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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Kantishna Hills
on the north side of the valley.
Part of the 400-mile long Alaska
Range,
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.
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 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.
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.
And trust me, I’m not
complaining!
You know Heinz and his coffee – but sometimes it can REALLY be
too hot.
This one melted the
straw!
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…
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.
