Alaska Part II: June 26-July 3, 2005
Journals
We stayed at the same state park (from previous log) near Chena Hot Springs on Sunday and Monday nights making our longest stay in one place so far on this trip-five nights. On Sunday, we drove up north of Fairbanks to the Dalton Highway: we drove the first 60 miles of the Dalton to the Yukon River crossing. Drivers heading for the Dalton need to take the Elliot Highway north of Fairbanks to the official start of the Dalton-this adds an extra 75 miles or so to the journey. Counting the mileage from our campground, we drove around 300 miles round trip (without the camper in tow). Beautiful drive through mostly uninhabited areas-amazing how much open space is up there. However, we were both glad that we decided not to drive the full Dalton-it's another 350 miles or so from the Yukon River crossing to Deadhorse, near Prudhoe Bay at the Arctic Ocean. While I'm sure that the scenery over the Brooks Range is amazing, that's a long way on a rough road, and our time was better spent down in Wrangell-St. Elias. Did a quick little one-man float for just a couple miles on the Chena when we got home-great river. On Monday, we headed into Fairbanks to check out the town. We left the truck to get our tires rotated, and biked around downtown Fairbanks-not the most exciting town, but we found a post office to mail some postcards. Got the truck back, and drove around for a while, and then had lunch near the University of Alaska campus-first real pizza we've had in a while! They have a museum on the campus at the university-the exhibits are all about the history of Alaska, broken down by the various regions of the state. The museum was very interesting, and perhaps the highlight of our visit to Fairbanks. After that, we drove around a little more before stopping off at Pioneer Park which is supposed to be a "theme park," theme being Alaskan history. Spent maybe 15 minutes there-definitely not our thing (we kind of knew this before we went, but wanted to check it out since there's not much else to do in Fairbanks). The guide books mention this as a highlight for Fairbanks, sad really because it's pretty pathetic. I guess overall I'd recommend against spending more than a day in town, which is what we spent. If you had less time than we do, I'd skip it all together. We headed back Monday afternoon to enjoy the river some more. I should mention that by this point, smoke from the wildfires up near Fort Yukon was making a serious impact on Fairbanks and the surrounding areas: very hazy and light smoke smell everywhere. The fires had been burning for about a week, but this was the first day it got really bad. Colorado was like this two summers ago, so we are used to it-still, it makes everything pretty dismal. On Tuesday, we drove out of the Chena area, through Fairbanks, and down to Denali National Park. We made a reservation in advance for Denali to camp in the Teklinika Campground. The road into the park (there is only one road) runs for about 86 miles from the entrance on the main highway to the end at Kantishna. The general public is only allowed to drive the first 15 miles of this road-after that, it's tour buses only. However, if you are willing to camp for a minimum of three nights, then they allow you to drive to the campground at mile 29. You are only allowed to drive the road in, and then back out on your day of departure, and there were only about 50 sites in the campground. On Wednesday, we had tickets to take the bus from our campground to Wonder Lake, near the end of the road. This is an 11 hour bus ride from the main gate to Wonder Lake and back-fortunately, they picked us up at our campground at mile 29-makes it more like an 8 hour bus trip. Not to say that it wasn't well worth it-we saw just about every variety of wildlife on the ride, including a total of five bears. Plus, it's the only way to see the interior of the park without hiking and backpacking: we decided not to backpack here because dogs aren't allowed. Unfortunately, I only took video on the bus because the zoom is much better than on our digital camera, and I'm having trouble importing the video for this log-sorry, no photos of wildlife! On Thursday, we biked from our camp up to Sable Pass-same route as the bus trip, but much different on bike. It was about 12 miles to the top of the pass-24 mile round trip-great ride. We ditched the bikes and climbed up to a small sub-peak for our picnic lunch, and then to a higher ridge for better views. Although we did see a large male Caribou, there were no bears out during our bike ride. On Friday morning, we packed up camp and headed out of the park and south to Talkeetna. Talkeetna is a small town around the south side of Denali, about half way between the park entrance and Anchorage, and is the starting point of many climbing attempts on Denali. We made a reservation at an RV park in Talkeetna due to the holiday weekend-good thing too as they were booked solid. This is also a stopping point on the Alaska Railroad between Anchorage and Denali National Park, so it's the most touristy area we've been to so far. Checked out the town on Friday afternoon, and the possibility of floating the local river. Although the river looked good for a float, we woke up to heavy rain on Saturday morning-oh well, we made some phone calls and got our laundry done. It's been a long time since weather has interfered with our plans on this trip, so we certainly cannot complain. The rain cleared by afternoon, so we headed out for a bike ride-they have a new 14 mile paved bike path from the main highway into Talkeetna. Sunday weather was still questionable for the river float, so we drove up the Petersville Road to the Forks Roadhouse for a beer. Nice drive, and the roadhouse was pretty authentic-been around since the mining days: these days the area is heavily used by ATVs in summer and snowmobiles in winter. Sunday afternoon weather was OK so we put the kayak into a small lake and paddled around a while-we enjoy reading a good book while floating around on lakes! Three days in Denali Park, and three days on the south side in Talkeetna, but no view of the mountain-I understand that it is rare to see it due to clouds at this time of year-looks like we'll be coming back this way sometime! Tomorrow is the 4th of July, and we'll be heading out of Talkeetna to spend a night outside Anchorage. After that, it's around the Kenai Peninsula for a few days before we need to be in Valdez to catch the ferry to Cordova on the 11th. Hope everyone is doing well, and congratulations to Chirs and Kate!
Click any of the above photos to enlarge the image!