Monday, June 30, 2014

Alaska at Last!

After talking about it for years, we’re finally here, Alaska, “the last frontier” and “land of the midnight sun”.   Alaska is from an Aleut word, Alyeska.  It means “that which the sea breaks up against.” And it’s BIG!  VERY big!

How big?  This Big!

It took us five days of driving to get from Tacoma to Fairbanks, all day driving, not those puny little 200-mile days we do usually.  Leaving the Seattle, we headed through customs at Abbotsford-Huntingdon.  Every time we tell someone we’re traveling out of the country, we get to hear the litany of border crossing horror tales.  This time it was from a couple that go up to Alaska every year to be camp hosts at an RV park.  “They’ll come into the rig and inspect everything.  They’ll take all of your meat out of your freezer and confiscate it.  It’s payback for us banning their beef all this time due to mad cow disease.”  (Fact: The U.S. did ban Canadian beef imports for 6 months in 2003-2004 due to 2 cases of bovine spongiform encephalitis in 10-year-old dairy cows).   On the contrary, we found the Canadian Customs officers to be their usual efficient, quiet, polite selves.  The officer asked us why we were entering British Columbia…to sightsee on our way to Alaska; did we have any firearms…no; did we have any fruit…yes, oranges, apples, and peaches.  Sorry, you can’t take the apples and peaches into British Columbia.  We handed them over, he gave us back our passports and away we drove.  Took all of five minutes, and we were in British Columbia headed for the Yukon!

Alaska, here we come!!  Only 2,182 miles to go!

British Columbia (BC) became the sixth province of Canada in 1871.  In October 2013 the province had an estimated population of 4,606,371, (2.5 million of whom live in the greater Vancouver area).  Considering that the province is 364,000 square miles that leaves you with an average of about 12 people per square mile.  That leaves quite a bit of open space…

Humans have lived in BC since the first Paleo-Indians arrived across the Bering Strait 20,000 years ago.  Around 5,000 years ago these nomadic peoples developed a more sedentary lifestyle and evolved into 9 groups speaking 3 languages.  Europeans arrived in BC in the late 1700’s bringing their usual gifts (smallpox and other diseases) that killed up to 50% of the native population. 

Fur traders were the first Europeans to enter the area.  By 1792 the explorations of James Cook and George Vancouver established British jurisdiction over the coastal area north and west of the Columbia River.  In 1793 Sir Alexander Mackenzie was the first European to journey across North America overland to the Pacific Ocean and claiming the inland area for Britain.  The establishments of trading posts, under the auspices of the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company, effectively established a permanent British presence in the region. 

With the agreement by the Canadian government to extend the Canadian Pacific Railway to BC and to assume the colony’s debt, British Columbia became the 6th province to join the Confederation League.  The borders were finally set through arbitration with the U.S. in 1903, settling the previously vague boundary of the Alaska Panhandle. 

History aside, this is a beautiful place, full of amazing sights and the best way to show you is through some photos taken along the way.

 One of our first sights in British Columbia.

Mountains everywhere. 

Wildflowers abound along the roadsides.  Western Columbine. 

Lupine makes a statement wherever it’s seen.


Rivers AND mountains.  Note the train tracks on both sides of the river.

Northbound trains travel on the far bank, while southbound trains travel the near side.

Our first night was spent at a small RV park with its own lake. 

Heinz shooed me out of the rig while the light was good.  Not sure what the rush was, the sun didn’t go down until long after 10:00.  I’m pretty sure he just wanted me out of his hair.

Day 2 and SURPRISE…more mountains, this time with snow and small glaciers.

When the sign says narrow bridge…believe it!

What the sign didn’t say was narrow, wooden bridge.

On day three we stopped for the night at a community (and barely that, population 20) called Jade City.  The town consists of one store selling artwork and jewelry of local jade, one café, a post office, a highway maintenance camp and several trailers housing the workers for the store and café.  Nearby is one of the largest jade mines in the world.  Somehow I always associated jade with China.  It turns out that most of the world’s jade comes from British Columbia, including the local Princess Jade Mine. 

Jade stones waiting to be cut down into smaller pieces.

Saws for cutting the blocks down.

Pieces of jade waiting to be packed up for shipment around the world.  While they look very dull here, wetting them brings out a much richer green color and polishing brings out the lustrous green we all associate with jade.

Well, we’re still on the right road.

Did we see any wildlife while driving through British Columbia?  Funny you should ask.  I decided to keep a log of animals seen along the way.  BC’s total was coyote-1, deer-5, elk-1, moose-1, black bear-7, and caribou-1.

 I do believe it’s my turn…our one caribou sighting in British Columbia. 

Our first bear sighting.  He took off before we got any closer.

And suddenly, there it was, the sign indicating our turn to start on the Alaska Highway, known by many (except the locals it turns out) as the Alcan Highway.

Day four was devoted to the Yukon Territory.  Now, if you’re like us, you’re asking yourself why is the Yukon a territory, but British Columbia a province.   Well, you know we had to GOOGLE IT - so I did.  It turns out that Canada has ten provinces and three territories, namely the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Yukon.  The major difference between a Canadian province and a territory is that provinces are jurisdictions that receive their power and authority directly from the Constitution Act of 1867 and are co-sovereign divisions.  Territories, on the other hand, are delegated their power and authority by the federal government.  Since the late 1800s new additions to the Canadian Confederation have entered in as territories as creating a new province requires a change to the Constitution Act.  But since creating a territory only requires a vote by the Canadian Parliament, a much less complicated process than opening the Constitution Act to changes, that’s how the Yukon became a territory.

Yukon entered the Confederation in 1898.  At 186,000 square miles it is the smallest of Canada’s three territories.  The total population of the territory is 33,897 or 0.18 person per square mile.  Eighty percent of the Yukon is wilderness.

Coastal and inland First Nations had extensive trading networks in the area for centuries before the first Europeans arrived.  Much like BC, the Yukon was first populated by fur traders; followed by missionaries and the Western Union Telegraph Expedition.  By the 1870’s gold had been discovered and the miners began to arrive.  This drove a population increase and the separation of the Yukon district from the Northwest Territories. 

Now here you go, our photomontage of the Yukon Territory.

 Welcome to the Yukon.

How strange, there are mountains around here.

And here…

And here…

A good looking bridge across a wide river.

But what is it with these Canadians and their narrow bridges; this one was grated.

The St. Elias Mountain range, complete with glaciers.

Kluane Lake along the Alaska Highway at the community of Destruction Bay (population 35).   The town got its name when a windstorm blew down structures erected by the military during highway construction in 1942.

Our animal count for the Yukon was one black bear…

…and lots of bugs on the windshield.

Now many people comment on the long days of summer up in this part of the world.  We’ve kind of noticed it.  The days are a bit longer here.  On this night the sun rose at 3:46 AM and went down at 12:15 AM.  A cool 3 hours and 31 minutes of “night” – not that it EVER got dark!

The view from the rig doorway at 10:00 PM.

 The same view at 0345.  No flash was used.

On day 5 we saw it, that magical sign, that wonderful, wonderful marker.

Whoohoo, we finally made it!

And just like that, we were in Alaska.  Well, that and a quick stop at U.S. Customs.

It took the greater part of the day, but we persevered until we made it to just outside of Fairbanks and turned into Eielson Air Force Base.  They have a great little RV park at Bear Lake on the base, tucked into the trees, no hookups, and lots of those famous Alaska mosquitoes.  Surprisingly, though pesky, they’re relatively slow flyers, easy to nail, and really haven’t bitten us all that often.  When they do bite, it doesn’t seem to itch much.  Of course, those are the inland mosquitoes; we haven’t encountered the coastal ones yet.  Further update on those later. 

 Bear Lake on Eielson AFB.

Bell flowers seem to grow everywhere across Alaska.

I did get a bit of an idea of just how cold it gets here when I noticed the parking lots had electric hookups at every parking spot.  It’s not for electric vehicles, but for you to plug in your engine block heater keeping your motor warm and making it easier to start in -50 degree weather.

After five days Heinz had had it with the sunshine.  He finally made liners for all the windows to block the light at “night”.  But even I had to admit that it was getting a little old being kept awake until 0200, then having the sun wake us up at 0400 or earlier. 

Heinz reading by sunlight at 11:00 PM.  (On the Summer Solstice, June 20, the sun rose at 3:30 AM and set at 12:25 AM in Fairbanks.)

I suppose most of you have heard the crazy stories about the road conditions in Alaska.  Well, to be honest, most of the roads are pretty good.  But….there are those few that make you go “Hmmmm”…

There is a lot of “permafrost” in BC, Yukon and Alaska – soil that never thaws out completely below a certain level.  The soil on top of the permafrost can thaw out in the summer, causing “frost heaves” and “undulations”.  Frost heaves are caused by soil thawing and raising the road surface, while undulations are caused by soil thawing and lowering the road surface.  Sometimes you can see the heaves and/or undulations coming, and depending on the angle of the light, sometimes you can’t. 

This creates a road surface that not only has lots of potholes, but turns into a literal rollercoaster ride depending on the speed you travel, the spacing and size of the heaves/undulations, and length of your vehicle wheelbase, etc.  For the uninitiated like us (trying to make time) this kind of road is bad juju, and can leave you with a rig that shakes, rattles, and rolls (at best), or a rig that feels like it just went completely air-borne (at worst). 

We drive a 40 ft rig with a car and motorcycle attached on the back, and I got to tell you, few things catch your attention more than crashing a 32,000 pound vehicle into the other end of an undulation at 55 mph.  Though I have to admit, launching into the air off the top of a frost heave would be another!  Yes, there were a few times when it felt like the whole contraption was launched in some sort of aborted take-off at the local airport.

We had one stretch of “highway” in the Yukon that was 135 miles long.  No problem, 135 miles divided by 55 mph - we’ll be there in 2.5 hours.  In our dreams - we arrived close to six hours later!  The only way to deal with these road irregularities is to slow down.…way down.  Max speed was 35 mph, with stretches of road where we were barely moving at all.  

Standard bad road surface (and patches) like we have anywhere.

NO, those painted lines are not painted by a drunk highway worker – they are in fact straight.

Sometimes the heaves and undulations are marked by red flags or cones.  Sometimes they are not – those get your attention real fast!   Of course, the really bad ones are the ones you don’t see until the front end goes into the air and crashes into the other end of the frost heave – so we have no pictures of those.

Summer time in Alaska, and the ability to repair bad roads, is a short four-month time period.  So, everywhere you go you see road crews fixing potholes or outright replacing entire sections of road surface. 

A frequent sighting along the roads.

Followed by this…

Or this…

…or…Yes, the entire section of “highway” is being replaced for miles. 

We didn’t do too much in Fairbanks, mainly because there wasn’t much to do.  But we rested, shopped for supplies, and planned our next week. 

Then it was up and out to Denali National Park.  This park was the dream of one man, Charles Sheldon, a Yale graduate who preferred the wilderness and big game hunting to city life.  Sheldon visited the Kantishna Hills in 1908, drawn by the chance to hunt Dall sheep, the world’s only completely white mountain sheep.  Once there he realized that market hunters were killing wild game to feed gold miners and railroad workers, hunting grizzlies, caribou, moose, and especially Dall sheep close to extinction.  Sheldon returned to Washington and campaigned to have Congress establish a national park of over two million acres as a wildlife preserve.  Considering the conventional wisdom at the time was that Alaska was a remote and frozen wasteland known as “Seward’s Folly”, this was an amazing suggestion.  On February 26, 1917, President Wilson signed into law a bill establishing Mount McKinley National Park.  Since then, the park’s boundaries have pushed outward to over 6 million acres.  In 1976, President Carter designated the park as an international biosphere reserve, focusing on ecosystem conservation and prudent use of national resources.  In 1980 the park was renamed Denali National Park.

Most of Denali has received full federal wilderness designation.  Within it there are only 17 miles of constructed trails, and one previously existing 92-mile road into the park.  Travelers along the road must travel by shuttle bus in an effort to decrease human impact on the park.  Around 400,000 travelers come to Denali National Park each year, mostly between May and early September, to see the wildlife or glimpse 20,320 foot Mt. McKinley, aka, Denali (Athabascan Indian for “the high one”).  Denali National Park is home to many animals, but the ones everyone hopes to see are the “big five”: moose, grizzly bears, wolves, Dall sheep, and caribou.  Read on to see what we managed to glimpse.

According to the park statistics Denali’s two peaks are only visible approximately 30% of the time.  The remainder of the time they are hidden within cloud cover.  So we felt very lucky to have seen the peaks not once, but three times during our stay in the park. 

North peak of Denali.

As I mentioned, travel within the park is by shuttle bus only.  The road is a paved 2-lane for the first 21 miles.  After that it becomes a “2-lane” dirt road for approximately another 10 miles, then turning into a “1 ¾ lane” dirt road for the remainder.  One unique aspect of Denali National Park is that visitors are allowed to get off the shuttle at any point and day-hike cross-country, flagging down another shuttle at any point on the road when they’re finished hiking.  (Overnight hikes require a backcountry permit.)  Traveling the entire 92 miles round trip can take up to 12 hours.  One reason for the long trip is that whenever someone on the bus spots wildlife the driver will stop and allow everyone to watch and take photographs for 5-10 minutes and with all the wildlife to be seen, that’s a lot of stops. 

Shuttle bus at a scheduled rest stop.

Road along Polychrome Pass, no wonder they don’t want anyone but the bus drivers out on the road!

But let me take you through the scenery along the drive from the entrance of the park to the end.  Your bus ride starts in a taiga, also known as a boreal forest.  A taiga is characterized by the domination of evergreens and larches.  In the case of Denali there are only 5 types of trees that grow in the entire park, white and black spruce, alder, aspen, and birch.  The trees tend to have shallow roots to take advantage of the thin soil layer above the permafrost.  They also have altered their seasonal growth patterns to survive the winter.  Most of the tree growth is at the top of the tree, taking full advantage of the long hours of sunshine available during the summer.  Even with this adaptation the trees grow very slowly.  There is a tree ring on display in the Visitors Center that you have to use a magnifying glass in order to count the rings.    

 
Taiga at the entrance to Denali National Park.

See the little sapling with Heinz’s hand at the top of it?  A park ranger counted the whorls of the branches and estimated this “tree” to be 30 years old!  Most of the larger trees in the taiga are 300 years or older.

Chlorophyll is needed by all trees for growth.  Usually it is located in the leaves, but the aspen in the taiga start chlorophyll production as soon as the sun rises high enough in the spring to reach the tree trunks, long before the leaves develop, leaving the trunks with a greenish tone.

While hiking along the Teklanika River down in the taiga we spotted lots of moose tracks.

Along with a few bear tracks.

Hiking along the Teklanika River.  It was just a bit nippy that day.

Luckily we didn’t run across a bear while hiking, but we did spot these guys having brunch alongside the road.  HA - one of the big five down!

The rangers kept telling us that a favorite food of the moose is willow and there are 17 species that grow in Denali National Park.  Well if you’re like me, a willow is a rather large tree, and I sure didn’t see any of those in Denali.  Turns out that none of the Denali species are taller than 3 feet and most are like this little guy, the Leather-leaf Willow - 3-4 inches tall.

 In the winter there is little to no willow available for the moose, so they eat the bark of the aspen and birch trees.
As you ride through the park you cross several rivers known as braided rivers.  A braided river has a channel that consists of a network of small runs separated by small and sometimes temporary islands called braid bars.  These rivers occur in areas with high slope and/or large sediment load.  In the case of Denali’s rivers the glacier melt contains a very large amount of silt and rock that are carried down the streams.  Due to the high sediment and shallowness of the streams there are very few fish in Denali.  The lack of fish results in a primarily vegetarian diet for the bears keeping their size somewhat small (only 400-900 lbs.)

Glacier Creek, note the multiple channels of this braided river.  According to the rangers, the entire riverbed is never filled with water, but the channels do change course over the years. 

As you travel deeper into the park you come to a high alpine tundra valley surrounded by snow and glacier covered mountains.  To the north are the Kantishna Hills and to the south is the Alaska Range, including Denali.  Along the way you see small ponds called kettle ponds.  These are depressions left by retreating glaciers that have filled with rainwater and snow melt.

Transition area between taiga and tundra.

The Kantishna Hills on the north side of the valley.

Foothills of the Alaska Range with fresh snow.

Part of the 400-mile long Alaska Range,

Traveling through the Polychrome Pass we spotted these Dall sheep at the top of a hill.  Two of the big five down!

Kettle ponds along the McKinley River, another braided river.

While riding through the transition area someone on the bus spotted a wolf.  Look closely, it’s just above the left side of the patch of snow.  Big Five #3.

While we’re on the subject of the mountains, the park rangers post the numbers each day reporting on climbers on Denali and Mount Foraker, also in the Alaska Range and a mere 17,402 feet.

Reading down the far left column:  Number of registered climbers, Climbers currently on the mountain, Completed climbs, Number of summits, Summit percentage.  Most of those who don’t summit are stopped by inclement weather at higher elevations.

I heard on the radio today that a team of three climbers just completed climbs of the three highest peaks in the Alaska Range in one expedition over 30 days.  The first time this has ever been accomplished in such a short time frame.  Read about their climb at http://m.powder.com/stories/hunter-foraker-denali-climb-ski-repeat.

But I digress...  Our next stop was in the arctic tundra, an area where the subsoil is permafrost (permanently frozen soil).  The bare and rocky land can only support low growing plants such as moss, heath, and lichen.  There are two seasons on the tundra, winter and summer.  Average winter temperatures are in the -18 degree range and summer temperatures in the 50s.  So as the snow melts in the spring the permafrost keeps the water from being wicked away from the top few inches of soil.  This is good because tundra receives as little rain as a desert; an average of 14”/year in Denali.

 Tundra, complete with caribou.  Number four - we’re on a roll!

Typical of tundra plants is this Dwarf Alpine Hawksbeard, less than 2 inches high.

So that’s your virtual tour through Denali National Park.  I’m not sure how many of you have spent time in our nation’s parks, but they are preserving the best of our wildernesses.  If you do go, make sure you take full advantage of the ranger programs offered free everywhere.  At Denali we sat in on three different ranger talks at the campgrounds.  Topics ranged from the trees of Denali, politics and the management of wolf populations, to the raptors of the park.  These talks are always interesting, informational and usually a lot of fun. 

We also went on a couple of ranger-led hikes.  The first one was a short stroll (about an hour) around the Eielson Visitor Center on the tundra.  It was immediately audience participation time as we were all given a photo of a tundra plant to find as we walked and talked about tundra development and maintenance.  Our second walk was a bit longer, 2 hours, and was a naturalist walk in the taiga.  This one turned out to be a private tour as we were the only two who showed up that day.  It was perfect as the ranger was able to take us places along the trail that she couldn’t take a large group.  This included an area where an local resident had run a fox farm back in the early 1900s.  Fox furs were very popular then and raising foxes was quite profitable.  The chicken wire pens were still there although most had fallen down. 

Ranger Joseph, an anthropologist who works for the US Park Service.  He led us on the tundra tour.

Ranger fun facts:  this is a set of moose antlers where the two bull moose fought for dominance and their antlers became too entangled to release.  The moose died with their antlers still locked together.

 Ranger Jennifer and me chatting about wildflowers on the naturalist walk.

Another ranger fun fact: this is the trestle for the Alaskan Railroad, built in 1922 and still in use today.  The only difference is that in the 1950s, a 400-foot long, 60 feet high, wooden trestle at the north end (left in this photo) was buried under tons of rock and dirt by engineers for earthquake stabilization.

We enjoyed our time at Denali and it’s so hard to remember everything, so let me just give you an idea of the little moments.

Heinz has taken on the job of providing us with fresh baked bread and has been researching recipes.

And trust me, I’m not complaining!

 A red fox trotting along the roadside.

You know Heinz and his coffee – but sometimes it can REALLY be too hot. 
This one melted the straw!

Think it snows a lot here?  I mean, really, a toy snowplow?

 Father’s Day was a l-o-n-g day up in this part of the world.

Watching a red squirrel nibble on lunch.  I know, he’s not one of the Big Five, but you have to admit, he’s cute.

If I’m patient, she’ll surely run out of wildflowers to photograph…

(Heavy sigh…) maybe not…

We traveled on and are now in Anchorage for a few days.  Hope you enjoyed your trip across Canada and Denali.  In case you were keeping count, we did manage to spot all of the “Big Five” while we were in Denali.  Let me think, I showed you the moose, caribou, wolf, and Dall sheep, all from a bit of a distance.  Right…that leaves the grizzly.

Standing by the roadside nibbling on the salad bar.  He’s a little guy, only around 500-600 lbs.

He could not have cared less that the shuttle bus was about 6 feet away.


If I have to be this close I’m glad I was in the bus instead of coming up on this guy while out hiking.


More adventures soon, so stay tuned.