Alaska – Page 2 – TooBusyForWork

Denali shows her face!

We took our time getting around on Monday, but we finally made it out to the park. We were kind of looking for animals, but mostly just enjoying the scenery. The park’s visitor center had a couple of movies on we watched. The first one was about the history of dog mushing in Denali, and it was fascinating. The park has the only active dog mushing crew left in the NPS, and the dogs are used throughout the winter months to support scientific and enforcement tasks. They are very proud of their dogs known for being the old style, big freighter dogs instead of the smaller racing style. The second film was basically just a travelogue of the park in all four seasons with breathtaking photography. The center was a zoo, filled with people who all seemed to think standing in the middle of a walkway was appropriate behavior. The park store was worse. It was pretty small, and it was very crowded. Then again, we didn’t get there until around noon!

We decided to drive the 15 mile section of Park Road accessible to cars. Lovely scenery, but we really didn’t take any pictures. Then we saw Mount Denali had decided to show herself! I took 15 photos, but I will only show 3. She is about 75 miles away from us here, and my little point and shoot was at its limits, but she is definitely there.

Everyone I have talked to about seeing “The Mountain” was right: she is big, she is beautiful, and people just do a lot of staring with their jaws open. I know I did.

After seeing Denali, we went back to the motorhome with big smiles on our faces. We had a caravan travel briefing about how to get into our campground in Anchorage (complicated!) and places we might want to see along the way. We then caught a bus to the Cabin Night Dinner Theater a few miles south of the park. The food was pretty good, and the show was fun. It was a series of vignettes about life in early Alaska with a very talented group of singer/actors. Not at all vaudeville like the Palace theater in Anchorage. This was very professional. I highly recommend!

Today we got a bit of surprise when we woke up – huge fluffy snowflakes! Here is an iPhone video I took.

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The temperature was 33 on our weather station. And guess what? We had an ATV ride scheduled for today! We made sure we had warm clothes and rain gear. We also went to the local grocery store in Healy, just north of our place, to get some perishables. Kevin ended up going back to the park store to buy a knit cap, but the weather ended up being gorgeous by the time we got to the ride location at 1:00.

Some people were out for wagon rides (excuse the dirty windshield!)

The snow and rain left lots of mud holes for us

But the mountains were spectacular in the new clothes

We were pretty tired from bad sleep and the ride, so we came back to the motorhome, changed clothes (I took a warm shower too), then went to dinner. Best meal of the trip so far was at Prospectors Pizza in Denali Park. We had fried ravioli for an appetizer, then their Gold Rush pizza. We had 2 pieces of our 13” brick oven pizza left over! But we did find room for crème brûlée for me (there is always room for crème brûlée) and a chocolate cheesecake for Kevin. It was really outstanding.

We heard Denali was showing her face again, so back to the park we went. However the cloud cover and very flat conditions meant it was impossible to photograph. After the previous day, we were satisfied with our memories. We did enjoy seeing park staff or volunteers out walking with young sled dogs beginning their training. We passed 6-7 of them, but we only took pictures of this photogenic young lad.

Tomorrow Anchorage.

Last night in Fairbanks and on to Denali

We went as a group to “The Alaska Salmon Bake” at Pioneer Park on Friday evening. We had been warned the salmon would be over cooked, so almost all of our group chose prime rib. Excellent choice! It was tender and juicy, and the roasted potatoes I had with it were fabulous. Kevin had prime rib with macaroni and cheese. The mac was definitely so-so. The cheesecake afterwards was more than I could eat, so I took mine in a to go container and had it for dinner the next night! After dinner we went to the Palace Theater on the grounds. It was a vaudeville-style show starting off with a great piano player who did a sing along of early 1900s music. I knew most of the songs, and I had so much fun singing. I miss group singing so so much when we travel! After the singing, various vignettes were done regarding early Fairbanks history. Old fashioned fun.

All vaudeville must have a drag performance

Cast of 4 including the standard tropes of “good girl” and the “bad girl”

We saw a sun dog on the way back to the motorhome.

Sun dog seen on the way to the RV park after the show

On Saturday we headed the short distance to Denali and the Denali RV Park and Motel. We stopped at an old Alaska traditional place, the Monderosa. We definitely recommend this place! Great burgers and fish and chips plus nice folks running the place. The RV place doesn’t have much of a motel, but the RV sites are level with solid hookups. The fact that they are pretty short and narrow is just part of the experience, or so we keep being told.

We went to bed at 9:00 on Saturday because we had to meet the bus for our naturalist trip into Denali. Regular vehicles can drive 15 miles into the park, but to go beyond that requires riding an approved bus. There are two types of buses. One is for hikers and sightseers who want an inexpensive method of seeing the park. No narration, just a hop on, hop off kind of thing. The second type of bus is a dedicated one with the driver adding naturalist commentary. It is a physically nicer bus, provides a snack box, water, and a souvenir booklet (quite nice BTW). The goal is to see wildlife, and the bus stops whenever someone spots something along the road. This is the type we had, and since we the caravan made a special type of group reservation, the bus even picked us up at the campground. The fact that it was to leave at 4:50 am was not mentioned until the day before!

We climbed on, almost awake, and took off for the park. We couldn’t leave the bus when we saw wildlife, but the windows are big enough for lots of picture taking. We saw pretty much everything we wanted to see. Be kind about the pictures; I have a simple Canon point and shoot.

A grizzly bear close to the road.

A young moose a long way from the road.

Dall sheep, a first for me. These were a loooonnnnngggg way away, but my binoculars confirmed I am correct in the identification. You’ll have to trust me.

And caribou! Another first for me. The males have the super long antlers while the female antlers are smaller. Males lose their antlers after the rut, but females keep theirs until late winter meaning all Santa’s reindeer (domesticated caribou) are girls!

Of course the scenery was interesting too. We won’t be seeing the Denali mountain from here because of the rain and clouds, but nice views without that. It started off rainy, then we had some partial clearing.

After a nice nap when we got back to the campground, Kevin and I decided to take a short road trip south on the road we will take to Anchorage in a few days, just to see the sites and pull-ins we can’t do in the motorhome. When the clouds came down and it started to rain, the mountains became ethereal and fascinating. They basically disappeared into the mists.

We did see something a bit different – the tourist train headed into Denali from points south (Anchorage and others). That would be a fun ride!

We ended up at the 49th State Brewery just north of town for an early dinner at 4:30. Beer was ok, and the food was good. Very busy though!

Tomorrow we are on our own until the evening when we attend a show. More on that later.

Two more (almost) days in Fairbanks

After the first two super busy days, we relaxed a bit. On Wednesday we drove part of the Steese Highway. It is just one of those “things” that Alaskans doesn’t use highway numbers; they refer to most highways by a name instead. The roads so have numbers, for example, the Steese Highway is legally Alaska 6, but no one uses the numbers. You just have to get used to it. The Steese goes north a bit then northeast of Fairbanks. We drove it strictly as a scenic drive, using our copy of the Milepost to identify interesting sites. We drove past the Dredge #8 we visited before, and it reminded me to post the picture of our $20 in gold! As I said before, we had it mounted in a magnet that will stay on the refrigerator in the motorhome.

Not long after the turnoff to the Dredge, we stopped at the state historical marker for Pedro Felix, the discoverer of the gold that made Fairbanks famous. While the name sounds Hispanic, he was actually Italian, and his real name was Felice Pedron, but he seems happy to have gone by the name Felix Pedro. His discovery was made just across the road from the marker, and the site is now owned by the Pioneers of Alaska historical/social group. You can even pan for gold there! He discovered a number of other claims in the area and ended up a very wealthy man.

The Milepost is the indispensable guide to Alaska, and it noted there were two osprey nests along the side of the road. There was a big one, empty when we came by, that supposedly had originally been an eagle’s nest, but the smaller one was active. Obviously the bird thought some home improvement was in order.

The scenery was lovely. The hills were gently rolling, even with the debris of placer mining all along every stream. There had been enough time that much of the debris was being reclaimed by forest. Lots of blueberries.

One thing about placer mining was that it took enormous amounts of water not for the hydraulic shoves and to operate the steam engines of the mills. The Davidson Ditch was one solution to this. For about half of the 90 mile journey it was a traditional canal/ditch, but it needed to transit elevations higher than its source. It used pipes as a siphon for the other half, also using them to transit hills. This is a remaining part of the ditch showing both an above ground pipe and where one end of the pipe goes into a hill. Interesting efforts for the first big pipeline construction in Alaska! Built in the 1920s, it operated until 1952. Parts were used in a hydroelectric plant from 1958-1967 when a flood closed the plant.

The scenery was lovely. The rain foreshadowed what we would get today.

As always in the wilder parts of the north, there are other engineers hard at work. I wish I had kept some sense of scale for this beaver dam. It was at least 5’ high! There are beaver ponds all over the areas we have driven both in Canada and Alaska.

The “ditch” disappearing into a hillside

We had a late breakfast at an old lodge along the road. The place was called the Chatanika Lodge, and I recommend it. Talkative folks, and family run. The roofs and some walls are covered with $1 bills. It is a “thing” to staple one to commemorate your visit.

The next day we visited Pioneer Park, an historic theme park run by the city of Fairbanks. Interesting place. It had lots of historic mining artifacts including one repurposed into a fountain.

Remember how I said it took a lot of water to mine? Without diesel engines, even the shovels were operated on steam. Lots of wood and lots of water.

After the mining history area, we went to the art museum. I fell in love with this wall quilt! The sign says it was Ree Nancanow and is a gift from the National Park Service. What artistry!

There is another part of Pioneer Park called “Frontier Town”. It is devoted to old structures originally in Fairbanks that have been moved to the park. A few are reconstructions, but most seemed to be the original buildings. Some have small museum displays inside, some are now offices or food establishments, while others are not open to the public. Here are a tiny fraction.

The Palace Hotel was an imposing structure with rooms. A bath could be had for 50 cents!

Kitty Hensley was a major player. She owned both a paddle wheeler and a mine. Look at that fancy two story place. I think the one next to it was a brothel. To put it mildly, they weren’t situated next to each other in their original locations!

There was also a transportation display. The Nanana is not in the best of shape, but you can still see how big these boats were. They were filled with cargo plus pushed barges with mining supplies up and down the river for years.

The Nanana plied the rivers for many years

And of course there has to be something about the railroads!

More transportation examples were found in the parking lot. Pioneer Park allows RVs to spend a night (or few) in their parking lot, and there was quite a collection. Big fifth wheels, nice Class A and Class C rigs, a few trailers and vans. And then there were these folks who look like they are staying a while. There are grills out, chairs, tables, and at least one of the vehicles has a flat tire. At least they have a safe place to stay.

We went to Santa’s Workshop in the afternoon. Since our campground is in North Pole, Alaska, that is required! Can’t show anything there because there were, perhaps, some presents bought! Next door is the “Reindeer Flying Academy” with a nice herd of reindeer. Expensive to go in the pens, but the picture outside is free!

We are in Fairbanks through tonight, then we head to Denali. We are attending “The Famous Salmon Bake” tonight with the caravan. However previous attendees had said we should order the prime rib, so we will be doing that! We are also going to a show. Both are in the grounds of Pioneer Park. I will post about that next time.

First two days in Fairbanks

One thing about an RV caravan is that they will keep you busy! We arrived on Sunday after a pretty nice drive north west from Tok. On Monday we started the day heading to the Riverboat Discovery for a fabulous cruise. The boat itself was interesting.

It was a BIG boat! I missed the rear paddle wheel in the picture

They had a full production at the shore too

A previous incantation of the “Discovery.”

We had been warned the best view was on top and the left side, so that is where we sat. Kevin and I chose the covered top seating while some of our group chose the open seating. We got a fun demonstration of a seaplane take off and landing.

We cruised by an abandoned shipyard. Shipping is why Fairbanks was founded. It was as far as the riverboat supplying miners could make it. There was lots and lots of river travel since the area is so forested and remote. Rivers were the highways of the times.

We paddled past Susan Butcher’s famous dog sled training camp. She won the Iditarod four times in five years, only the second woman ever to win the race. She is a legendary figure in the dog sled world. Though she died in 2006, her husband and daughter continued her work. Her daughter Tekna and some of the other folks gave us a fabulous demonstration of how the dogs train and play.

Into the river for a cooldown after racing

I know videos are a pain to watch here, but take the trouble to click on this link to see (and hear) the dogs in action. They are having fun!

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After the dogs, we visited a recreated Chena native village. The docents were all natives from the area, and they talked about life before and after Europeans arrived. We saw a group of reindeer they let out each day, conveniently just as the riverboat comes by.

A convenient t group of reindeer, the domesticated version of caribou

The fish wheel is still used to catch salmon and other fish. We were shown how they were filleted, dried, (tall tent roof structure), and smoked (large wooden structure). A cache to store food is to the right of the smoke house.

Note the fish wheel and post-European contact tents

We got off the boat to have more direct presentations by the docents. The trapper cabin was recreated in a very traditional style.

We were shown examples of the numerous fur-bearing animals the natives used in their daily lives by a young woman sitting at the entry to a cache cabin. Cabins were a post-European concept when the natives stopped being nomadic.

Indigenous woman sitting at entry to a cache for storing items over winter next to an indigenous cabin

There were examples of more traditional shelters too. Sorry I didn’t get a good picture of the fur-covered structure. It was done like, made with steamed north limbs. It was used as longer-term housing for families. The spruce limb shelters were for hunting camps.

Traditional hunting party shelters with a birch bark canoe

This ride was a true class act, and I would highly recommend anyone in the area to attend!

After the boat ride, we had dinner at the dining area associated. Not bad – beef stew, roasted veggies, (slightly stale) rolls, brownies. The managed the crowds of a few hundred very efficiently.

After a lunch in the motorhome, we regrouped to go to the Ice Museum in downtown Fairbanks. It is one of those oddities that are locally interesting. It is run by an ice carver, and our tour started with seeing how the ice is harvested and cut by renowned carvers every year. Then lights were turned on to show a bunch of carvings that had been done. People were invited inside to take pictures and even slide down the ice slide! Sorry I didn’t get a better picture, but here is Kevin sliding. Really, it is, trust me!

The second day here was also fairly full. We took a bus trip today to the Gold Dredge #8, a National Historic Landmark. Another fabulous trip. The first thing you see on the grounds is part of the Alaska Pipeline. The exterior you see is an insulation jacket around the pipeline itself to protect the permafrost.

Isolators to protect against an 8.5 earthquake

A “pig” used to scrape gunk off the interior of the pipeline

Much of the pipeline is underground, but just under half is above ground.

When we got past the pipeline, we boarded a cute historic train that would take us to the dredge. I can’t believe I didn’t get any pictures of it! The ride was interesting in and of itself. We had a musician who joined us as we were boarding.

He’s been playing on the train for almost 30 years

The train took us through some left over areas.

There was a steam engine they operated to show how the carts of ore from drift mining were moved from the mine to the processing facilities.

Steam was blowing as the car moved through its paces

While hard rock drift mining was done in some places, the bigger claims used placer mining from the streams. The dredge dug the shore with its big shovel, grabbing the rock into the buckets on the right. Then the buckets dumped the rock into a big grinding facility that eventually moved the rock through filters that captured the heavy gold while moving the waste rock to the chute on the back to the thrown out. It was very effective and an absolute environmental nightmare. There are piles of placer waste rock thrown into huge rows all through the area.

After being shown the outside of the dredge (no one can go inside), we went to a spot to pan gold for ourselves! We had a demonstration, then everyone was given a small sack of “pay dirt”, a pan, and a big wash pan full of water. The gold we found we could keep, and I made a whopping $8! Kevin made $12, and we paid them to put it in a small locket attached to a magnet. It is a total racket because almost everyone paid way more than we made in gold, and it was great fun.

Afterwards the bus took us back to the campground for a bit so people with pets could deal with them. We then went to the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska. Nice museum, but smaller than I expected. They showed two interesting films though. One was about the methods faculty, staff, and students use to find and recover fossils in Alaska. There are huge fossil beds that have disgorged hundreds of finds. Many are dinosaur fossils, but they also discussed the plant fossils and how those are discovered. The second move was about Auroras, and I finally understand what makes the light and colors! Well done.

Our next two days were free of planned group activities. I will cover what we did later.

The road from hell (or Yukon Territory to Alaska)

We left Whitehorse on 30 July to head to Destruction Bay. The scenery was as lovely as anything we have seen. The place was a construction depot during the build of the Alaskan Highway. One night a massive chinook wind of 60+ mph came through and basically destroyed all the tents near the lake where the crew stayed, therefore the name! The campground was Destruction Bay Lodge and RV Park, but there wasn’t any lodge any more. The RV park was a gravel parking lot on a sloped hillside, but they had solid 30 amp power and the best views we have had from any campground plus NO BUGS.

There are 16,000’ mountains trying to hide in the smoke haze

Gorgeous mountains with the Kluane River below them

Trumpeter swans are making a come back in Tetsin National Wildlife Refuge

Our campground in Destruction Bay looking towards Kluane Lake

Destruction Bay campground looking to the mountains

We left early the next day to get to Tok, AK. We had been told by many people including our wagon master that this would be the worst stretch of road we would be on. Everyone was right! It started out deceivingly mild, and I rolled along at the 90 kph speed limit for a while, but then the frost heaves, pot holes, and unbelievably rough road began. I have drive roads as bad as this, but never for as long. The bad part was perhaps 100 miles, and it was truly awful. Most of it I drove at 50 kph (35 mph), but I routinely dropped down to 20 kph. It was a long, long day. We took very few pictures since we were just concentrating on the road surface, trying to anticipate the next nastiness. As we got to the US border the road temporarily got better, but it didn’t last!

The US border patrol confiscated my eggs, but I wasn’t surprised. It was a brief stop. We took a picture at the “Welcome to Alaska” sign, but I can’t find it! Just as well because the welcome was the worst road yet! The US, in their infinite wisdom, used asphalt for the road after the border station, and it was the wrong choice for permafrost. The tar and rock used in Canada was much easier to repair, but the asphalt was pot holed the worst I have ever seen, and I have driven on I-40 west of Flagstaff, my precious bad example. The permafrost made massive ripples that went on for hundreds of feet, and the frost heaves were huge!I ended up traveling a lot of it at 15 mph! Ugh. When we got to Tok, I basically collapsed. It took a total of 7 hours to drive the 225 miles from Destruction Bay to Tok. Hardest driving I have ever done.

After Tok, we enjoyed continuing to drive , now mostly along the Tanana River. This river is HUGE, and it flows through a very large valley in numerous braids. The river is a major resting spot for migratory birds, and much of the area is protected in the Tetlin National Wildlife Preserve.

There is an awful lot of water heading to the Bearing Sea.

Delta Junction is the official end of the Alaska Highway, so we got the mandatory picture.

We continue following the Tanana until we got to the Fairbanks suburb we are staying in – North Pole, AK. The ride was much easier, though there were still occasional frost heaves especially along the musket areas. I also finally got a good picture of the skinny trees that were so common. I am pretty sure they are a variety of hemlock., but feel free to correct me! They get quite tall, but the limbs are very short.

The land of skinny trees. Blow up the picture to see many more across the pond.

We are now in a really nice campground in North Pole, AK, Riverview RV Park. It is north of town in a quiet area. There are all kinds of things on the schedule here, so expect a lot of pictures coming up.