a path through the forest on both sides. There were a lot of cool spots on these trails, and we were able to take our time taking them in. It's the exact opposite of the sheer cragginess we'd come to expect while in Alaska.
-----Wildlife was scarce, as we didn't venture into the backwoods, but there had been bear and elk sightings in the area and we were keenly aware of our surroundings. None emerged, though we saw evidence of the bear and the unmistakable footprint of the elk. We did spot a black squirrel, a redheaded woodpecker (who really slammed his beak into the tree to dislodge significant chunks of bark), and a slug who looked, at first glance, to be a homeless banana.
-----Many more birds tweeted their way around the canopy, but they were too far up and too well-hidden to be seen. Coho salmon fry and tadpoles churned their way upstream in the extraordinarily clear waters of the Taft Creek that feeds the mighty Hoh. The creek had a bluish silt at its bottom, which we found fascinating. The canopy was so thick that, when it began raining as we made the return journey from these trails, we only felt a scant few drops.
-----We began making our way south to the famous Ruby Beach, where craggy rocks jut up out of the waters in a makeshift cove, but by the time we arrived, I was feeling quite sick. It wasn't what I'd had in Homer—my personal feeling is that it was just too much stomach acid and not enough food—but again, concerns over dehydration led us back north to Forks. Their hospital is older but there's not much going on there, which was to our advantage. I felt better after I got some IV fluids, but I had several anomalies on my blood work and they ran some extra scans. These all turned up negative, as expected, but did slow the discharge process. (The doctor there has driven the northern roads quite a bit and was very pleased to hear that we'd driven the Top of the World Highway. To quote him: "it's a great road, but not a lot of people even know about it.")
-----(By comparison, I did not really regain any sort of appetite from the Homer norovirus until we reached Dawson City four days later. This time, I was starving by the time we left Forks for the final time.)
-----By the time we were fully on the road to Olympia, I felt absolutely back to normal in every way. I was thankful for this, but at the same time, it struck me as extremely weird. My dad took us on the mountain roads down to Olympia, past utter walls of trees on either side and fields of wild forsythia. It was in the state capital that it got dark on us. This was extremely unpleasant, as we'd gotten so accustomed to the midnight twilight that we forgot how enormously confusing the roads can be when darkness falls.
-----We got turned around as we saw nothing but closed restaurants, and finally—when we got to our hotel—we were thankful that their in-house restaurant did not close for another thirty minutes. We looked like a mess, collectively, and we had to endure the loudness of a little-too-drunk collection of travel-baseball parents, but we got there in the nick of time.
-----I felt entirely normal but still wanted the lightest thing on their menu. When our waitress told us that they'd run out of chicken, as it was apparently slammed since they opened, the option for a light sandwich went out the window and the lightest thing on the menu became a steak. I ate about half of it as well as some potatoes which probably weren't all that great but that tasted great to me. (The meat did not go to waste, as I'd lopped it in two when I started and my dad wolfed down the other half.)
-----We awoke at around 5:00 to a very bouncy ship. No storm was around us, but we’d entered choppier waters, unprotected by any islands to our west. We’d go up and down, squeaking on our mattresses as we went along, before things settled down a bit and we were able to continue to sleep.
-----After breakfast, we came back to the cabin and continued to sleep, catching up on much-needed rest, until the afternoon, when we assembled some of our luggage for the afternoon car deck call. The car deck, which exists on the deck below the cabins, is generally closed unless the Malaspina is in port, but on days where there is no port of call, they open it on occasion. Dogs, cooped up in kennels down there, get fifteen minutes of activity about three times a day, and otherwise seem as miserable as their owners given their condition. The Alaska Marine Highway is not designed for pets and I question why any pet owner would subject their creatures to such conditions.
-----An announcement came over the public address system informing all passengers of several humpback whales in the area, but by the time the interested passengers got to the observation deck towards the front of the ship, there was only driftwood and the occasional bird. The topsy-turvy ride earlier had slowed to smooth sailing as we got within the protection of Vancouver Island, of which British Columbia’s capital—Victoria—is at the southern end. We knew that the end of our oceanic journey was within reach.
-----Dinner was a surprisingly good corned beef, although a bit streaked with fat in places. With an early morning, we got to bed for the final time ready for terra firma.
-----We’d reached Petersburg at 1:00 in the morning, and Wrangell at 5:00 in the morning, but I slept throughout. There is something calming about sleeping on a ship—the dull, interminable roar of the engines far away, murmuring through steel, the gentle rocking to and fro, enough to feel but not interfere, etc. My dad is a much lighter sleeper than I ever recall him being, having been awoken that morning by kids running around in the lounge area directly above our heads—as it turns out, spurred on by a distant whale. He explored the ship in the morning as my mom and I, one after the other, figured out how to get showers in an extremely narrow area, and how to dry off with towels only a hair larger than a standard hand towel. (Ill-advisedly, as it turned out.)
-----11:45 was our expected arrival time in Ketchikan, the most promising port of call for those who wished to venture on terra firma. The downtown area is two miles from the port, and lo and behold, when we disembarked, various taxis were lined up! We grabbed one in order to maximize our precious time in the downtown, and our driver gave us restaurant recommendations while reminiscing about the days when Ketchikan wasn’t amongst the largest population centers in the state. The highway now runs a good ways around its island and features suburbs of mansions with wonderful views. He dropped us off at noon outside Annabelle’s, a seafood restaurant he highly recommended. My parents, who ate breakfast aboard the ship, each got the crab cake appetizer, while I got massive king crab tacos. I wouldn’t say that they were better than the halibut tacos of the Denali Park Salmon Bake, but they were certainly different and much easier to eat in a somewhat dignified way.
-----The service was quite slow, so it took an while between entering and leaving, but we still had an hour to explore downtown Ketchikan. Tourists were everywhere, meandering around sidewalks and streets slowly, chatting loudly, and with no concern for the fact that yes, there were others there too. The cruise ships had docked, several end to end, right outside downtown, and they were hulks—like skyscrapers tipped over—who spewed endless numbers of people onto the already congested streets. Eagles could be seen soaring high overhead, not even having to flap their wings, as they hunted for their next fishy meal.
-----Throngs of humanity aside, Ketchikan is a cute little town. Everything’s basically lined up on one road, and the further you go away from the harbor, the less crowded things get. There are a lot of shops, especially high-end ones; I was shocked by the sheer number of jewelry stores around the area. They definitely know the specific subset of tourists they attract.
-----It was overcast, as it seemingly always is in the Alaskan Panhandle, but it wasn’t raining as we walked past the rows of shops, lush greenery, and totem poles, for which Ketchikan is highly regarded. My dad got a mighty chuckle out of several signs too bawdy for BZPower.
-----With time to spare returning to the main street, where our taxi driver was scheduled to pick us up at 2:00, we ducked into several stores in an eventually successful pursuit of a Christmas ornament as well as a very fancy establishment that dealt in fine artistic imports from Russia, including large hand-painted wooden dolls that went for $6,000. Each item was intricately carved and colorfully painted, and it was a treat to be able to see them. (They even had Matryoshka dolls of professional sports teams that went five players deep.) One younger fellow who worked there followed us around the store and I’m inclined to think that he was keeping an eye on us given our wild beards.
-----Ketchikan’s revitalization as a hub of tourist activity is a relatively recent phenomenon, as we got an impromptu history of the region from our cab driver, who hails from nearby Prince of Wales Island and who has been in Ketchikan since January 1989. The pulp mill that had dominated the economy for years finally shuttered its doors, and in 1997, it was thought that Ketchikan had no future. But they invested in one, and they got it, as the endless cruise ship tourists attest.
-----Upon our return to the Malaspina, we went to the observation deck as we shoved off for international waters. To comply with the law, announcements came over the public address system calling for medically trained professionals to volunteer in the case of an emergency, as well as a general “what-to-do-if-something-should-befall-the-ship” talk. Somewhat disconcerting in the moment, but overall par for the course. The only wildlife we saw were birds, of which there were plenty of eagles. Others thought they caught sight of porpoises, but these unfailingly turned up to be either mirages of the surf or simply driftwood.
-----It was once again nap time aboard the Malaspina, and my dad and I slept soundly as my mom—generally speaking, the preeminent taker of naps—stayed awake, taking pictures of lighthouses and potential critters, but while asleep, we missed very little. As the route between Ketchikan and Bellingham passes by Prince Rupert, British Columbia, my dad sleepily asked if we’d “seen the Tim Hortons sign yet” so we could “say goodbye to maple donuts.” We told him that we’d not yet caught sight of that community, and we passed it while snoozing.
-----At close to 8:30, we decided that it was a good idea to go get something to eat. There is a yin and a yang to going to the galley late—on the one hand, they’re usually out of at least something by that point, but what’s left is usually given in enormous proportions. We’ve gotten to know the cooks, one of whom bears a striking resemblance to Dom DeLuise, and he’s one of these big fellows who likes to exaggerate and poke fun at a lot of stuff and generally doesn’t take things too seriously … so when he said that he’d go two-for-one on the Hawaiian chicken burger special, I assumed that he was joking.
-----He was not joking. Fortunately, the burgers—though served on truly immense buns—weren’t actually all that big, and my mom helped me dispatch them. My dad had cereal without milk, and—strange as it is to say—he seemed quite pleased with his dry crunching.
-----We awoke hungry, and breakfast ended at 10:30. Our cabin and the entrance to the galley were pretty much on totally opposite ends of the ship, and it was thus to our advantage that the Malaspina is not a particularly long vessel.
-----I remain nonplussed with the state of affairs when it comes to the operations of passenger services. Our breakfast was plentiful and tasted good … when we got it. There are too many options and the line takes forever to get through. But they piled the breakfast foods high and we came out as satisfied as we came in hungry. (Subsequent meals were timed so as to avoid this.)
-----Our route, which had stopped in Juneau in the middle of the night—something I expected to at least jostle me awake, but one which I slept through—took us through narrows towards Sitka, one of the oldest settlements in Alaska, which served as the capital for the Russian operations before the Alaskan purchase. The Marine Highway was kicked out by the cruise ships to a dock a good seven miles out of down, and we were amongst the handful of Malaspina passengers to disembark in anticipation of somehow seeing the town.
-----Sitka’s approach towards tourism, unfortunately, skirted something akin to what we’d witnessed in Haines in that they’ve always had it and take a lackadaisical approach to it with the idea that it’s always going to be there. The people at the ferry terminal had absolutely no clue what they were talking about, but knew a vague something about a bus that would be cheaper than a cab, and so we and another family got on the bus—once the bus found us, because while the bus stop exists, the sign certainly doesn’t. The bus driver mumbled his way through confusing answers to eminently straightforward questions, but we learned one extremely important thing: if we got off the bus, we’d have to take our chances on one of the cabs we’d been promised were everywhere but which turned out to be essentially nonexistent.
-----The bus seemed to only care for the ferry terminal as an afterthought, as it served more to shuttle locals around town. The locals are friendlier to tourists than in Haines, perhaps because—as inefficient as their transportation options are—they do understand something about tourism as an industry. This is not to say that the six dollars we paid for the bus was wasted, as the time we had in Sitka was not extremely long for any sort of cab ride or tour. We got a view of the spread-out town with stops at grocery stores and downtown strips alike, and we caught glimpses of the famous Russian church architecture in the place they used to all “New Archangel.”
-----The bus arrives back to the ferry terminal every thirteen minutes past the hour, and as we needed to get back on board at 2:00, our only choice was to stay on the bus as it completed its loop and traveled back to the terminal. We did so, and after some more ambling around, got back on the ship around 1:30. The car deck is the only way to get on and off, and while many cars were on board when we got on in Haines, only a fraction remained.
-----Going out of Sitka took us back through the same narrows, and we admired the scenery from our window for a while. We ate lunch, where I satiated my inexplicable craving for chocolate milk, and thereafter napped. We saw some sea otters and a few pods of porpoises in the respite from the rain, but the rain came down again, as it always does. Dinner—if you can call it that—was simply some drinks from the galley and a few bites of a mediocre cheesecake amidst the bounding waves.
-----Our Alaska Marine Highway ferry was scheduled to leave the dock at 5:00, and we wanted to be there early enough for its departure. But the vessels of the Highway are juggled early and often, and upon our confirmation, we learned that departure was actually 7:00. But it was better to be early than late, so we left Whitehorse—this time, for the final time—around 8:40 in the morning.
-----The hour and a half of driving between Whitehorse and the next sign of human activity in Haines Junction was one which we’d already covered on the day we first entered Alaska, and it was a good chunk of the reason behind wanting to leave so early. A 14-kilometer section of badly damaged road and some of the worst loose gravel sections of the Alaska Highway were once again expertly navigated, though somewhat mitigated by the fact that they were doing some road work on the front half of things. When we stopped, the lady holding the stop/slow sign—replete in pink hard hat and yoga pants, with her lazy dog napping in the shade of a nearby car—approached each and every vehicle in line and cheerfully told all of us how long it’d be and how great it was that they had two pilot cars running. Truth be told, someone so friendly is in the wrong line of work.
-----The cloudiness and the raininess that dominated our journey up the Alaska Highway had passed, leaving clear skies and views of the snowcapped peaks as we motored on to Haines Junction. We got gas in Haines Junction, at the same place as we did before, with the words of our secondary Arctic Circle tour guide ringing in our heads: “on the road to Haines, always get gas when you see it.”
-----True to form, the first sign that greets you on the Haines Highway is one that warns of no services for the next 200 kilometers, and as far as lonely drives are concern, it’s practically a paved Top of the World. The route took us south through what remained of the Yukon, swerving into verdant valleys with mountaintops all around. It was well-paved, with only a few chipsealed sections to eradicate our complacency and serve as reminders of exactly how good it was to have legitimate pavement under our wheels once more.
-----Few vehicles were coming from Haines, and even fewer were going in our direction, and as we passed into British Columbia, the scenery began to morph. As rain began to drizzle and snow encompassed the mountains, the landscape—now a rolling plateau—had frozen lakes and rivers just now feeling the thaw, and in every direction the snow lay in a patchwork of embankments “like spilled milk,” as my mom put it. As we reached the summit, we encountered a man who had gotten out of his truck who waved us down to ask if we had a spare gasoline tank. We told him that we didn’t, but that the RVs we passed earlier might be of help. What we soon learned is that, if he gave his vehicle a good push, he’d probably be able to coast the rest of the way.
-----What comes up must come down, and coming down meant going through customs. They give travelers a good warning, but it’s not always wise to slow down to a stop while on a steep grade. The Canadian customs office was just around the turn, and we stopped at it only so my dad could get out and tell one of the officers about the guy out of gas at the top. A quarter of a mile down the road, we reached U.S. customs, where the guy there took one look at our passports, asked the mere basic questions in a monotone, and sent us on our way.
-----Haines is regarded for the immense number of bald eagles that either live there year-round or make it home seasonally, and the “Welcome to Alaska” sign called the area “The Valley of the Eagles.” The road descended—gradually, now—alongside the Chilkat River. On either side, mountains shot straight up. We’re not at the right time of year for the tens of thousands of eagles, but we did see a handful of them soaring above our heads as we came into town.
-----Haines, as it turns out, is a rather sleepy little place. Like many places in the Alaskan southeast, it receives quite a bit of rain, and I don’t think it’s quite stopped drizzling since we exited Canada for the final time. The Marine Highway used to be nearer to the town centers for each of its ports of call, but recent decades of increasing cruise ship activity necessitated shuffling the workaday Marine Highway to the side in favor of the massive vessels that pump money into the economy. In Haines, the port is about three miles from the center of town, so we ended up going into town for some lunch.
-----The place we ended up going to, nestled near the harbor at the end of the road, was one that I had reservations about upon first sighting it. There was something fishy, and I don’t mean what was in the fryer. Though lunchtime, there was only one other car parked outside, and they had a phenomenal view. The interior was clean—though old and slanted somewhat—but smelled like some kind of diluted cleaning fluid.
-----We went in because we’d already parked and my dad badly needed something to eat beyond what we had in the car, and we ended up all splitting an appetizer sampler platter where the shrimp was the only halfway decent thing. It was one of those places that gets by solely on the backs of deep-frying everything they serve into utter submission, and upon unwary travelers like us—and on the one day we didn’t do our research, at that! The calamari came in flat sticks, the chicken wings were more sad than anything else, and the mozzarella sticks tasted like they were straight out of an Italian nightmare, as most of the cheese had disintegrated in the frying process and the result were mostly empty husks of solidified frying material.
-----As it turned out, we would find out later that it is considered to be, by far, the worst restaurant in Haines. But we didn’t contract any illnesses and it was enough of a caloric intake to get us around. Our next stop was the visitor center, where the lady who was supposed to be knowledgable knew absolutely nothing. But Haines is a small place, so after about a minute of driving we arrived in historic Fort Seward, where old Army headquarters have been updated and refurbished to serve as a hotel and some lodgings. The fort was one of the military posts in Alaska and policed the gold rushes into the area.
-----With several hours to spend, we meandered our way through Haines again and towards the Marine Highway terminal, where we went in to confirm our reservations. When we’d booked last winter, they’d not only had us boarding at an earlier time, but on an entirely different ship. Later, this was changed with the same route, only changing ships in Ketchikan. Now, we’re entirely on the different ship, as the one in our original reservation is still being prepared for the season. All of this led to some disorganization, so we thought it best to make sure we were still good to go and to generally scout the place out.
-----The terminal is well-organized and the employees inside the deserted lobby confirmed that we were still good to go at 7:00, as the latest info says. We saw our ship already docked, with the waters it was in—constituting a truly massive fjord—absolutely pristine and absolutely stunning. What wasn’t a mountain was a rainforest, and what wasn’t either were the waters of the fjord.
-----With several hours still to go and absolutely nothing else to do, we washed the car and then found the Haines Borough Public Library, which was—in one of these recent years—voted one of the best small libraries in the United States. It’s got a quaint interior and free—but slow—Wi-Fi.
-----After leaving the Haines Library, we wandered around Haines and got to a place called Mountain Market for a bite of proper dinner before boarding the MV Malaspina. Though ranked highly amongst the Haines restaurants, we soon discovered that a) it’s more of a coffee bar and dessert place whose sandwiches are an afterthought at best, b) it’s half grocery store anyway, and c) those who ran the place were infinitely more interested in speaking to old locals than to give half a glance to any newcomers. Our sandwiches were as bland as they were hard to bite through. The peanut butter chocolate brownie was the only remotely exciting thing there, and though it began life on our taste buds as if it were chocolate fudge with peanut butter cookie dough atop, by the time we finished with it, it was positively repulsive.
-----We went all the way to one end of Haines and then all the way to the other, and the more we saw, the less we thought. Other towns nestled in the Inside Passage are more keen to advertise their wares, but Haines is just sort of … there. There’s just not much to it, and those who lived there don’t seem to have any sense of civic pride. After we got gas for the final time before driving onto the Malaspina, my dad said that “the food isn’t something I’d feed to a praying mantis.”
-----We arrived at the port at 6:30, and we rearranged the car in the misty rain as those around us filled into the loading lanes. The Malaspina was supposed to leave at 7:00, but was nowhere in sight by 7:15, so after my dad entertained us with his patent-pending moose impression before my mom and I went inside the terminal and inquired about the status. As we did so, the Malaspina came into view, cruising in from Skagway before coming to a stop in the dock.
-----We waited for a long while as the vast innards of the vehicle bay spurted out RV after RV after camper van after RV, and finally, several attendants came around who looked at the signs in our windshields telling them of our destinations and told us to wait for directions. The loading process was very quick, as the crew made up for their lost time by packing vehicles in to several inches of each other in spots.
-----It took two trips to get our stuff from the back of the ship to the front of the ship, for as it happened, we were bequeathed one of the very front cabins on board. It was snug, to be sure, but roomier than I expected. It was clean, with a bolted-down table on one end and four chairs aside, with two sets of bunk beds. I took one of the top ones to satisfy a long desire to sleep in a top bunk. Our windows, though equipped with a sign reminding us to close them at night so as not to interfere with the night vision, afforded a wonderful view of whatever happened to be to our front right.
-----The Malaspina has a lot of stuff on board, and even though it’s one of the original ships in the fleet and thus showing its age when it comes to the amenities, the accommodations are pleasant. After exploring, we went out onto the deck and watched, with the wind in our faces, as the Malaspina set off from Haines, and went to bed content with our activity for the day.
-----It was a pleasant night's sleep in Dawson City and we awoke refreshed enough to leave at 11:00 sharp. On the way out of the hotel, we talked to one of the owners, who was doing housekeeping work and was telling us of the meat he was smoking for the night's dinner. One short scenic drive about town later, and we found ourselves on Front Street, which morphed into the Klondike Highway as we exited the city. It's one of the Yukon's most memorable places, to be sure, though hard to get to as it may be.
-----In the pantheon of wondrous roads the northwest has to offer, the Klondike Highway cannot rightfully take its place amongst them. It was chipsealed all the way down, with promised gravel breaks that never materialized but unpromised potholes that did. Swerving to avoid them and scanning for wildlife were perhaps the only things to do on much of the drive. In Alaska, such a route would doubtless pass through tiny communities or hermit families with trash astrewn about their claims, but the Yukon is fundamentally different in that there was just flat nothing but forest and a single line of telephone poles running for miles and miles on end.
-----There are tiny communities: Stewart Crossing, where the highway known as the Silver Trail peels off and advertisements for the absurdly tiny towns of Keno and Mayo may be seen, Pelly Crossing, home to the Selkirk First Nation, and Carmacks, where the Robert Campbell Highway peels off bound for Watson Lake. These are all very much blink-and-you'll-miss-them kinds of places save for their one commonality beyond mere existence on what is otherwise a dreadfully deserted route: they all were located at the bases of some very large hills, which decreased their speed limits beyond what was feasible as you descended.
-----We topped off the gas tank in Stewart Crossing and Carmacks to be on the safe side, as has been our custom; only a handful of times has the gauge fallen below half of a tank. Aside from these, we got out once more just beyond Carmacks to the Montague Roadhouse, which was one of the original stops along the overland trail along much of the same route as the modern Klondike. Nowadays, it's nothing more than a large log cabin husk, but it's well-preserved and acts as one of the last remaining relics of the old trail.
-----It was two hours between Carmacks and Whitehorse, and the road surface had improved from the potentially car-busting potholes we'd threaded earlier. The scenery also improved as we went on a bit of a ridge and saw beautiful glittering lakes to our west. The last of these lakes was Lake Laberge, made famous by its "Labarge" misspelling in "The Cremation of Sam McGee." (It's not your traditional lake, either—rather, it's just a place where the Yukon river widens in both directions by several kilometers.) It completed what I've come to call our "Sam McGee Loop," as we began with the Sam McGee cabin in Whitehorse, Robert Service's cabin in Dawson City, and now the lake.
-----Returning to Whitehorse made us feel at home, in an odd way, and after checking in, we went out again on a mission of errands where we were surprised to find out how well we knew how to get around. The first place we considered eating was a donair shop, but it was attached to an expansive liquor store and there were some rugged loiterers on the premises, so we went around a ways to a place called Giorgio's Cuccina, which was a blend of various Mediterranean cuisines. My parents both got the chicken souvlaki, which they enjoyed so much that they didn't even as much as offer to trade bites—as is their custom—for a sample of my excellent lamb souvlaki. Mine was tender and moist and cooked to a perfect medium, with vegetables—which included brussels sprouts and beets—that were nicely seasoned, and roasted Yukon gold potatoes spiced with oregano and probably something else, but by the time I got around to figuring it out, I'd cleaned my plate.
-----Our remaining Canadian currency needed to somehow be spent, so after paying for part of the meal in Canada's wonderful semi-transparent scratch-and-sniff bills, our next stop was ... Wal-Mart. We've gone to more Wal-Marts in Canada than in much of any other time in my entire life, and we went in there primarily for those maple cookies that my dad has been raving about getting since we left Whitehorse the first time. They didn't have them, but they had chocolate chip of the same brand, which is his second-favorite. We got a few other items for the Alaska Marine Highway and then got the final gas of the day.
-----Leaving the gas station led us to an intersection, and we waited at the red light for an absolutely inordinate amount of time before my mom's voice floated out of the backseat with the suggestion that my dad hop out of the car, run over to the sidewalk, hit the "push to walk" button, and then run back to the car in time for us to roll. A short while later, my dad did just that: hopping out, jogging over, slapping silly every button he could find, and then prancing back to the car just in time for the green light. We wanted to turn left at that intersection for the express purpose of finding a car wash, as the vehicle was never cleaned after going on the Top of the World and the Klondike just served to increase the filth levels. We were led to an industrial area, with oil tanks shaped like enormous golf balls, free and clear of all other human activity because it was a Sunday evening ... and not a car wash within sight.
-----Now, what you must understand about this entire journey—basically since we left Carmacks—was that my dad was absolutely entranced with the concept of eating a Tim Hortons maple donut. It stuck with him since his last morsel in Fort Nelson, BC, and as we checked off things to get and do, he got increasingly bouncy. So when we got to the crucial intersection, with Tim Hortons at the bottom of the hill and our hotel at the top, I was surprised to hear him direct me to turn to go up the hill. I looked at him square in the eyes and uttered the immortal line: "don't you want your donut?" This got him so excited that he told me to turn left at every available opportunity, even though the first few left turns would not have gotten us to the Tim Hortons with any alacrity. During this, his mile-a-minute pace included a bit of quixotic illogic that went along the lines of "I was so excited thinking about the donut that I forgot about the donut."
-----We did, indeed, reach the Tim Hortons, and we brought our trio of donuts back to the room. My dad did a little dance as he pranced around eating his, and a short while later, the car was indeed cleaned ... at a cleaner just adjacent to our hotel.
-----Tomorrow: back to Haines Junction and on to Haines itself as we leave Canada for the final time en route to the Alaska Marine Highway. With no Internet access at sea, entries may be sporadic until we reach the contiguous 48 in Bellingham, Washington.
-----Due to the lateness of the hour in getting back from dinner at Fast Eddy's and repacking the vehicle, we abandoned the idea of getting up early enough to be at the border crossing when they opened. Instead, we invested in a good night's sleep and showered in the morning to prepare for a difficult day on some of the most treacherous sections of road this side of the Arctic Circle. We knew what lay ahead and we came prepared, and so we left Tok bound for Tetlin Junction, once again rejoining the Alaska Highway, but going east instead of west.
-----Tetlin Junction is the crossroads with the Taylor Highway, which had a road surface that looked like a quilt from a distance. Different layers of gravel breaks and chipseal dotted the path, but the frost heaves didn't cause full-on breaks in the pavement and the gravel breaks weren't close to the Alaska Highway nonsense. The Taylor Highway connects the town of Eagle—the home of our Arctic Circle tour guide—to the Alaska Highway. We did not go through Eagle—as it was a good sixty miles north on the Taylor past our split-off—but we did go through the town of Chicken.
-----The Taylor was paved in its unusually patchwork manner for sixty miles of wild forested wilderness, but the pavement ended six miles south of Chicken, which is the only place in the world named Chicken. The road work they were doing got so bad that the pilot car flew through while I attempted to follow without going into a pit or a car-sized rut or scrape the undercarriage or hit any of the completely oblivious eighteen-wheelers who motioned as if I had room on the soft shoulder when I really didn't. We peeled off in Chicken to find it—quite unsurprisingly—nearly deserted.
-----Chicken has seven people and a gigantic metal statue of a chicken made out of spare metal bits and bobs. It's not even given the vaunted status of unincorporated community; it's a census-designated place, right alongside crossroads with derelict roadhouses. Yet looking at the sprawling Chicken—after all, there's lots of room to grow in the middle of absolute nowhere—one would think that it has several dozen. There's old mining equipment, including a massive gold dredge. Each little patch of the town claims to attract viewers with an Authentic Chicken Experience, and these patches include Chicken, Downtown Chicken, Chicken Historic District, and—presumably—Fried Chicken if you squint hard enough. (Where's Colonel Sanders when you need him?)
-----The dust blew up off of the Taylor Highway and the all-but-deserted parking lots of Chicken as we admired the sign, grimaced at the latrines—for there is no running water on the Taylor—and got pictures with the Enormous Chicken. While this is truly an chicken of magnificent proportions, it—incredibly—wasn't the only gigantic chicken on display. No, we were in Chicken—or was it the Chicken Historic District?—and when we went probably no less than a hundred yards to Downtown Chicken, we were met with a large wooden specimen under which my mom posed as if in imminent danger of being crushed.
-----Downtown Chicken has three storefronts (gift shop, saloon, and cafe) and operates a gas station, and they're all run by the same old kooky lady who used to live there all year but now only comes and bakes her "world famous" pies during the summer months. The disparate parts of Chicken are held together by the sinew of being a tourist trap of a gold rush town that never quite died off, and I'll readily agree to the fact that it has some level of unique charm to its slanted storefronts and windswept latrines, all watched over by one great flightless metal beast of a bird who cares not for who rightfully may claim the disputed title of "Original Chicken."
-----The money we'd usually set aside for lunch ended up getting spent at the highly interesting gift shop. We're still ahead of Chicken's tourist season—thank goodness we've beaten the tour buses some place—and I can see how they make their living. It was one of the more interesting gift shops I've been in, as long as you could keep your footing even on the tilted plywood. You name it, they had it: a Bigfoot pennant (which we didn't get), fake road signs (some of them quite crude), hats (your choice of roughly 75 dozen varieties), and all manner of chicken-related socks, of all things.
-----We checked out and then decided to top off the tank with gas, as Chicken makes for the last stop before Dawson City, 108 miles east. Our seventy-odd miles from Tok didn't take us much fuel at all, and when my dad went in to pay for it, the cashier guy's calculator broke and he was unable to make change for a twenty without my dad having to spell it out for him. As such, we elected to ignore his advice about the road ahead, especially since he freely admitted to never driving the Chicken-Dawson route. (Sad.)
-----We got back on the Taylor Highway, and it proved to be the worst and most miserable twenty-two miles to the Jack Wade junction, where the Taylor splits off towards Eagle and the famous Top of the World Highway begins. All manner of narrow twisting gravelly washboard-prone unpaved curviness made this route a treacherous one, and it was all eyes on the road for every mile. At around 25 MPH—the fastest safe speed—we were still passed by several locals. It took us about an hour to safely complete, though a respite was welcome when the highway paralleled Jack Wade creek for a spell.
-----The entire region is still actively mined for gold, and we saw everything from "No Trespassing" signs to heavy machinery to roads cut up steep hillsides to some older fellows panning for gold in the creek. On the flat sections, the gravel and dirt compacts, leaving a dusty but quite smooth surface. It got worse again as we approached Jack Wade hill and the junction of the same name, but once we left the Taylor Highway and were on the Top of the World, it lived up to its name in every way—about which, more later.
-----The Top of the World Highway is only officially named as such in the Yukon Territory, the United States section is officially the Boundary Spur Road. Nevertheless, we were now officially on the ridge line, and we would continue to be so for about eighty miles, through absolute wilderness. The Boundary Spur was not just paved, it was well-paved, proving to be one of the best and smoothest in the entire state, strangely enough. After about a dozen miles, we saw a complex of green-roofed houses on the next hill: the customs station.
-----The route through from Tok to Dawson is open conditionally, and one of these conditions is that the border station has to be open for business. They are, for twelve hours, between 8AM-8PM Alaska time and 9-9 Pacific. It constitutes the northernmost border crossing of its kind in the world, and the only one between the US and Canada where the two groups of officers share the same building. It's so incredibly remote that quarters are provided on-site.
-----We talked for a bit to the Canadian border patrol guy, who clearly needed some folks to talk to as much as we needed intel regarding the route ahead. As it turns out, while US agents serve on month-long shifts—as the I-drove-a-motorcycle-to-Prudhoe-Bay guy told us when we initially crossed into Alaska—the Canadian officers are there for the duration of the open months: May to September. There's not a lot of traffic on the road, but he told us that he never tired of the view—and how could you? He also gave us the numbers of the RCMP detachment in Dawson City as well as two wrecker companies should the worst befall us.
-----Re-entering the Yukon was bittersweet, but we know that we've not seen the last of Alaska on this journey, and so we pressed on across the Top of the World—and how we seemed to soar above the mountaintops! It was initially built to supply Dawson City during World War II, and it's one of those roads that would never otherwise even be remotely considered for construction. To accelerate construction, the crews went where the trees weren't so plentiful and cut it across the ridge instead of the valley. For every minute of this remarkable drive, we were struck with vistas in every direction, from the verdant trees that went on and over the grand hills for as far as the eye could see, to the snowcapped peaks of a mountain range that stuck to our north the entire time. Occasionally, more mining claims could be seen, but these were so few that their activities—however ambitious—couldn't tarnish the beauty.
-----Part of the wonder of the road is that it seemed almost natural, like a ridge in and of itself along the mountains. While seeing a distant part of the road we are to travel is a common enough occurrence to be almost old hat around these parts, the Top of the World's route truly snakes, meandering seamlessly yet aimlessly hither and thither to the point that many more miles of it could be seen than, say, the Alaska Highway at its most vast and wandering moments. Its name speaks for itself; its needs no appellation after some otherwise long-forgotten figure of Northern history.
-----The road was chipsealed around twenty years ago, but the Yukon government never invested in it since—citing a lack of travelers, most likely—and so the pavement, aside from a scant few spots, has reverted back to its natural state of gravel. Yet in the pantheon of awful things that can happen on unpaved surfaces, none did on the Top of the World, and the road—though difficult in nature—was about the best that you could expect under the circumstances. Its remoteness and its difficult western terminus meant that this is one of those once-in-a-lifetime drives, and we rightfully savored everything we could.
-----The final kilometers of the Top of the World took us off of the ridge as we could catch glimpses of Dawson City—or the Town of the City of Dawson, officially—as we kept going. The pavement began again moments before we had to stop as the road ended at the Yukon River. Across the river was Dawson, and the vehicles were lines up to take folks across on the George Black Ferry, which rumbled and roared across the mighty Yukon and used its flow to reorient itself to pick up and drop off passengers.
-----It wasn't a great deal of time before the ferry came back our way and we were waved on. Though it is a rather large vessel, capable of accommodating heavy loads, it does not appear to be of great strength against the roaring Yukon when you're actually on the thing; on the contrary, though it's metal, it seems almost rickety. It's a surreal experience, getting dragged across the water like that, towards a hillside-nestled town that seemingly hasn't changed since the gold rush.
-----Dawson City is not a large place, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in absolute adorability. There's not a modern building in sight; everything's wooden slats or log cabins, and the older the building, the more slanted it seems to be. We even went past an abandoned church that still seemed absolutely fine save for the fact that it looked like it'd been twisted several different directions at once. There is only one paved street in Dawson, but we were experts at this unpaved business and presently arrived at our hotel.
-----The back of our vehicle is an absolute mess, as the dust and grime thrown up by the Top of the World stuck in some places and made to run—only to cake on—by the fluid of the rear wiper. The end result was that it looked like a giant had had a few too many drinks and the result was the rear end, but we still fared better than many of the other folks driving around—and we certainly outpaced the completely caked Arctic Circle van.
-----Our hotel is run by several European immigrants who run things in an extremely clean way. One removes one's shoes in the foyer and carries them to a storage closet. The main level is dominated by a communal kitchen and several seating areas, with the bulk of the rooms in the winding upstairs. The rooms themselves are pristine, but everything is small; my mom sat down in the rocking chair and declared it the seat of Papa Elf. The beds don't even approach the level of my knee, and the night stands, chairs, and bathroom levels are all to that scale. The ceiling is quite high, but I'm not sure if that's an optical illusion with the dollhouse furniture or if it really is high up.
-----The adjoining restaurant is highly thought of, and we all got some meat: My mom some pork and my dad and I some steaks. Their collection of steak sauces was quite broad and all of them were in-house concoctions, and I got the red wine gravy while my dad went for something mushroom-based, as he got mashed potatoes. We split a Toblerone caramel cheesecake for dessert, and it was heavenly. A lot of places serve a fluffy cheesecake, but this had a truly creamy texture.
-----We re-donned our shoes and struck out on the town. Dawson is so small that it's only eight or so streets deep until you get to the base of the cliffs, and from our hotel it took almost no time to go past the colorful houses towards the Robert Service cabin. It's closed save for viewing and demonstrations, which only happen around the early afternoon, but it was still unlocked and we were free to walk up to the rickety log building. Not too far down the road lay the equally closed Jack London cabin, and London's poorer background and failure as a prospector was evident in his digs when compared to Service's.
-----Our remaining excursion was dedicated to wandering quasi-aimlessly around the city, towards the Yukon River and into some of the few shops still open. At 9:00, most establishments—save those who served alcohol—were closed, a fact which dawned on us as we wandered back through the town and eventually back to our shoeless hotel. Our room, in the intervening time, had turned into a bona fide oven on account of there not being air conditioning, and so much thought has been put into proper fan placement and alignment.
-----Tomorrow: southbound again, as we return to Whitehorse on the Klondike Highway.
-----We got to bed fairly early last night as my dad regaled us with one of his signature stories—this time, concerning one Ethel Shmütz—a human with an avocado for a head—and her penchant for vacuuming people's mushrooms. When we awoke, my parents wandered off to find some kind of breakfast at one of the establishments in the vast building, only to find tour bus people withreservations who still had wait times. They ended up going to a fantastically overpriced Starbucks and brought back some muffins.
-----After packing up most of our belongings, we decided to take advantage of three free tram tickets that we'd gotten upon check-in. The ritzy Alyeska area is highly prized for its skiing and was even once considered a selling point for a potential Anchorage Olympic bid, and as such there are two air trams that go up over 2,000 feet in the span of roughly five minutes. It was like something out of a Roger Moore Bond film. (Moonraker and Live and Let Die are some of my dad's guilty pleasures.) Being avalanche season, the hiking trails and skiing opportunities were both closed off, leaving only a few overlooks and a gift shop open at the top.
-----I was expecting more swinging and swaying on the ride, but the trams were large enough and stabilized by enough thick metal cables at the top to make it a significant—and much appreciated—step down the potential-vertigo ladder from the disorienting Kenai Fjords boat. As we saw the hotel get smaller and smaller, and the people outside become undetectable to the naked eye, we were pretty much there.
-----The views from the ride were epic, but the top was outright spectacular. From the snowcapped terminus, we could spot hanging glaciers behind us and the entire quasi-town of Girdwood laid out in front. Ahead of the natural bowl in which Girdwood is located was the thin strip of the Seward Highway and the soon-to-be-rapidly-filling Turnagain Arm behind. Being well within the mountains was peaceful, but looking back down along the tramline really emphasized how far up we really were.
-----The air trams run every fifteen minutes, and we'd planned to be up there for that period of time, but we were so taken by the scenery that we entirely skipped that one and spend a full half-hour at the top. I quite wish we'd had more time at the place, at both ends of the tramline, in order to properly explore; though somewhat uppity in attitude amongst the more affluent clientele, it's hard not to be bowled over by the beauty enough to look past it. Yet not enough snow has melted for the trails that somehow offer even greater views to be hiked, so I suppose any return trip will have to see us arrive smack-dab in the middle of tourist season. (My dad, for his part, is already talking about the next Alaska trip. So much of his concern lay in his previous horrid memories of the Alaska Highway, and now he's looking forward to driving the whole thing again.)
-----The ride back was a bit scarier as we stared down at the now-tiny hotel towards which we would be descending, but we were—magically—the only ones on the tram, and so we asked the tram operator a few questions to pass the time and not make it an awkward ride. The massive wheels and gears clunked and whirled their way into action at the top, and before long, we were at the bottom. We didn't have long to check out after this, so we rushed back to the room, grabbed our bags, and whirled out the front door past fancy cars with open food containers left outside, reinforcing that being born with a silver spoon does not equate to any level common sense around bear country. We absconded before the larger wildlife caught its scent.
-----There is—or at least, there seems to be—more road construction per mile on the tiny Alyeska Highway leading into Girdwood than on many other of the state's highways combined. The amount of tourist money pumped into what is a truly minuscule (by Alaskan standards) road really shows that the government puts their money where the money is. Between it and the Kenai Peninsula and there's much, much more road work—and better roads where there isn't road work—than much of the rest of the state. (About which, more later.)
-----It took about as much time to get out of the few miles of the Girdwood area as it took to get from there to Anchorage proper. We marveled at the rushing inflow of Turnagain Arm at around noontime, stopping once in an eventually fruitless attempt to get a better glimpse at about ten Dall sheep perched nearly on top of the nearly straight-up peaks to the opposite side. It wasn't too long before our second attempt—this time, more well-informed—at getting to Flattop Mountain, where we'd previously encountered signs for death-defying (or death-inviting) grades. This time, we took the next road up, and though the roads were still fairly steep, it was nothing like the winding mountainousness with which we'd had to previously contend.
-----There was a short trail to the overlook near Flattop Mountain, and the views were stunning. All of Anchorage was visible, with the Knik and Turnagain arms snaking around it. Despite its feeling as a metropolis, by area it's still mostly greenery. But what we really came for were the mountains, and on a clear day they did not disappoint. Far to the left, standing by itself, was Mount Iliamna, the peak well over 100 miles away that dominated the sky during our journey to Homer. The Talkeetna range loomed large, as did Mount Susitna (the one they call the Sleeping Lady). But as we scanned north, one mountain stood above its foothills and above the meek clouds: Denali. We'd not gotten a good look at it from within the park, but now it was showing its full splendor.
-----We understandably took a while at the peak, attempting to get a good picture and eventually getting to talking to a couple from Rhode Island. But the road called, and we had a long way to go in order to reach Tok before the moose came out to play in full force.
-----Our route meandered around the road work through Anchorage and eventually got us back to Palmer, where—on the southern outskirts—we ate at a place called the Noisy Goose Cafe. Though highly ranked within the annals of Palmer restaurants, its claim to fame probably should begin and end with its humorous signs tacked helter-skelter upon the walls. My mom and I played it safe with what turned out to be a mediocre club sandwich, while my dad's halibut was apparently so inedible that he picked at it for several minutes before wolfing down a quarter of each of the club sandwiches. It's one of those classic serve-everything diners, which makes for a place where any one thing is only going to be serviceable. That said, the fact that its overall mediocrity made it one of the worst meals is a testament to how well we've eaten overall in a land where I was promised car sleeping and beanie-weenies.
-----The road out from Palmer took us through an epic and winding mountain road called the Glenn Highway, featuring such hits as: hairpin turns with 7% grades up and down, the extraordinarily large Matanuska Glacier, passing lanes where not needed and then none for twenty miles when they are, and many more. This led us all the way to the tiny town of Glennallen. I don't know who Glenn is, and I don't know who Allen is either, but it was a place to get gas, so I thank them both for whatever it is they might have done in that middle-of-nowhere accidental crossroads. After gas, we stopped in at an IGA store to get some caffeinated drinks, but a little while afterwards we found that my dad's Mountain Dew simply would not budge open, and it felt like my thumb was about to pop straight off in the exertion. Examining the problem showed that the screwtop was entirely stuck on, and it took a Swiss Army knife to eventually pry it open once we got to Tok—but by that point, it was too late to be of any use until tomorrow.
-----We went north on the Richardson Highway from Glennallen until we reached the very poorly signed turn to the Tok Cutoff. It should have been a portent of things to come that, in the annals of the epic names bequeathed these few but mighty roads, one and only one was given such a poor, blunt, and entirely unsatisfactory name as "Tok Cutoff." By the first several miles in, we were asking ourselves what in the world we'd plunged into, as there were more gravel breaks than traditionally paved surface, frost heaves so heavy and so ill-patched that they created full-on road fault lines which had to be stopped at in order to proceed over safely (but never comfortably). and signs every few hundred yards that said either "road damage" or "loose gravel" with little in the way of rhyme or reason with regard to the actual conditions. The only consolations were that a) the moose weren't going to emerge until much later, b) we had no real time crunch, and c) the gravel breaks were much more well packed-down than the truly loose gravel of the Alaska Highway. There's such a vast difference that we were actually able to go pretty much the same speed on these gravel breaks without any significant difference in how they felt under the car—which is saying as much for the gravel as the chipseal used to pave the roads in these parts. A certain amount of bumpiness is to be expected, and if our tour to the Arctic Circle was any indication, the unpaved is superior to the paved and unmaintained.
-----Roughly the first half of the 120-mile Tok Cutoff was in this bouncy and patchy shape, but we managed through it without any hassle as there was hardly another vehicle in sight. No one passed us going at physics-breaking speeds and only a handful of others were coming from Tok. The moose were not yet loose, and though we anticipated returning to Tok at 9:30, we rolled into Fast Eddy's Restaurant at 8:30, unpacked our bags, and split a pizza at the restaurant, intentionally ordering a medium to split in order to have leftovers available for breakfast tomorrow. Though Eddy's serves a mean breakfast, 6:00 is a little too late an opening for our epic morrow. (The medium at Fast Eddy's is a large almost anywhere else. I daren't think what their idea of a large really is.)
-----At a little after 11:00, a rainbow from a southeastern raincloud was illuminated by the light of the sunset, giving the lower half of the majestic bow a nearly uniform red tint, though upon closer examination the colors could still be visible. We even repacked the vehicle, as it's the last time we'll have a chance to do so prior to our return to the contiguous 48.
-----Tomorrow: the only time on this entire trip that we'll intentionally traverse unpaved roads as we go across the northernmost land border crossing in the world on the famous Top of the World Highway bound for Dawson City.
-----It was get-up-and-go from our hotel to the departure point for our tour boat around Kenai Fjords National Park. We had to be there at 7:00 for boarding at 7:30 for an eventual departure at 8:00. Our tour took us through the waters around Seward, and the wildlife we saw was impeccable: a dozen-odd sea otters (one of which had napped all the way to much deeper waters), several pods of orcas who crested early and often around and under the ship, several humpback whales who displayed their tails for us as they dove deep, a score of sea lions, and a few seals. Our captain stopped for a great while during these sightings, and after a few minutes without running engines, the boat really started to rock. This wasn't much fun, but no one suffered ill effects, as getting the boat moving at its maximum speed of roughly 22 knots mitigated the impossible-to-walk-on-straight tilting.
-----The coolest (pun intended) part of the journey was Holgate Glacier, whose massive ice face flows six feet per day off the Harding Icefield. While many of the glaciers have receded in recent decades due to the effects of a gradually warming climate, it doesn't diminish their awesome power. The captain rolled up perhaps a mile away, and yet the deep creaking and crackling of the glacier made it as if a scene from an alien world. Seeing what appeared to be small chunks of ice calve off and fall to the sea, only to hear an epic and thunderous thud moments later, gave a sense of scale to the place. The frigid wind sweeping off of the glacier blew in our faces, but yet we persevered in order to catch a glimpse of the next big calve.
-----Because of the unusual abundance of wildlife, we got back to Seward closer to 3:00 than our expected arrival time of 2:00, but we had no other place to be than up to Girdwood—specifically, the Double Musky Inn. My dad has been talking about the Double Musky since I can remember, and from the well-worn 30-year-old cookbook at home came the recipe for shrimp étouffée, which he was obsessed with ordering since we first started planning this Alaska journey in earnest. We got to Girdwood at 4:30, a half-hour before the Double Musky opened, so we decided to check into our hotel before doubling back in the small community. (Interestingly, Girdwood isn't even a town, but rather is incorporated within Anchorage despite being nearly an hour's drive further south.)
-----Enter the tour buses. We'd seen our fair share of these around Alaska, but it's past Memorial Day and into June and so there were several parked in front, blocking vehicles from entering. The lines to check in at the short-staffed front desk grew massive, and when we finally reached our room, we walked past a team of housekeepers who—at 5:00—were just now getting to third-floor rooms. It's nice in as far as accommodations are concerned, but the manner in which things are run leaves something to be desired.
-----We showered for the first time in several days and were able to drive back down to the Double Musky at around 6:00. The small eclectic interior is adorned with tiny signs and tchotchkes from turn-of-the-century soda advertisements to coasters advertising German beers to—of course—all manner of cajun paraphernalia. It's tightly packed and they were running as if short-staffed due to the number of people they cram in, but hey—at least we got in ahead of influx of the tour buses.
-----My dad ordered his beloved étouffée, and said that it was spicy but excellent. My mom got an appetizer of crab cakes (which were very spicy) and myself perhaps the blandest (and worst) thing on the menu in the beef tip appetizer. I'd not eaten solid food in about 48 hours save for a few granola bars on the ship, and I was loathe to introduce anything remotely spicy to my system. I ate about half of it, but mainly just enjoyed the look on my dad's face as he savored his étouffée, which he reported as being the same as my mom's recreation save for the fact that it was laced with hot sauce and thus significantly spicier. (Thank goodness for Zantac.) Dessert—of which I partook a single bite—was "cajun delight," and it was basically cream-flavored air.
-----Tomorrow: we return to Tok, as the journey back to the Yukon begins.
-----I awoke in Homer with a horrid stomach ache a little before 6:00 in the morning, and though I got up with the intention of somehow distracting myself, before long, my gastrointestinal tract had simply had enough. My growing and legitimate concern over potential dehydration led us to the hospital in Homer.
-----The hospital was very new, very nice, and very well-staffed in their emergency room, where I was given two liters of fluid as well as some nausea medication. They ran several tests and the best diagnosis they could come up with was a 24-hour norovirus which has been going around several Alaskan communities. Nasty, yes—but over and done very soon. I already felt a bit better by the time we left the ER, but we'd checked out of our hotel and were understandably nervous about getting all the way to Seward, so we found another hotel closer to the hospital. I slept there for about four hours straight, putting a solid dent in my sleep deprivation and going a long way towards getting my guts back to normal.
-----After some discussion and debate, we decided to head on to Seward. I continued to rest and nap in the backseat as much as I was able, and our 8:30 PM departure meant that there were a lot of moose. It seemed like every couple of hundred yards, my parents would say "moose," and sure enough, one of them would be standing up on the side of the road, eating some plants without a care in the world.
-----The sun stayed up for a long, long time as we headed north and then east to Soldotna, where my parents got some fries from McDonalds for sustenance. The sun had not yet set at 10:30 when we pressed on through Soldotna through what remained of the Sterling Highway until its reconnection with the Seward Highway.
-----The southernmost portion of the Seward Highway was simply the most gorgeous drive. The sun finally set, but the illumination from the endless twilight bathed the mountains and lakes in the most wonderful light. It was so otherworldly that I was almost—but not quite—thankful for my overly eventful morning, because otherwise we'd never be able to see such sights. If there wasn't such a threat of hitting moose, driving Alaska at night would be ten times better than the long daylight hours.
-----It was past midnight when we rolled into the all-but-deserted streets of Seward and checked into our hotel for about four-and-a-half hours of solid sleep. I don't think I even rolled over, on account of the fact that I woke up with a crick in my neck.
-----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.
-----Our free day in Anchorage was by no means one of simple rest and relaxation, as there was research and reservations and hike planning for the days to come, from our journey to Whittier and Homer tomorrow all the way through our return to Whitehorse in a week's time. It was also the last available day to do laundry until we return to the contiguous 48, a process which took the remaining hours of both the morning and the early afternoon. While this went on, my mom took great pleasure in taking our cell phone people to task via online chat because we were promised continuous cell coverage since North Pole and we haven't seen a single bar since Minot, but she realized about halfway into this process that she might have directed her rightful frustration into the void of a robot that responded in one of four preprogrammed ways. Nevertheless, it was a form of catharsis.
-----The rain was coming down steadily as we finished the laundry process and headed out into Anchorage. Our first stop of the day was going to be on the north side of the city, up at Ship Creek, where the salmon run had begun last week according to area news articles. But when we reached the Ship Creek overlook, no salmon could be seen in its meandering and rushing rivulets, and the rain made it not worth any more time spent there than we needed to. Though the temperature was in the mid-40s, our breath was visible in thick clouds.
-----We hopped back into the car and worked our way across the city to Earthquake Park, where evidence of the 1964 Good Friday earthquake could be seen ... well, at least at one point. Now, the drop-off to Knik Arm is covered in trees and shrubs, and while there is a significant drop, it seems hardly different from an especially precipitous hill. It was a well-done park and was a hot spot for dog walkers and runners (in shorts!) more so than a tourist spot. Still, it felt good to stretch the legs out, as the distance itself was a mere drop in the bucket compared to yesterday.
-----Coming back across Anchorage, we had our sights set on a local sandwich place called Arctic Roadrunner. While we knew that Memorial Day would involve closed restaurants, we had reason to believe that this one was open ... but alas, it was closed. Fortunately, we also chose it for its proximity to our hotel, so on the way back, we pulled into the Cattle Company steakhouse for what proved to be a huge meal. After a sampler appetizer that involved quasi-spicy boneless wings, shrimp cocktail, loaded potato skins, and—my personal favorite—panko-crumb-breaded, deep-fried zucchini slices, we all got ribeye steaks. My dad got garlic herb butter atop his steak, while I got bacon blue cheese. My sides were unique, not in content but combination, as I got both a Caesar salad and a garden salad, much to the consternation of our waiter. But I ate both of them and still had room for my dad and I to split a slice of mud pie that had coffee ice cream in it and shaved pecans on a coffee-flavored whipped cream on top.
-----It was a while before we got out the door, for our waiter at what appeared to be an understaffed establishment had to contend with a) doubling as the bartender and b) dealing with a family at the booth adjoining ours whose patronizing matriarch mistook corn silk for wayward hair. We were able to snag a significant discount by signing up for some kind of free customer's club, but in the hectic buildup to the dinner crowd which we had deftly avoided, they forgot to ask for our e-mail address. We left before they realized their mistake, thus mercifully sparing our inbox from cross-continental spam messages.
-----We waited until the clouds began to clear in earnest before embarking to our last destination for the day at Flat Top, a short hike leading to an overview of the entire city. The route took us more or less up the mountain face and eventually led to well-worn 1.5-lane dirt and packed gravel paths. There was an increasing level of trepidation in the car, but this turned to horror as we crossed through a gated fee area and were immediately faced with an even steeper hill with an ominous sign warning of a 17% grade. We were fortunate enough to be able to put the vehicle in reverse and use a well-placed pullout to get ourselves back down, at which point we realized that we'd gone over unsigned 14% grades going up around hairpin turns. The view from the top, while not of all of Anchorage, was most of it, and the view out to the arms of the Cook Inlet was breathtaking, especially as the sun—still hidden behind the departing storm clouds—glinted off of the ocean waters. Once back to flat land, we got gas in anticipation of the eventful day ahead.
-----Tomorrow: through the one-lane tunnel to Whittier and a hike to Portage Glacier, then back out again to Homer across the westernmost point on the North American highway system at Anchor Point.
-----We were able to sleep in, and for us, "sleeping in" means 8:00. I never thought I'd be a morning person, but I guess my circadian rhythm has always been on Alaska time. We walked to the site of our epic dinner the previous night for a breakfast of champions, and the buffet spread they had was the greatest breakfast I've had. I'm not normally a breakfast kind of guy and I can't name the last non-trip day in which my first meal was something other than lunch. But every component of the hot breakfast was top-notch, and we entertained our plucky Wisconsinite waitress by our habit of putting as much creamer in our coffees as the cups will hold and being self-deprecating about the whole matter. We got our fill because we knew we'd need it for the hike ahead, but little did we know just how much we'd be praising our previous selves for their wise investment.
-----We left our lovely little cabin, with its five pillows per bed and oddly Star Trek-esque showers, at 11:00 sharp, and said goodbye to the Knik River area as we once again paralleled the river over the hilly and winding road that led us—eventually—to the Glenn Highway. It wasn't long on the freeway (!) that we reached the exit for the tiny town of Eklutna, home of 363 people and a really cool Russian Orthodox church. Though no one was manning the visitor center, we voluntarily put $5 in the collection box and walked around the area. The permafrost means that people are more or less buried in mounds aboveground, and the Russian Orthodox tradition of housing the bodies in what appear to be small facsimile houses made the entire area feel really ... I don't want to say creepy, but kind of odd—especially when no one was around.
-----The Glenn Highway was full of the most insane examples of driving I'd seen yet, as the hectic nature of the big-city freeway was crossbred with the daredevil foolishness of the Alaskans. We soon reached the outskirts of Chugiak, which now has as many people as Eagle River did back in the late 80s. It was around this point that my parents—who lived in Eagle River for several years in the 1980s—began openly marveling in a state somewhere between shock and stone-cold horror at the amount of growth in the greater Anchorage area in the intervening period, which started in earnest when we saw the sprawling high school in Chugiak and only continued when we got into Eagle River itself. Every street, every extra lane, every shopping center, every road, and every stoplight saw one of them say in hushed tones that "that wasn't there before." This didn't stop as we wormed through town to see their old house.
-----After passing the old stomping grounds—a place that both of them believed they'd never see again—we headed up to a trailhead nestled deep in the mountain roads that go into Eagle River valley, where—as we negotiated steep grades and sharp turns—there was continued marveling at the subdivisions and new constructions that have begun to stretch into the valley. It was house after house after school bus stop after house on the winding road that took us to the South Fork trailhead.
-----Our research had led us to believe that—after the inclines we'd endured in Denali and the snow we'd tackled in Hatcher Pass—a long and relatively flat walk would be of great value and ameliorate our sore calves and shins. Sure, we'd seen that it'd be a nearly ten-mile round trip, but we saw the minimal elevation change and pictures of the beautiful lakes we'd see at the end—Eagle Lake and Symphony Lake, specifically—and thought that it was well worth a trip. They never got to do it in the 80s, and there was no time like the recent past.
-----We realized nearly immediately that the 800-foot elevation change was a net gain, because we went up and just kept climbing. The path started out quite well, but soon became thinner as it crossed over tributaries of Eagle River and finally Eagle River itself by way of a footbridge. The trail got progressively rockier as we traversed the rolling hills of the valley floor, and while it was not overly cold, the wind was rather steady and it brought with it various misty rain showers and the occasional miniature snow flurry. We made good time until the trail really got rough; there were multiple paths cut as previous alignments turned into impassable mud pits, where logs and wood planks put down to aid the wayward hiker just got sucked wholesale into the moist earth. We ended up perfecting a quasi-system were trails were blazed along moose paths (which became easier to see the more one looked), as well as stepping on roots and thick shrub branches and the viable planks (where available) to avoid the puddles and muck which came to dominate the trail.
-----The problem is that the trail—which is called "easy" as opposed to the "strenuous" it actually was—used to run through the valley the entire way instead of working its way up on the ridge line, which added time, distance, elevation, and strenuousness. Someone had purchased land down in the Eagle River Valley and while the previous owners were okay with hikers on their property, the new owners weren't so pleased. This is obviously well within the owner's right, but no one bothered to change the web site, maps, or ... well, pretty much anything anywhere for anyone wanting to learn anything about getting to these secluded lakes.
-----We were very obviously over the 5.5 mile point, which was to mark our arrival at the lakes, and no lakes were anywhere in sight. The trail was simply getting worse, as now there was mostly a line of muck and running water snaking over the valley floor. We had to pause to look around at the mountains and fog around us and the snowcapped peaks ahead, at whose bases lay these mythical lakes. We were much too far in to turn back, and we'd come all this way, so with the mist blowing around our hooded faces, we pressed on, climbing over huge piles of loose rocks—miniature mountains in and of themselves—and snow banks and drifts still feet thick, and finally—at long last—we saw the glimmer of a green lake.
-----Actually getting to the lakes requires a certain amount of negotiating over a truly massive pile of rocks and boulders with only the barest hint of a suggestion of a trail embedded within, and it took us a long while of steadying our muddy hiking boots and keeping our weight evenly distributed over such hairy terrain. I've always enjoyed climbing on rocks such as these, but when there's six miles of a so-called trail between you and the nearest road, there was even more emphasis on safety.
-----I made it over a particularly challenging set of rocks and came down on quite a nice trail that led to an epic view of the green-hued Eagle Lake, which was just melting into its pure glacial color as Flute Glacier and Cantata Peak looked on majestically from their faintly fog-shadowed perch high above. Symphony Lake still lay above the huge mountain of boulders, and tiny figures could be seen on the rocky ridge that lies between the two lakes. But Eagle Lake is a) a prettier color, b) has actually melted somewhat, and c) larger, so when it was time to head back not too long afterwards, it was well worth the journey.
-----The hike is a well-worn path by Alaskan locals, and we were one of perhaps a few groups in a small minority who didn't have dogs with us. They ranged from small to massive, and protective to friendly, with the two golden retrievers happily greeting and being petted by all the new friends they could find. (My jeans, already caked in mud from the knee down, got an extra few licks from these dogs.) Though the scenery was gorgeous everywhere you looked, it became harder and harder to ignore our sore feet and legs, and as we passed landmark after landmark on the return trip, we did what we could to make time downhill and pass the time however we could. I recited what I could remember of The Cremation of Sam McGee, and several lines about the badness of the trail seemed very apt—especially the parts about feeling half mad but swearing never to give in.
-----We saw little wildlife on the trail; though we crossed through prime moose country, only one moose sighting was reported by a family ahead of us, and by the time we'd gotten to that area, the creature was well away. The number of people on the trail probably helped in this regard; while we saw many holes for ground squirrels and beavers, none seemed inhabited as we passed, and our bear spray stayed stuck safely in their holsters on our belts. We saw a number of magpies—beautifully stark creatures of black and white—as they zoomed through the air alone or in groups, as well as the majestic willow ptarmigan, which is a beautiful bird until it opens its mouth, at which point you hear a sound echoing across the canyon that sounds like a dying goat auditioning for the role of the Joker. It's this awful whining screeching chirp that sounds like some sort of demonic chicken, and I now understand why early settlers with no knowledge of this creature would have assumed that it's some sort of native chicken.
-----Over hill and dale and creek and muddy quicksand we kept on the trail, occasionally taking a shortcut or the long way around depending on their relative levels of mud. It didn't look like it helped if you went by looking at our jeans afterwards, but we'd have been in far worse shape had we gone through the worst of the mud. Our pants were caked, our layers of shirts and sweaters and jackets were soaked from both the tiny but constant precipitation and our sweat, our hair was completely in shambles, and we looked beat—but we beat the trail. (My dad and I also wanted to beat up whoever said that the trail was "easy" with "minimal elevation change.")
-----We had begun the adventure at around 12:40 and we got back to the car at 7:00. The rest of the Glenn Highway awaited and we got to Anchorage well within half an hour, where it took all of what remained of my attention to keep eyes out for every driver within 100 yards of me, the myriad middle-lane potholes, and—of course—where our next turn was. My parents provided a bit of help, especially in the latter category, between their statements affirming their incredulity with the course of progress in Anchorage. It's not the small-ish town they remember, and driving around reminded me of driving into somewhere like St. Paul or Sacramento. Not even Fairbanks with its metropolitan area felt like such a big city as Anchorage.
-----It did not feel good to move after a half-hour's respite in the car, but we needed to unload some of our things before we went to one of the area restaurants. Our gnawing hunger and utter exhaustion in every other aspect led us to the closest place: the Sea Galley. It's a local chain, yes, but they had food and food meant sustenance and they served seafood and we were in Alaska so we went in. We sucked in as much food as possible, and it's a testament to our empty metabolisms that what tasted heavenly at the beginning began to seem more and more like a plate of overpriced fried whitefish the longer we sat. But I will give kudos to their strawberry lemonade—which tasted like a melted sherbet—and their calamari, which actually had tentacles and had a wonderful sauce alongside.
-----Tomorrow: we see how sore we are. Good thing we have a full day in Anchorage to rest up!
-----It was 7:20 when we left Denali and took the Parks Highway southbound amidst frigid temperatures that reached freezing for a while. Our goal was to get to the town of Talkeetna before 10:00 for the possibility of a flight around the south side of Denali. While forecasts for Talkeetna and McKinley Park indicated clear skies, Denali itself was projected for snow. But weather changes on a dime in the Last Frontier, and we would kick ourselves if we canceled without giving it a shot.
-----Morning on the Parks Highway was astounding, with very little traffic at all as we saw the remaining epic peaks of Denali National Park and the adjoining Denali State Park. The solitude of being alone on the road with the mountains in the morning light was a wonderful experience, and we took in what we could as we kept a beeline to Talkeetna.
-----Getting to Talkeetna is kind of ... well, slanted. Given its position on the Susitna River, getting to the town from the southbound Parks Highway requires doubling back for 14 miles to get to the town. We pulled off well before the downtown and went to the company which was to take us over Denali, where we learned that all three of the highest peaks would be covered in clouds for the rest of the day. They offered to fulfill our reservation and simply take us over lower glaciers and 5,000-foot peaks, but we've hiked atop both in the past and we figured that it wasn't worth the money if we couldn't see the highest peaks.
-----This gave us time to explore downtown Talkeetna, which is a unique little place to say the very least. It's as if all of the Pacific Northwest got compressed into a beach town and then plopped on the side of the Susitna. There are tiny restaurants and even tinier shops, and it was clear that the brunt of tourist season was only the beginning; when we left, there were far more vehicles of all kinds coming in. People walk and bike hither and thither over the streets in assumption that oncoming tourists will see them.
-----Talkeetna is not a big place, and we parked at one side of the one-street downtown and walked to the other, scoping out the not-yet-opened eateries. When we got to the gravel shores of the Susitna, we saw several large tents set up as an outdoor shop with the sign "Mexican Moose." This was an eclectic conglomeration which sold many hats, even more knives, local bead artwork, and cinnamon-roasted almonds which turned out to be a cinnamon-vanilla-sugar-butter pecan-almond-peanut mixture. After a sample, we bought a bag of it and ate it while walking near the river, and it was gone by the time we walked back.
-----We ducked into a store called "Mostly Moose" that really lived up to its name, as most of the items for sale were moose-themed. My dad was having a lot of fun, but there was nothing there we wanted to buy until we went through a middle section of the building to a twin store on the other side called Bears & Beyond, where we found a dorky Christmas ornament for Mom's collection. We were just about to leave—and, in fact, my dad had already paid for the ornament—when I saw a t-shirt that said "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger—except bears. Bears will kill you." There was something about the shirt and its advice and the way it was printed that spoke to me, and I simply had to get it.
-----By this time, the lunch establishments had just opened their doors to business, and when we walked into Mountain High Pizza Pie pretty much across the street, it was already slammed. It was in the mid-40s, but the wind was picking up and we were lucky to get the last inside table. We split a ten-inch special, which was a Thai chicken pizza. I can't say that I was a huge fan of how the chicken was cooked, but the rest of it really tasted fantastic, with just the right blend of onions, peppers, and peanuts to balance with the white sauce base. The crust was also quite flavorful and had a consistency of neither bread nor wafer, two singularities in the pizza continuum into which many crusts find their downfall.
-----On the way out of Talkeetna, checking out the shop windows and artists' tents as we did, we went into Nagley's Store to find the legendary mayor of Talkeetna, who is a cat named Stubbs. The place is a bit of a local dump and is a convenience store sans gas station, whose only claim to fame to attract the wayward tourist is the cat. But they told the folks in front of us that Stubbs was "in retirement," which makes me wonder how long he's been dead. They don't advertise that he's dead since, presumably, a mayor by any other name wouldn't be as effective a tourist trap. Though all online sources state that the 20-year-old cat is still alive and still the mayor, I'm wholeheartedly convinced that it's all a conspiracy and that Stubbs became roadkill many moons ago.
-----We had but one final stop to make (after pulling off on Yoder Road, much to the excitement of our trip mascot): Flying Squirrel Bakery and Cafe, closer to the beginning of the spur road than to Talkeetna itself. This was purely for the purpose of getting a Wi-Fi signal, as our phones still refuse to work in Alaska even though they rightly should, but while there we figured we might as well get some snacks because it's kind of rude to use the Wi-Fi without getting something. Everything looked scrumptious, but one bite of the lemon barley half-moon shortbread cake—which was described as "buttery" by a local—was very clearly made with as little sugar and gluten as possible. My dad's ruggelach, a rolled-up pastry with apricot pecan cream cheese filling, was reportedly sweet with every flavor in every bite, while Mom was a fan of her shortbread. Maybe I was expecting the wrong thing from the west-coast crowd, but I like my sugar and I'm not afraid to admit it.
-----We got gas at the extremely busy station at the intersection of the Parks Highway and the Talkeetna Spur, where everyone in the area got gas. As we continued on the Parks southbound, we were on the busiest road we've been on since Fort Saint John; not even Whitehorse's 20,000+ people got that busy. The great thing is that it was all going north, but the bad news is that the Alaskan drivers liked to pass slow RVs without regard for things like blind curves and blind hills. It wasn't too bad pothole wise—I'd expected worse—so we made tracks down to Wasilla.
-----We headed to the Hatcher Pass area, and it wasn't long before we saw the signs for Independence Mine State Historical Park. We headed into the bowl-shaped dip in the mountains up the winding alpine road, and as the mine area opened up before us, we could see that it was covered in snow. It was in the low 40s and dropping towards freezing, so we laced up our hiking boots and pulled on as many coats as we could and headed up the road.
-----I remain unconvinced that Alaska has any idea of how their budget works. Their operations have been funded solely from the principle of there always being oil money, abolishing statewide taxes and even paying citizens a stipend. This manifests in an utter complacency and mismanagement when it comes to revenue generation at all levels, for at the park, the road beyond the first parking area was closed off, with no ranger to enforce the $5 fee that most were neglecting to pay. We all sort of figured that the road ahead must be damaged or snow-covered, so we walked it ... all the way up to the completely plowed parking lots. There was no reason to close it off unless to enforce the parking with fewer rangers, which they didn't have.
-----It was a little while up the road until we got to within site of the decaying mine, and fortunately for us, the locals had trudged out the paths. Such trudging ended up creating a hodgepodge of footprints jammed into snow that was nearly two feet deep at its deepest and still nearly a foot at its lightest. The snow was light and dry and gave way instantaneously, sliding and crunching its way from two feet into an inch or so above the trail. We stuck to the footfalls that came before us wherever possible, as creating new paths through the snow was much harder and made our jeans wet. Our poor hiking boots again bore the brunt, and our feet stayed nice and warm because we kept moving; staying still made our jeans too wet in the nearly freezing weather.
-----We managed to make it all the way up to the largest extant mineshaft area, where the snow had really built its way up. We couldn't stay long at the top save for getting pictures of the decrepit shacks, slowly collapsing, with the snow piled atop, and our reasons for getting back had as much to do with the fact that our jeans were soaking from the knee down as for the dark cloud in the distance. As we journeyed back, the snow hit us in flurries. The first thing we did back at the car—aside from kicking ourselves for not bringing ski pants—was to put on our regular socks and shoes and hike the socks up so the jeans couldn't make us cold anymore. The view out to the Chugach range was epic, and the thin fog that covered the region made the Palmer area look like a great calm sea.
-----We soon made it to Palmer, which was gorgeous all the way around. The mountains framed the small plots of farmland and everything we kept a beautiful green; it was not the dark green and light green of the spruce and aspen that grow even on the Arctic Circle, but a flowing green straight out of a postcard—and this is to say nothing at all of the mountains around us, into which we seemed to be heading towards. We got on the old Glenn Highway and crossed over the Knik River, where we turned on a road that parallels it and followed its winding and hilly path past private property with a plethora of "keep out" and "no trespassing" signs before getting to the very end of it, where our cabins overlook the craggy mountains we'd seen parts of for most of the day.
-----The cabins are quaint, perched in rows on the hillside, and their interiors make it a contender for the best cabin we've stayed at. The shower looks like some sort of Star Trek transporter and the heater is an actual small transportable fireplace-looking thing. But Wi-Fi is only available in the office/restaurant area, they said, so my dad and I went down there for a while after requesting a third set of towels for our room. After about an hour down there, we asked if the towels were ready ... only to find out that they weren't ready and the front desk lady was clearly frustrated at having to do the job of the housekeeping staff and marched over to their yurt to straighten things out. In the meantime, we realized that we do sort-of kind-of get a Wi-Fi signal in our cabins, which is enough to get by.
-----We'd been fortunate enough to avoid the intolerable Tourist Season thus far, but this is Memorial Day weekend and we make preparations accordingly. The cabins will be absolutely slammed tonight, as will the adjoining restaurant, at which we originally had 9:00 reservations that we were only able to move to 8:30 at the last minute.
-----The food was simply the best meal we've ever had on any of our trips. The crab cake was simply falling apart with Thai flavors, and the French onion soup and house salads were straight-up incredible. I had a seafood sampler, with was a rich pasta with white wine cream sauce filled with juicy salmon, thick prawns, and tiny pearl-sized bay scallops, and the freshness made everything even better. My parents both went for a 12-ounce ribeye, and the few morsels I had from my mom's steak were full of smoky flavor and marbled to perfection; it truly melted in your mouth. We split three desserts: a rich orange cognac crème brûlée with absolutely no burnt sugar at all, a rich chocolate cake thing that was delicious as well, albeit a bit too rich for my taste, and a cheesecake slice with raspberry sauce atop. Our complements to the server ended up with meeting the chef, since everyone else who was eating had left, and we told him that we'd eaten in 49 states and 9 provinces and that his meal was absolutely top-notch.
-----Tomorrow: a hike-filled day as we work our way to Anchorage.
-----As if 6:00 was bad enough, we got up today at 5:00 and left for the park by 6:15 to be there thirty minutes ahead of our 7:00 shuttle, the first into the park. The buses go as far into the park as they can, and we were somewhat concerned of how far they'd be able to go because when we got up, there were snow flurries in a frigid 37º. It was hardly an inch of buildup, but there was buildup.
-----We got into our bus, which was around half-full when it was all said and done, and learned that the bus driver's name was was the same as that of our Arctic Circle tour guide who ran out of gas. Funny coincidence or twist of fate? You decide.
-----As the bus left and went along the more familiar paved part of the road towards the parking area for our previous day's hike, the snow started really coming down, to the point that, though we saw caribou, it was through the dense and silent blanket of snowfall. The unpaved part of the road was beginning to turn to mud. The scenery around was wonderful, though we could see little and the snow was beginning to get everywhere; a little more wind might have qualified it for blizzard status.
-----Blue skies were ahead as we reached an hour and a half's drive into our journey at the Teklanika River, where the snowfall over the night had built up to a good four inches that crunched away underneath our sore footfalls as we stretched our legs on the short walk to the overlook over the Teklanika. The snow was just abating, and while clear skies were still well into the future, we could see mountains beyond us just about everywhere. The park entrance was still getting doused in snow, but further ahead looked just fine—save for the "road closed beyond this point" sign.
-----Our driver, a veteran of 28 years on the Park Road, was convinced that he'd be able to go on if they'd open the gate, and after consulting and haggling with the rangers over the long-distance walkie-talkie and waiting for an industrial-strength road grater to go over it, we were allowed to proceed. This was where the real magic happened, as the skies got clearer and clearer as we climbed up the steep, winding, 1.5-lane mud road that had been cut into the cliffside. As we were the first in the park, we were able to make some good time; coming back had us slow on many occasions to give incoming traffic the right-of-way.
-----On the way up, we saw—in addition to the aforementioned caribou—a lone black wolf, covered in specks of snow and with determination in his striking amber eyes as he strode along the road back to his den. Though they use the road to get around—as they know where their dens are in relation to it—visitors to the park rarely see them.
-----Though the active snowfall had ceased, it was still cold and windy, and the snow still stuck. Polychrome Pass, the epic expanse well-known for its striking shades of silt, was blanketed in snow. Nearly every body of water was frozen save for streaks of running water along their edges and center. I'm certain that it's beautiful any time of year, but there was something especially peaceful about the wintriness of it all.
-----Clouds had moved along for the most part, but there was still a system hanging over the deeper Alaska Range, hiding Denali from full view save for the darker rock that constitutes its north face. But if one comes to Denali to see Denali, then one is doing it wrong; unlike other parks where there but one thing to see (such as the geysers of Yellowstone), Denali as a park has a great many facets of which the Alaska Range in total is only a part.
-----We continued into about halfway on the park road and arrived at our westernmost destination at the small ranger outpost and gift shop at Toklat River, where the winding and somewhat terrifying road had abated in favor of a much more relaxing journey over the valley. It was there that we talked to a park ranger and found out that we were up to around 5,000 feet above sea level during our accidental trailblazing yesterday. Furthermore, they closed the next trail over—which shares a trailhead with the side of our trail that we couldn't get to over the mountain—because of a "bear incident." After talking to a guy on our bus, we learned that there were simply an exorbitant number of bear sightings on the trail, leading to its temporary shutdown. It makes me glad that we weren't able to go that way.
-----There is something magical about being surrounded by high peaks, but my favorite kind of mountain is that which seemingly rises out of flatness, and in the level river valley, the Toklat area gave that feeling. It was still too cold to do anything but take a few pictures and then head back to an area where visibility could be sacrificed for warmth.
-----Though it was the same scenery on the return trip, there was something different about it as well; the lack of cloud cover made everything brighter and made everything seem warmer, although the rolled-down windows of several folks in the seats ahead of us was a constant reminder that it was still extremely cold. The trip back was only slower due to stopping to give other buses the right-of-way (a treacherous endeavor when there doesn't seem to be enough room on the side of a cliff) as well as a departed couple who left their camera and—on one occasion—stopping because a little light came on our driver's dashboard that said something ominous about the brake system despite the brakes being fine. We thought we were in for another breakdown and were about to take a vow never to use any vehicle but our own for this trip going forward, but soon enough we started rolling ahead again when he figured that it was just a computer problem. (Nonetheless, we're going to be very wary if our plane from Talkeetna tomorrow is flown by a third individual with the same name.)
-----The total wildlife count came in at about a dozen Dall sheep, 6 caribou, 4 moose, 2 willow ptarmigan, a black wolf, a golden eagle, a grizzly bear (waaaaaaay on top of a hill) and more red and Arctic ground squirrels than could be counted. We returned at about 2:00 and thereafter went on an ultimately unsuccessful hunt for an ornament for Mom's collection. We ate a few scones at the small coffee shop adjoining the visitor center and then headed back to our room for some rest before dinner.
-----We had a few coupons for free coffees from the bar and grill adjoining the cabin complex, and we went over there and talked a little to the bartender who was just closing up. She was from New Orleans and had gotten a one-way ticket to Alaska, and this is her first summer here. We asked about the vastly different accents of the Louisiana couple from our Arctic Circle adventure, and we learned that people really from the heart of New Orleans sort of inexplicably sound Bostonian. We thanked her for her time as she closed up shop, but the coffee was weak and had many floating grounds, so we ended up chucking most of it down the sink. ("It was free anyway," my dad said.)
-----(The sink takes over a minute for warm water to get through cold pipes, and so it's hilarious that we have to effectively waste water next to a sign that implores us to "please conserve water." Also, Denali is continuing the trip tradition of hotel phones not working, as my dad had to call the front desk to ask about confirming by phone our flightseeing tour tomorrow. Nothing wants to dial out—only in.)
-----Our respite from the day had to end, and we went back to the Denali Salmon Bake. As an appetizer, we split the Yak-a-dilla, which is a quesadilla with yak meat, locally raised. With all of the exotic meats we've been eating, I don't know how I'll ever go back to a less varied diet, especially because yak was delicious. It was everything I ever wanted bison to be but wasn't. For this time, my dad and I both got the halibut tacos for entrées, but he abandoned the idea of eating his second like a normal taco because each one I've seen over the past two days has come out with twice as much filling as would be reasonable—but they were, of course, still quite good. My mom got the Drnuken Chikcnen—yes, you read that right—which was an equally massive sandwich with a generous amount of flavorful chicken tenders in some kind of bourbon-flavored barbecue sauce. For dessert, we finally got my dad to try a bite of the blueberry pie, and he was glad that he finally acquiesced.
-----On the way out, we stopped by an adjoining gift shop before heading a little further down the road for some gas before our long and early day tomorrow. When my dad got out of the car, our waitress from our first dinner at Big Daddy's in Fairbanks walked out of a nearby shack of a restaurant called Denali Doghouse and asked if we were the crazy North Carolinians that she remembered. As it turns out, she was heading to Palmer with her husband, so we might run into her yet again. Only in Alaska!
-----Tomorrow: a journey to Talkeetna, where the weather will hopefully be good enough for a flight around Denali, before a hike at Hatcher Pass en route to Palmer.
-----6:00 in the morning—our newest frequent wakeup time—saw us ready to go a little after 7:00. Our first stop of the day was at a Safeway in Fairbanks to replenish our supply of water, which didn't take that long save for checking out; the store was still opening and there were only a few self-checkout lanes open, which slowed us a bit, but we weren't getting massive amounts. We found a spot in which to stuff the water supply and we hit the road on the Parks Highway southbound.
-----As we caught glimpses of the huge peaks in the Alaska Range that we knew had to be scores of miles away, we kept on our toes for Denali. I kept thinking "okay, that one has to be it," but every turn took us within view of an even taller peak. The cloud cover was not bad and it didn't rain on us, but it was quite chilly, fluctuating between the high 30s and the low 40s with a steady wind.
-----The scenery on the Parks Highway made the trip feel like it took no time whatsoever, and after a precipitous bend around a mountain we found ourselves smack-dab in a heavy conglomeration of hotels and restaurants that constituted the town—technically, census-designated place—of McKinley Park. I'm not sure if a single soul lives there, but it's sure busy, and we're ahead of the heavy tourist season.
-----We donned several extra layers at the visitor center, and soon we were practically Matryoshka dolls of fabric. When it wasn't windy, the parka and even hoodie felt excessive, but it was almost never calm. At the visitor center, we inquired about some trails and decided that we were going to go to the Savage River Alpine trail, one of the newest in the park, which led a strenuous four miles up and over a ridge line, from whence we were promised expansive views alongside the possibility of Dall sheep and caribou. As we went back outside, a large moose burst out of the foliage and was spooked by the people accumulated outside.
-----Denali allows passenger vehicles to drive the first section of the park road, until the pavement stops and it's bus-only from then on. The views of the Alaska Range were tremendous despite the clouds; the mountains were bigger than the clouds and as they passed over, we could see evidence of a recent dusting on the peaks. We turned out to admire the scenery on several occasions as we searched for Denali itself, which spent much of the day in obscurity. (By the end of the day, we'd seen it, but from our vantage point, it didn't seem all that much higher than the epic peaks around it to the point that I’m still not sure which one it was.)
-----The wind began eating away at our layered selves once we exited our vehicle, but we'd been well prepared, and began our ascent alongside a foursome from Fairbanks. What we did not expect here on the twenty-fifth day of May was snow, which came down in small flurries as we'd driven and was packed up to a maximum of around eight inches as we trudged up the trail. The evergreens around us kept us insulated from the wind, but made us especially wary of bear and moose.
-----As we exited the tree line, we began the gradual ascent up the mountain, and the wind began blowing a bit, but it wasn't bad—in fact, I even shed my parka for a spell. The path forward did not have the same grandiose view as the view backwards, where it felt like every peak of the Alaska Range was within sight, but the path was treacherous enough as the sun began to melt the snow into slush and then sloppy mud. Our hiking boots were the real heroes of this story, as they repelled every bit of nastiness that the trail threw our way. We would have made much better time had we not looked back every few minutes to marvel at the view.
-----All of a sudden, things got steeper—much steeper. It was switchback after switchback as the trail climbed higher and higher, and before we knew it, we had to catch our breath for the altitude. The wind began picking up, which meant that our parkas went back on and we bundled our faces up as much as possible. Flurries began flying in, thrown hither and thither by the wind that picked them up from the distant cloud that was laying new snow on the peaks far afield.
-----It was here that a Dutch couple met us on the way back, and they told us that they had been unable to complete the loop because of heavy snowfall on the peak obscuring the trail. We thanked them for the heads-up, but secretly we all harbored a suspicion that we'd somehow deduce the trail. Once we got closer to the summit, we kept on a ridge line that now afforded grandiose views to our left, and we split time between turning our backs to the wind, admiring the view, and looking down at the thin trail that led towards a set of rocky outcroppings at the far end. We were now as far up as the peaks around us, having climbed nearly 2,000 feet when it was all said and done.
-----We should have known better when our Fairbanks hikers left us to go back to their car, but they had announced their plans far previously and thus we thought nothing of it. As we inched our way towards the summit, occasionally consulting each other's opinions and observations to great success, we spotted a small furry creature that we thought looked like a gopher. At first we thought it was a marmot, but after taking a few pictures we realized that it was an Arctic ground squirrel, and our hunt for the trail led us up to it. It was a feisty little thing and more or less coincidentally led us up the trail to the top, at which he began screaming at us.
-----We were not entirely at the summit, but we weren't a far distance from it and nor was it a great deal higher than us. While the footprints of the Dutch couple had long since petered out, we were now at a total loss for where the trail went ourselves. Deep snow banks covered a great deal of the incline, and while there was room to spread out at the top, the drop down was quite precipitous.
-----A couple from the Ukraine had caught up to us, and while the husband's English was better than the wife's, putting our heads together only led to one thing: keep moving along the ridge line, up towards the summit, to try to find a way around the vast snow buildup to what we thought was the trail on the other side. As we got up to a smaller ridge just below the nearly vertical ascent to the summit, we spotted a Dall sheep ... walking up the hill the other way towards us. We froze, but he didn't care much at all and continued nibbling on the scant greenery.
-----Standing stock-still was the worst possible thing for our bodies because the wind just whizzed around us, taking up loose snow and scattering it in drifts. As we watched the sheep pass, we saw another come over the hill ... and then another ... and then two lambs following closely behind their mothers. In all, it was a group of ten, slowly eating their way across the mountain. The closest one got to within about twenty feet of us, but none of them really so much as cared that we were there at all.
-----By the time we could regroup, it was abundantly clear that there was no way to get across towards what we thought was the trail, and though we'd walked around three miles of the four-mile trail, it was to turn into six as we diligently trudged down the mountain from whence we'd come, trying to avoid the worst of the wind as we snaked our way down the switchbacks to the safe zones were the worst gusts were hampered by mountains and forests.
-----On the way back, we saw a group of several more Alaskan-born hikers. We knew that they had to be Alaskans because the lady we talked to was wearing an athletic turtleneck with rolled-up sleeves and no headwear, while we were cold beneath our four layers and two hoods each. She told us that she'd been on the hike a hundred times and there was no way to go past the summit when the snow built up, although she told us that going further up the ridge was totally the wrong way to go.
-----The walk down was brutal. While the beautiful view was now easily seen without turning around—and the clouds had all but cleared out—walking down while so weighted down made it hard to stop on the constant inclines. We avoided frostbite, but it was definitely a threat and we'd likely have gotten some had we stayed much longer at the top.
-----We turned on the heat in the car and warmed ourselves as we drove to check into our cabins. We were sore and hungry, and after putting some stuff in our cabin and cranking up the heater to make it nice and toasty when we got back, we left for Denali Salmon Bake. On the route, we spotted two moose crunching on leaves alongside the road. One was the expected dark brown, while the other was lighter—almost caramel-colored—similar to a moose that we'd spotted on our trip up the Alaska Highway.
-----There are no words that can describe the Denali Salmon Bake. The building itself looks like a couple of wooden shacks that were melted together, and the resulting unholy confederation itself melted into the side of the mountain. There is no surface in the entire building that is flat; everything is on an incline. The windows are taped at the bottom. The glasses slide across the table if you’re not careful. Each room looks like it was built by a drunk architect, or by Willy Wonka if he manifested into the corporeal realm and subsequently went into the seafood restaurant business. Any more slant in any surface would have defied the laws of physics, and as it is, I’m not entirely certain if the bending glass in the windows were abiding by their statutes. Someone threw a building code into a black hole and the Salmon Bake was the result.
-----I couldn’t stop laughing at the incredibly slanted building, but they didn’t make money by advertising their weird construction habits. Their menu was as unusual as their architecture, and we began the meal with a trio of elk sliders. I was expecting something gamey, but it wasn’t the kind of gaminess I expected; there was either spice in it or I had a totally different definition of gaminess. They were all finished off in short order.
-----We also had, as a second appetizer, three small bowls of a seafood chowder that featured clams and salmon, which was very rich, although I must admit a preference towards the more traditional clam chowder of New England. Returning from our New England adventure were oyster crackers, which—for my dad—was very exciting. My main course was halibut tacos, which was surprisingly southwestern in aspects other than the fact that it was … well, a taco. They put two shells on it because it was just that big and piled it up with more cabbage and sauces and other assorted vegetables that there was clearly no way to properly eat one and maintain any shred of dignity. Alongside were corn chips and a blend of refried beans, rice, and corn in a bowl that served as a dip.
-----My parents both got plank salmon, which they said had a citrusy flavor. Before we could say “where’s the dessert menu,” we’d demolished our plates and were thinking of dessert. My dad got a chocolate mousse, as has become his custom. He says that he’s “not a chocolate guy” but makes exceptions for most chocolates save for the extremely dark. My mom and I split a slice of blueberry pie, which was made from local berries and served warm. It was sweet but not overly sweet, with a flaky crust, and was like a wonderful little hug for your mouth.
-----After walking up and down the inclines necessary to exit the building and saying goodbye to our Alabama-born waitress, we headed back to our cabin.
-----Our escapades in riding to the Arctic Circle had left us worn out, and so we slept in quite a bit. After getting up, we used what remained of the morning to do a much-needed couple loads of laundry and a small job of re-packing and re-organizing in the disoriented aftermath of preparing for yesterday.
-----By afternoon, we headed out on the town to find the University of Alaska Fairbanks, home of the Museum of the North. After asking an employee of the museum to direct us to where Denali might be seen and being told that it wasn't quite visible from their campus due to some unfortunately-placed hills, we went into the museum. It was very interesting and informative, with a lot of neat artifacts, but it was painfully obvious from several placards and exhibits that the information contained therein hadn't been touched since its opening in 1980. My dad re-created a picture he took next to a stuffed bear cub in the 1980s and my mom and I imitated several other masks and taxidermies.
-----Stretching our legs further took us outside once again to a dirt parking lot, as there are a great many wilderness trails that snake through the UAF campus. Yet while the trails traced a cobweb of paths, the signs that attempted their explication proved to not align with their actual paths. We were undeterred and sort of wandered off on some trails in the general direction of a lake that we knew was nestled somewhere in the deep woods.
-----The paths we trod took on several consistencies, from gravel to dirt to thin strip through the thick forest, but nowhere was the walking surface more distinct than on a section of heavily packed dirt and gravel. Walking on such sections made us bounce, and stepping on one section made the surrounding area jiggle upwards in the manner of jumping onto a water bed. The viscosity of the dispersion indicated—in our admittedly untrained observation—that water had pooled under the packed-down trail but above the permafrost. Had it been colder, it would have frozen and created a frost heave, but in nicer weather, it stayed liquid.
-----We worked our way down to the lake by following the trails and ... let's just say, fresh moose evidence. My dad absolutely loves moose and has been obsessed with finding one himself; apparently, the massive bull moose that jogged past our Toad River cabin was not sufficient satiation for his moose watching appetite. We worked our way past huge pits of muck where the trail had degenerated to mud, and eventually found our way to the lake which the map indicated had a bridge over it. There was no bridge and there were no moose, but it was a beautiful spot ... that is, until the wind died down, the sun came out, and the mosquitoes decided that we were a tasty snack.
-----We swatted and slapped our way over hill and dale, disc golf course and forested trail, back to the insect-free safety of the car, thereafter vowing to never again take a hike—regardless of how small it may be—without sufficient bug spray and our hiking boots.
-----The truly southern barbecue at Big Daddy's was too good to pass up on our final day in Fairbanks, and we got the same thing once again, save for a few different sides. Our waitress from last night was not serving us again, but she saw us and seemed happily surprised to see us back. The only thing different from last time was the fact that my dad and I were both hungry enough for dessert, which was in the form of a peanut butter cream pie, which was basically peanut butter mousse in an Oreo crust. The great thing about this mousse was that it was not a repeat of the frozen fiasco of Whitehorse, and none of us had to skewer it wholesale just to take a bite.
-----(Side note: our hotel is a bit of a mess. It's clean and the people are very nice, but nothing really works properly: the closet door jams open and interferes with coming into the room itself, the only way to really see in the bathroom is to turn on the heat lamp, the shower head is too big for the shower and the curtain is a few sizes too small, the phone refuses to call out, one of the sockets doesn't work and one that does had its facing pop off prior to our arrival, the refrigerator is encased in a warped chest of drawers without much in the way of air movement and opening said fridge means the entire fridge will come out unless you use your other hand to brace its body backwards, the Internet is exceedingly slow, the thermostat doesn't seem to have any effect over the climate control unit, the door isn't totally sealed and what is said in rooms is audible in the hall, and of the side doors into the building, one doesn't open properly and one doesn't lock properly.)
-----Our alarms went off at 6:00. We snoozed it quite a bit, but by a little after 7:00 we went to Fast Eddy's for breakfast. We wanted to get a small sampling of breakfast goodies in anticipation of a late lunch outside of Fairbanks, and we ordered what we thought was going to be a small meal. We entertained the waitresses with our pre-coffee selves and ordered. What we did not know was that the Eddy's philosophy of Alaska-sized dinners would also be applied to their breakfasts. My two blueberry pancakes were as wide as the massive plate it came on, and they were very very good but I couldn't get but half of them down. My mom was practically swimming in biscuits and gravy with a generous helping of hash browns, while my dad was the only to finish his plate because he just loves French toast that much.
-----Being idiots who had no clue of how much we'd get, we ordered reindeer sausages for the table, and only about one and a half got consumed. I'd always wanted to try reindeer, and while I've heard great things about its usage as a hot dog meat, by itself, it differed very little from regular sausage, save for being a bit gamier and perhaps a tad chewier. It wasn't bad at all, but it was the icing on top of a massive, massive meal.
-----After clearing out what we could amidst the requisite coffee refills, we ended up packing and heading out a little after 10:00. We rolled through what was left of Tok that we could not see from our cabin, which is very little—though we did see a large chair as we were heading out. We circled back around to get a picture of it; a large lawn chair is the last thing one expects in a middle-of-nowhere crossroads like Tok.
-----The road out was as straight and flat as anything on the Alaska Highway. Above the trees lay mountains as far as the eye could see, and it appeared as if we were racing right into them. We were thankful to be going the speed limit for once, although the Alaskan drivers often blew past going nearly triple digits, and how we didn't see such folks in trees after going airborne on frost heaves is beyond my rational comprehension.
-----The road once again wound in and out, and the only treacherousness came in the form of facing down an oncoming truck with a wide trailer on a narrow bridge. We took several pullouts to see the distant mountains, which included our first glimpse of the Alaska Range. It was raining off and on, and the peaks wove their way in and out of the passing cloud cover.
-----Of note, we passed over several dry river valleys where either the glacier that fed it had receded too much or the ice from the mountains had not yet melted to cause the runoff. The wind, which came in enormous invisible waves throughout the day, buffeted fine particulates up into great clouds that could be seen for a long distance. (We saw this yesterday as well, between Whitehorse and the border.)
-----It was around two hours on the road before we got to Delta Junction, the end of the road for the Alaska Highway. Before the official end of the highway, however, there was one last stop: Delta Meat & Sausage, a locally owned meat packing company. We saw that they had some free samples of exotic sausages and were very interested, but the friendly Montana-born lady—half of the couple who moved up and started the company—said that we'd beaten the tourist rush and they hadn't gotten any samples out yet. All of their products were refrigerated, so we just talked to her a bit, and she told us that most of their business was for hunters in the Alaskan interior who needed a place to turn their game into manageable food items.
-----Delta Junction is where the Alaska Highway ends, meeting the Richardson Highway in town right next to the visitor center. A recurring theme of the past few days has been incredible friendliness on the parts of the welcome center people, and this was no exception; since it's before tourist season, the talkative ladies always are extra-friendly to the first faces they've seen in a long while.
-----This particular lady told us about moose encounters as well as advice on food to be found in North Pole, around 15 minutes east of Fairbanks. She advised that we go to Pagoda, a Chinese restaurant that was featured on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. Once we got to North Pole and walked into its visitor center, the lady there told us that it was one of the few North Pole places open on Monday at all.
-----We successfully navigated all of the twists and turns of the Alaska Highway, and felt a great sense of accomplishment at having tackled its thousand-plus miles in less than a week. Yet the road went on, and the Richardson Highway proved to be much similar to that which we had grown accustomed. We saw more mountains and wound around more peaks and lakes, and even caught our first glimpse of the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline.
-----Getting to North Pole is not a big deal, because it's a small place whose main claim to fame lies in their year-round commercialization of the Christmas aesthetic. The light poles are candy canes, everything that can be dressed as an elf is dressed as an elf, and there's an enormous and thoroughly creepy Santa Claus statue hanging around near the highway. I can't imagine what they do when December actually does roll around. (They've got live reindeer and a literal pole that they flew over the actual North Pole. When will these madmen be stopped?)
-----Even the Pagoda had colorful Christmas bulbs around its ceiling, but it was tastefully incorporated into the authentic Chinese aesthetic. The menu was huge and we were advised at both visitor centers that they give you enormous portions. Wondering if we'd ever run into an establishment in the Last Frontier that understands the concept of normal portions, we got teriyaki beef and chicken fried rice, which were both excellent after an appetizer of egg rolls. We entertained ourselves with trying sweet and sour sauce on most everything and analyzing our psyches with a handy guide to the Chinese Zodiac. The worst part of the whole thing was when I mistook a stemless cherry for a cherry tomato.
-----The main street through North Pole has an unnatural predilection for roundabouts. When you come off the highway, three come within a mile, and it was disorienting enough for us to get lost despite how small the place is. Getting out was even more fun, and all told I think we went around them a combined eight times. Dizziness is apparently the lingua franca of the commercial Christmas capital.
-----Thankfully, the two-lane Richardson Highway had expanded to a four-lane expressway at the Eielson Air Force Base, and it didn't have a single traffic circle in sight. The ever-present rain was the only hazard in getting to our hotel room, which was a race against time. Initially, we had gotten a rental vehicle to drive to the Arctic Circle, but after enduring the gravel breaks on the Alaska Highway and knowing that there'd be no legal way to switch drivers on the Dalton Highway, we canceled that in favor of a much less stressful tour van. Confirmation had to happen before 5:00, and my mom and I have both been waiting to get a signal on our cell phones, which we'd anticipated happening in Fairbanks, but we have had no such luck. (We'll get a signal again, I'm sure ... but it'll probably have to wait until Seattle at this rate.)
-----On top of this, a recurring theme of our Alaska Highway trip is that the phones simply do not work. Sure, you can get a dial tone, but dialing out in any way leads to a recorded error message. The last place we had a reliable phone was in Ft. St. John, where we didn't need it. Since then, Toad River did not have a phone, Whitehorse's ended up with an error no matter what you tried, Tok's didn't work until we physically went to the front desk, and now in Fairbanks it's a repeat of the Whitehorse fiasco. Dad had to go to the front desk to leave a message, and we got e-mail confirmation.
-----After so much riding, we were looking forward to getting out and walking around in Fairbanks, so we went to Creamer's Field, site of a small dairy operation that closed in the 1960s. During the spring, a wetland forms, and the walking trail around the wetlands leads over swampy regions that wouldn't otherwise be accessible. My dad was looking forward to seeing a moose, but alas, we saw nothing more than a large rabbit and several birds. The region itself made for an extremely interesting walk, with all sorts of submerged and half-submerged trees. The water itself was silty in places, giving sections a rainbow-colored hue. The wooden path was toppled sideways off of their anchors at several spots, which made for a more wobbly and interesting walk, but we had great fun walking around the deserted wetlands until the mosquitoes came out to bite at the very end. But we pulled up our hoods and kept walking, so they didn't bother us—save for the one time that I opened my mouth at the wrong time. (They don't have much of a taste, but what taste they have is appalling.)
-----We awoke in Whitehorse with a singular goal: reach the Last Frontier. By distance, we had conquered much of the Alaska Highway, but the roughest parts were to come. The Yukon's 511 service, along with the advice proffered by the ladies at the Watson Lake welcome center, told us that the roughest gravel breaks and frost heaves were to be found in permafrost territory north of Destruction Bay.
-----Rain—steady but not hard—dominated the first part of the journey, and the mountain peaks were lost in the low-lying clouds, as they had been for much of our time in the Yukon capital. As soon as we got out of the outlying subdivisions of Whitehorse, traffic once again thinned to its barest. The clouds kept us from seeing many of the day's mountain peaks, and though we missed out on some of the highway's greatest scenery en route to Haines Junction, we consoled ourselves with the knowledge that our return journey would take us on the same stretch.
-----Haines Junction, like everything else in the Yukon, is an extremely small town. We pulled onto one of the few side roads and went into the Village Bakery, which is small yet sprawling, with a huge front porch tucked away into the forest. It's a hip and happening place for a town of less than 600 people, and it felt like half were at the Bakery. It felt no different from walking into an independent bakery in Portland. They also baked a mean scone, and when push comes to shove, that's what really matters.
-----We topped off gas in Haines Junction, having completed roughly a third of the distance from Whitehorse to the Alaska border. Destruction Bay was the next stop, and my parents reminisced about their misadventures in the great northwest nearly thirty years ago. As we rolled through Destruction Bay, they pointed out the place at which they'd stayed.
-----As we got ever closer to Alaska, things got bigger. The highway passed over the flat bed of the all-but-dry Slims River and traversed the south side of Kluane Lake, the largest in the Yukon, which kept going ... and going ... and going. Destruction Bay is named for an inlet on Kluane Lake where a storm took out a bunch of equipment during construction of the highway. All along the area—since exiting Haines Junction, really—we were on the north side of Kluane National Park, which contains the largest non-polar ice fields in the world. (While we'd been pronouncing the name as KLOO-ann, it's actually kloo-WAN-ee.) Its shrouded peaks paralleled us all the way to Alaska.
-----While many Yukon communities are few and far between, there are not many miles between Destruction Bay and the much earlier settlement in Burwash Landing, site of a small gold rush at the turn of the century. That legacy continues to this day with the massive gold pan—billed as the world's largest—emblazoned with the town name. Of course, while Burwash Landing is large enough to be on maps, it's still a blink-and-you'll-miss-it kind of place.
-----Burwash Landing represented a bit of a rubicon for our travels. We'd encountered hideous roller coaster-like frost heaves and had to endure gravel breaks, but we braced for the worst as we got into permafrost territory. Fortunately, we were spared that which we most feared as we worked our way to Beaver Creek, the westernmost settlement in all of Canada. In the five or so miles up to Beaver Creek, it was nothing but barely-patched potholes, sections of slick resurfacing atop scratchy and gravelly chipsealed pavement, and wavy frost heaves that left us dizzy after the worst sections.
-----A respite in Beaver Creek was well-deserved, and in the visitor center, we encountered a lively and friendly 65-year old French Canadian woman who'd lived all over the country and takes multi-month solo RV trips to the States in the winters. She regaled us with stories of fussing at cops in the Florida Keys, accidentally turning into a California penitentiary in a futile search for a campground, and much more. We returned the favor with some advice about hiking in Zion National Park.
-----There are thirty miles from Beaver Creek to the Alaska border, and those thirty miles proved to be amongst the worst. Just outside of Beaver Creek is the Canadian customs station, but one has to go past the Alaska border to get to US customs. The thirty miles of road in the aforementioned liminal space is not particularly well-maintained by either side; it was paved (for a certain definition of the word paved), but aside from that, little in the way of complements can be paid.
-----Finally, we reached the Alaska border, where there is a pull-out to take a picture with the sign as well as some information panels. The international border, which is kept tree-free by an international commission, stretches far as the eye can see in either direction, running from Mount Saint Elias in the south to the Arctic Ocean in the far, far north.
-----But as thrilling as it was to finally make it to the Last Frontier, our day's journey had not yet concluded. We spent some time at the border crossing, but not because it was a long process; we could have been in and out in less than two minutes, but we got talking to the border officer and inquired about the nature of some of the highways we'd be on. As it turns out, the fellow had taken a motorcycle trip all the way up to Prudhoe Bay and splits time between the two road border crossings between Alaska and the Yukon.
-----Finally back to miles instead of kilometers, the speed limit now read an unbelievable 65 MPH, a speed which—if reached—would send most travelers airborne on the frost heaves, of which there were more than enough. The further we got on the highway, the better they got, but we dealt with the worst of them amongst the mountains leading out of the border.
-----Almost immediately after crossing, we caught a glimpse of the majestic Wrangell Mountains to the south. While the Kluanes were epic, the distant, almost totally snow-covered majesty of the Wrangells just screamed "Alaska." Getting out of the car at a pullout left us with a silence so thorough that walking felt almost like desecration.
-----Not too much further down the road lay the Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge welcome center. We arrived at 4:30 Alaska time, which was precisely when they closed up shop. We went on the center's immense back porch to catch more beautiful views of the Wrangell Mountains, only to hear a chorus of angry squawking and a small rush of wind above our heads. A horde of cliff swallows came rushing in and rushing out of their mud nests, nestled underneath the roofline of the center. We did not know what species kept screaming at us and buzzing our heads until we happened to come back to the car right as the park ranger was driving away. She rolled down her window and asked us if we had any questions, which is how we learned the name of the species.
-----Views of the Wrangells framed the forests, the thousand unnamed ponds, and the Tanana River, which made for an epic drive when we could spare some time from the distorted and mangled road. Yet as we descended towards Tok, it became possible to do the long-signed (but long-insane) 65. Before we knew it, we were in the tiny town of Tok.
-----We had dinner at Fast Eddy's, a place where you can seemingly get everything, and their portions are Alaska-sized. I had a massive chicken burger with a side of beer-battered fries, which was the most unique thing on the menu. They were fluffy and crispy, just as all fries should be. My mom had a huge burger—and these are truly epic, half-the-size-of-your-head portions. Mushrooms, tomatoes, lettuce, onion, and the rest of the works topped a perfectly cooked burger that lived up to its name of "the incredible burger." My dad got a personal pizza, with a thick but airy crust. Generous toppings and just the right amount of cheese balanced it all out.
-----Our waitress brought out the check, but we were not yet done. Dessert were milkshakes: my dad had a strawberry shake, and I had a Butterfinger shake. It came out so cold and chunky that I couldn't suck it through the straw to save my life, and it wasn't until much later that it began to deliciously emerge.
-----Tomorrow: we finish the Alaska Highway at Delta Junction en route to Fairbanks.
-----Our alarms went off at 7:00 in the morning, and by eight we were out of our cabin and on the road to the Yukon border. The road out of Toad River led towards more epic mountain peaks, yet somehow the road felt even more desolate than yesterday. We went directly towards the mountain peak that had dominated the sunset last evening and saw ever more incredibly breathtaking vistas as we kept going.
-----We dropped down as the road went around Muncho Lake, a mile wide and seven miles across, nestled in amongst the peaks. It was still frozen mostly solid, although along the edges, cracks were forming and liquid water lapped up over the edges. Every time we'd turn a new corner, new snowcapped peaks could be seen.
-----After we came out of this gorgeousness, we encountered our first wildlife of the day: a stone sheep, standing majestically alone alongside the road. There was more greenery as we crossed rivers and watched for bison, of which there was great evidence of a herd but only males—alone or in small packs—were seen grazing on the side of the road. Not too much later, we spotted a lone black bear, minding his own business and rooting for food on the side of the road.
-----This section of the highway was either fruitful with scenery and wildlife at every turn, or barren and monotonous for scores of miles. Driving meant staying on one's toes the entire time and anticipating the craziest of the few other drivers. The worst drivers are the ones from the lower 48; Canadians were generally the nicer and more reasonable ones.
-----The geography teems with waterways, and we went around and across an uncountable number of creeks, lakes, rivers, and streams. Thankfully, few metal grates were to be found, save for the longest bridge on the entire Alaska Highway into Teslin, Yukon. (We also crossed the only suspension bridge on the highway.)
-----The most interesting thing about the highway's route is that it zigzags into the Yukon and back out a total of seven times, with the seventh its final entrance into the territory. On the fifth border crossing, the Yukon government places its sign, for the first community in the territory is Watson Lake. Its biggest tourist-y claim to fame is the Signpost Forest, which was started after a lonely GI made up a sign for his hometown and posted it. Now the Signpost Forest has around 80,000 signs, arranged on immense wooden stakes in a roughly concentric pattern, and walking around it is entirely otherworldly. No one really has the time to read every last one of them, and we did not try; we used it as an opportunity to stretch our legs and try to spot signs from places we've been. There were more than a few from North Carolina, and we also saw one from Wausau, Wisconsin—home of trip mascot Yoder the Duck.
-----We stopped at the adjoining visitor center, where the two friendliest ladies in the entire territory answered all the questions that we asked (and more than a few that we didn't). We debated lunch; though past noon, none of us were hungry (as we'd snacked in the car), so we topped off the gas tank and hit the road once again for Whitehorse.
-----For the last time, the road dipped back in to British Columbia, looping around mountains and going up and down big hills. We'd long been removed from seeing a ton of snowcapped peaks, but once again they appeared in the distance in the form of the Cassiar Mountains. One could see the road miles ahead as it lay atop the terrain, and once we entered the Yukon for good, we realized that the buffer zone that had been cleared on either side of the highway was now gone. The Yukon government works on repairing the road only, and it's a tough enough job without the extra cost of clearing an extra two highways' worth of trees and shrubbery on either side.
-----It was in the Yukon that we discovered the full joy of gravel breaks, where the blacktop dropped away to reveal either packed-in dirt (which was dusty but alright) or flat-out loose gravel (as the orange signs warned). The gravel was also only bad if there were oncoming vehicles or nutty Americans attempting to—of all things—pass. These gravel breaks did not last long, but felt like they went on for ages. Since they necessitated a slowing, most of the folks we passed seemed to be on these rough gravel breaks.
-----As we traveled further into the Yukon, the roads got rougher. Frost heaves, heretofore few and far between, are now actively sought as we scan the road for treacherousness of all sorts. The potholes are "filled" by a certain definition; since there are so many of them and so few road workers, all they do is just dump in some asphalt and call it a day, leading to half-filled potholes wherein the cure is deadlier than the disease, so to speak. It was a team effort to navigate these minefields at full speed.
-----After a pit stop for gas in Teslin, we kept on, where there were yet more gravel breaks and an increase in oncoming traffic from Whitehorse (where the locals apparently go south to various lakes on the weekends). There were also just as many lakes (such as the immense Teslin Lake) and mountains to be seen. Rain came in and out and in again, though never hard, as a steady stream of vehicles came the other way. Clearly, we were nearing Whitehorse.
-----Whitehorse is the capital of the Yukon Territory and its largest city by far, though it is spread out a good distance around the Yukon River. While a lot of the Canadians drove pleasantly on the road itself, the Yukon natives hold road courteousness right below cleanliness in the hierarchy of virtues ... and their vehicles are incredibly filthy. (To be fair, so is ours; spotlessness is laughable amidst the dusty patches of the Alaska Highway.)
-----After hundreds of miles and a rough day on the road, we arrived safe and sound at our hotel, which is the single weirdest mix of ultra-cheap and ultra-fancy I've ever seen. For instance, the chairs are custom-built, with the hotel logo on the back ... but the upholstery itself is lackluster. The bathroom is upscale, but a note tacked on the thermostat tells us, in so many words, not to touch because the thing doesn't do what you program it to do anyway. But it's clean and functional and the Internet access isn't a dog and pony show, so there's a lot to be said ... even if the modular structure manifests itself in slanted hallways and doors.
-----We ate dinner—our first proper meal of the day—at an Asian fusion restaurant. The Yukon is a place one expects ... well, I don't know what kind of food, but Asian fusion isn't the first guess I'd venture. We were hungry enough for the food to be extra-good; after a starting course of miso soup and small salad (with ginger dressing), we all had Udon noodles with varying meats atop. They came out on piping hot iron skillets, a bit like a noodle stir-fry crossbred with a fajita, though all the flavors were distinctly Asian. My chicken was extremely tender and tempura-battered, and the sauce was rich and somewhat spicy. Though appearing to be very little at first, it seemed to multiply on our plates the more we ate, which was a welcome sight to our famished selves.
-----My dad and I both got a chocolate mousse for dessert, and it was delicious—although one generally thinks of mousse as light and this one was absolutely frozen solid. You could build a lickable igloo out of the things if you had enough. The tiny, almost baby-size spoons did almost nothing; they could cut through the minuscule topmost layer of chocolate, but not the three layers underneath. I warmed my spoon up in my mouth before attempting to slice off some bits, but this wasn't too effective until things began to melt. My dad, fed up with the same tactic, took one of the metal chopsticks from our meal and skewered the mousse, stuffing it in with both hands and then eating it as if it was ice cream. It turned out to be a highly effective—and really the only—way to eat it.
