Juneau to Haines and Beyond
Day 22 June 20, 2012Juneau to Haines
Walter woke up at 3:30 am and stayed wide awake until he got up at 4. I dozed some and got up at 4 when the alarm went off. There wasn’t a huge hurry to get ready to go because they don’t open the gates of the campground until 4:30 so I got all the usual things like making the beds etc done before we motored out. We got checked in okay and they put us at the front of the line in lane 4. They told us when we checked in that they’d start loading at 6 am so we had time to go back into the trailer and have breakfast and do the dishes before they even came to check to see if we’d turned off the propane.
We were one of the first rigs on the boat this time. They had us drive into the right front door of the ferry and drive down the length of the ferry and up the other side. We got our stuff together and went upstairs. We were on the ferry, Malaspina, which was very similar to the Taku both in layout and the fact that they have a floor of staterooms and a larger food outlet with short order cook.
We got seats in the front row of the front viewing lounge next to the folks we’ve talked to off and on from Iowa. They are birders and have really good binoculars and a very good telephoto lens. The weather was foggy and misty when we started out but as the trip went on it got better and better and the patches of blue up ahead got bigger and bigger. Finally about half way through the sun came out. Hurray. We also had to separate sightings of orcas (one pod of 2 or 3 and another pod of 4 or 5) plus two kinds of dolphins or porpoises and lots of seals. They were looking for a yellow billed loon so we had lots of sightings of loons and I learned how to spot them from the long trails they make in the water while they work up the speed to take off.
By 9 am Walter was hungry again so we went back to the cafeteria and he had a cheese omelet with country fries and toast from which I snuck a few bites and we shared a big bowl of mixed fruit that was really good. Then back to watching for light houses, orcas and loons. The clouds were still hanging on the tops of the mountains as we came into Haines but the weather was clearing fast.
Carmine the Garmin couldn’t find either of the addresses we put in for RV Parks in Haines so we followed her directions to the waterfront and checked out the Oceanside RV Park. It’s a tacky gravel lot next to the water with no space between the rigs just like the pictures on their website. So we found Main Street and followed it up the hill to the Haines Hitch-up RV Park. It’s a very nice place. All the spaces are on a lovely grassy lawn which is lush and green and freshly mowed. The office was nice, the bathrooms and showers were good, the Wi-Fi is free and works okay and we have the entire area we’re parked in all to ourselves, though it’s set up to be closer than that. We dropped the trailer and set up camp. I needed lunch but Walter was still running on his omelet so I had lunch while he fiddled with getting on line and checking the email.
Then I took a nap while he played on-line. When I woke up, he wanted a nap so I paid bills, answered email and uploaded the latest version of this on the website while he slept. By about 3 pm we were both awake and ready to go out exploring. First we drove southwest out of town to Chilkat State Park. It’s a gorgeous drive and by this point in the afternoon the sky was blue and all the mountains were out. WOW! Haines is surrounded by gorgeous snow-capped mountains so the view is drop dead gorgeous in every direction. We stopped at turn outs to take photos and soldiered our way through pot holes towards the end of the road until we got down into the park. It’s a 14% grade downhill once you arrive so I wouldn’t take the trailer in there. But there’s a wonderful little viewing hut with a great deck overlooking Chilkat inlet with views of both the Davidson and Rainbow glaciers. The Chilkat Range is the set of mountains that separates Chikat Inlet from Glacier Bay National Park. So these are high mountains with huge glaciers (38 of them) on the west facing slope. We heard a huge boom while we were there and the locals we were talking with said it was probably an avalanche or calving on the other side of the mountains. Davidson Glacier is a low elevation glacier that was blue in color like Mendenhall. The local guys said it had lost tons of mass over the last 30 years. The Rainbow Glacier was much higher up in the mountains and was still and white and puffy with snow.
There was a huge flock of birds in the water and we watched as they dove in unison into the water fishing. The locals thought they were probably scooters. As we were leaving 2 couples who were passengers on the only cruise ship in town today (I guess they get one a week) came by. They were from Kansas and had spent a week in the interior and then had left yesterday from Seward on their way down the Inland Passage. We warned them they might see rain!
From there we drove back to town and then out northwest of town to Chikoot Lake State Recreation area. The road to this park follows Lutak Inlet up past the ferry dock to where the Chilkoot River empties from Chilkoot lake into the inlet. Earlier in the day there had been brown bears and eagles fishing for salmon in this area. But they were gone when we got there. Never mind. The views were fabulous, there were tons of folks out fishing and the lake is lovely. Both the inlet and the lake are lined with steep mountains with waterfalls cascading down their faces.
We then drove back to town and decided to gas up before heading north tomorrow into the Yukon. Gas was $4.91 a gallon! But now we have a full tank that will get us almost to Tok in Alaska. We came back to the rig to find it nice and warm even though we’d left the windows on it. It really needed to have a good baking today, it had gotten so damp from all those days of cold rainy weather. At 8:30 we still have the door and windows open and it’s 62 outside. We rested a little while and then took showers—hot water and clean rest rooms. YES! Then it was time to make dinner and update this.
Tomorrow we head north along the scenic Haines Highway towards Haines Junction, Yukon and Kluane National Park. The plan is to spend 2 nights in Kluane so we can get some hiking in before heading to Tok on Saturday.
Day 23 June 21, 2012
Haines to Destruction Bay, Yukon
We got up and did chores. Walter checked under the pickup to see if he could see our oil leak. Our spot at the RV park was all grass and it hadn’t rained in the night so it was a good day to do it. He got a tarp out and used that to get under the truck and couldn’t find anything wrong. It’s a great mystery. He had thought maybe there wasn’t a leak but he checked just before we unloaded from the ferry and there was a spot under us so clearly we’re losing oil from someplace but it’s not obvious where. While he did that I did my exercise band workout and juggled some things in the truck and trailer to better utilize storage space at this point.
The folks from Colorado stopped by to say hello. We saw them off and on all day today as we drove towards Haines Junction. They didn’t know where they were going to stay tonight and we didn’t see them in after we stopped for lunch so who know where they are tonight. Some people from Texas stopped by to see the Casita. They leave real near Rice where the Casita factory is and have driven by it a hundred times but never stopped to see the trailers. So we gave them the tour and talked about roads and things. They had a hard time at the border crossing at Sumas. The Canadians took their RV apart basically in reaction to the fact that he wanted to escort them through their inspection which no doubt made them suspicious. They thought the Cassair was in wonderful shape and had a great surface. This is great news for our trip home since the Cassiar used to be horrible with lots of gravel.
We finally rolled out at about 10:30 to partly sunny skies. We drove up the Haines Cut-off road also called the Haines Highway. It’s gorgeous. We decided to stop at all the turn outs and viewpoints to see everything and read all the signs. It made for slow going but it was fun and we learned a whole lot about the rivers, fish and native peoples of the area. I got some great shots of a fish wheel working the Chilkat river.
We stopped to take pictures at a turn out above tree line (which is only 3,000 feet through these mountains). We saw the Colorado folks one more time and when I got out of the truck, I heard an odd hooting sound. Ray (the fellow from Colorado) said he thought there was someone out there trying to call moose. Said fellow showed up to get his camera out of his car and I asked him what the sound was since clearly he wasn’t making it. He said it was a grouse and then went into great detail as to whether it was one sort or another—I just love birders! I debated following back into the bushes to see the puffed up chicken (that’s really what a grouse is) and decided not to.
Shortly after that we came around the bend to see someone parked on the other side of the road with their caution lights. We slowed down and couldn’t see anything but the drive rolled his window down and told us that there was a grizzly (brown bear) sow and 2 cubs on their side of the road. We drove forward up behind the folks from Colorado and sure enough there she was. I got out on the passenger side so I had the truck and the road between me and her and took photos. The folks from Colorado drove on so we moved up into their spot and then I could take photos through the driver’s window. At about that point she passed around in a circle a bit and lay down on her back. The cubs climbed onto her chest and began to nurse. Oh lordy how cool is that? I took over 20 photos of her and then we drove on.
The mountain views along this road are just spectacular. They get better and better and just about the time you think you couldn’t digest another one, something more spectacular comes into view. We stopped for lunch with a wonderful view out the kitchen table window and then I hiked a little ways back along the view point to take a photo of the tree-line trees which I’d been trying to ID as we drove along. They have a yellow cast to them but they’re clearly spruces. They were hit very hard by Spruce beetle in this area in the 1990s and there are lots of dead trees. But the trees that survived are doing well and there are lots of small trees coming in to replace the dead ones. We stopped at Million Dollar Falls and did the little hike down to the viewing platforms. This is a great waterfall with a huge amount of water crashing over the top at this point. I took a couple of quick videos of it to record the power of it.
There were some fun different wildflowers along the walk too and I stopped and took photos. One looked like kinnikinik but the leaves and flowers were really small.
As we drove on the fields of dandelions that we’d seen in northern BC appeared again. I finally took a photo of them since it turns out they are native. There was also lots of very short dense lupine. As we began to drop in elevation a very bright magenta vetch showed up. I pulled over in a wide spot in the road and took photos of it and a cream colored vetch that is probably a milk vetch. I haven’t taken the time to do the flower ID yet.
We arrived in Haines Junction and made the connection to the Alaskan Highway. In the process missed the visitor’s center for Kluane National Park. Oh well, it was probably closed already anyway since Yukon is on Pacific Time so we lost an hour today. We continued to skirt the eastern border of Kluane National park with all of its huge mountains and giant ice field. We drove on and crossed yet another pass and got our first view of Kluane Lake which is the largest lake in the Yukon.
We rolled into Congdon Creek Campground at about 5 pm our time or 6 pm local time. All but one of the lake-side campsites were full. We drove the loop and looked at the other sites which are all really nice, some with mountain views. We came back to the last lake-side site and set up. I was really tired at this point. We opted not the drop the trailer since we didn’t know what we wanted to do tomorrow. The original plan was to spend the day tomorrow hiking in Kluane but we’re past all the trails and will have to drive back to do that. We’ll probably go back the 11 miles to the second visitor’s center (which has the local native people’s name of the big mountain on it) and do the short hike that is there and then drive on a ways. It all depends on the weather.
It had been warm and sunny and lovely the whole day until the late afternoon. I drove through a rain squall that was pretty heavy and at times the highway was wet from previous showers. When I got out to photograph the vetch there was a lightning strike across the lake and a great boom of thunder and not long after it began to rain.
We hit a section of construction where the road was all gravel. I slowed down and went between 30 and 40 mph and that was fine. But we drove through a section of it where it had rained and the driver’s side of the front of the trailer is now caked with grey mud. It’s so thick that you can’t see the running light through it.
After we got set up we walked to the pay station and back and then I took a nap. The sun was out when I lay down and I was trying to avoid getting sun in my eyes. By the time I settled down to sleep, the sky was dark grey and we had to close up the windows because the rain was coming in. It rained pretty hard while I was fixing dinner but it has blown through now and we have patches of blue and a little bit of a sunset which is starting at 10:24 our time (11:24 local time).
It was still very light when we turned in last night at a little after 10. It was the solstice after all!
Day 24 June 22, 2012
Destruction Bay, Yukon to Deadman’s Lake, Alaska
We awoke wrapped in fog with the temperature at about 45 degrees. By the time we were half the way through breakfast the fog had burned off and we had blue sky overhead and could see the mountains again. Hurray! We’d seen folks walking on a path just north of our campsite the night before and thought it might be the nature trail. But I’d also heard the creek over that way and it sounded really full.
Well, it was more than full. Clearly that thunderstorm we’d had after we arrived yesterday had done the deed. The creek had overrun its banks and flowed all over the place just north of us. It cascaded down a bit of a drop in about 4 different places and had flooded the two spaces just inland from the lake to us. They’d had red cones in their drives last night and it had seemed strange that there were that many folks saving sites. Ha! You’d have had a big surprise this morning if you’d camped in those sites yesterday afternoon.
We walked a little ways on the beach so I could take photos of the view with the fog wisping across the lake. But the mosquitos were out in force so we had to keep moving. We headed back to the trailer and broke camp. We drove south 11 miles to the Sheep Mountain visitor’s center (it’s not called that but I’m too lazy right now to dig out it’s real name which is the First Nations name for it which translates to skin scraper mountain). There weren’t any Dahl sheep left on the mountain. The ranger said they still had a few last week but that it was still cold then. We asked about trails and got a map of the area. In the end we decided we’d take the easy hike to Soldier’s Summit which is a signed ‘nature trail’ type trail about the completion of the Alcan Highway. They had the ribbon cutting for the highway on Nov 20, 1942 here.
We drove up the road about a mile and found the trailhead. It goes up hill a bit following the old original roadbed of the Alcan. There are signs about the building of the highway and about the impact the coming of the road had on the local First Nations people here. There were also TONS of wildflowers of all sorts I hadn’t seen before. There were little short blue penstemon and pink and cream anemones. There were short milk vetch and little tiny daisies. There were dwarf asters in light pink and a nice yellow cinquefoil just to name a few. We slowly worked our way up the hike since I had to stop and take photos of all the pretties.
The trail technically ends at a platform with an American and Canadian flag flying and signs about the ribbon cutting. But the old road bed goes on. There was a Canadian couple hiking the trail (they passed us as I took flower photos) and they walked out a ways and came back as we sat and enjoyed the view. They said it was worth going out until it started to go downhill again so we went out and got a great view of the river valley and the mountains in the distance. This river used to be the drainage for Kluane Lake but at some point the lake got plugged up and rose to a level so that it started draining out via the Kluane River instead. So this river is now just a feeder to the lake.
All the rivers we saw in the Yukon were silty with glacial melt and had huge piles of rocks and gravels on their sides and at their mouths. That’s what glaciers will do for you.
After our hike we started our drive north again. The lake was perfectly still and so I took reflection pictures as we drove along. There weren’t many viewpoints along this section so we just drove until it was time for lunch. The road started to have frost heaves and pot holes not very far beyond where we’d camped and continued to have bad spots here and there all the way to the US Border. We stopped for gas in beautiful downtown Beaver Creek and paid $1.49 per liter!
We stopped at the rest area that is focused on Kluane River for lunch. It was pretty full when we got there but nearly empty by the time we had eaten, read the signs, and taken a few photos. We changed drivers here and I was the lucky one who got two sections of gravel. One was being watered by a water truck so the dust wasn’t bad and it wasn’t so wet as to be muddy at least on our side of the road. The other section was pure dust but not very long.
We stopped at two rest stops in the afternoon. One had views of the Kluane Range (if you got in the right place looking through the poplars that were starting to block the view. The other was on a little lake that had more flowers including a strange while lily that looked a lot like a calla lily. It opened the trailer up to make a pit stop and discovered all our rocking and rolling on the bad road had caused the refrigerator door to swing open and dump a few things out on the floor. Warm lettuce anyone? Thank goodness nothing broke open all over the floor.
Shortly after that, I saw something brown entering the road and Walter said sharply, “Slow down.” I hit the brakes and there’s a black bear (he/she was brown but small and with no hump so technically a black bear) wandering out into the road. I got one profile shot before she turned tail (literally) and headed back into the willows along the road. This area is classic moose country with willows and ponds full of lilies but we didn’t see any moose.
It got warmer and warmer as the day went on and we dropped a bit in elevation and went north. By the time we got to the US Border crossing it was over 80! We looked at private campgrounds both before and after the border and they were all gravel parking lots next to the road. We changed drivers again (I was pooped from watching the road so carefully) at the actual border which is in the middle of a 20 mile no-mans-land that they keep fairly well cut back. We took photos at the border plinth and the Welcome to Alaska sign as proof we’d made it to ‘mainland Alaska’.
We ended up camping at Deadman Lake a lovely free US Fish and Wildlife campground in the Tetlin Wildlife Refuge (birds, birds and more birds). We drove the circuit and decided that we’d fit okay in a site down by the lake. We had to wait while a couple of bigger rigs got parked and worried for a moment that the people in front of us would swing around and take the site we wanted but they didn’t. We got parked okay without getting eaten alive by the mosquitos and set up camp. It was 83 degrees in the trailer and 80 outside. Hot! But now at 10 pm it’s 76 inside and 72 outside and the sun has not dropped below the horizon yet though it may do that in the next half hour or so.
After dinner I went out to take a photo of some flowers outside the trailer. I stepped out onto a grassy section and mush up came water. It’s muskeg out there! My socks got wet—what a surprise since I had sandals on (the sock were to protect against mosquitos mostly). Since they got so wet to start, I wandered around in the woods getting wetter and taking photos. The lake is lovely with a great view of what I guess are the Wrangell Mountains to the southeast. I found a sweet little orchid but the camera thought it was too little to focus on it and by then the mosquitos were after my face (I’d used DEET but hadn’t done a good enough job on my face.)
Unlike the muskeg on Petersburg, here there are black spruce growing in it. They are stunted which makes them look pretty weird. They get pretty tall but their branches only stick out a foot or two. They do this in both muskeg and in areas of permafrost all through this section of Alaska. I remember them from my first trip to Alaska. I thought the trees here were pretty darned weird, and I was right.
Tomorrow we will head north to Delta Junction which is the end of the Alaska Highway. That will put us within a hundred miles of Fairbanks so we can get there fairly early in the day on Sunday for grocery shopping, laundry and touring. We hope it cools down some by then.
Day 25 June 23, 2012
Deadman Lake, AK to Clearwater Lake State Rec. Site (outside of Delta Junction, AK)
It cooled off in the night thank goodness and we actually crawled under the covers and eventually closed up the windows. The sun was setting at 11:00 pm when we shut the blinds but the sky was still lit up with sunset. It was light again at 3 am when I woke up. Not a lot of dark hours this far north this close to the solstice.
We were up by 8 am and had breakfast and got things ready to go. I had taken some photos of a sweet little orchid yesterday that didn’t come out so I put on my ducks (waterproof shoes), my jeans, my rain jacket and my head net and sprayed up with DEET on my hands and headed back out into the muskeg next to our trailer. Wonders of wonders I found the patch of little orchids and again and convinced the camera that they were flowers this time.
When I got back from doing that, Walter and I took the little nature trail that was a wood pathway up the hill through the muskeg. It had nice signs explaining the plants and critters in the bog and the ‘viscious cycle’ that creates permafrost. The sphagnum moss is a good insulator so it helps insulate the frozen ground and keeps it from defrosting in the summer. The permafrost means that the bog has no place to drain downward so it gets wetter which makes it an even better home for the moss. And on it goes. The black spruce end up stunted both because of the wet conditions and the fact that they can’t push their roots deep into the frozen ground.
We rolled out sometime around 10 am or so and headed north along the Alaska Highway. We stopped at a few of the turn outs to see the Tanana River and the Wrangell Mountains way off in the distance to the south and then the Alaska Range to the west as we got closer and closer. Some of the viewpoints no longer had views, the trees tend to block them out.
We changed drivers just outside of Tok at the turn off for the Tanacross airfield. We’d decided we would try to stop for lunch at Dot Lake but couldn’t tell when we got there if the turn off was the one or not. So I drove on. Right after that came a series of gravel patches—my favorite. I was driving slow and a big RV (don’t know if it was a fifth wheel or just a big rig) kicked up a rock that hit the windshield right at eye level at the edge of the driver’s side. The pit is big and the crack from it has already traveled 8 inches in a curve up the windshield. A week or two ago we got a little pit in the passenger side at about the same place but a little higher. I’d been waiting for us to get hit by a big rock since we got hit by one on Hwy 203 in Duvall when the truck was only about a month old and didn’t have 1,000 miles on it yet. It’s like the angle of the windshield says, “Please hit me!” Now at least, we can drive the rest of the trip no longer worrying about getting a rock in the windshield. Needless to say we’ll wait and have it fixed when we get back.
We found a nice turnout with a while later to have lunch. There were two big rigs from Alberta there and they said that the weather had been cold on the Top of The World highway and it didn’t get warm for them until yesterday. They were headed to Haines.
It was a straight shot from lunch to the Clearwater Lake State Recreation Site with no turnouts calling and nothing but a few cool bridges worth mentioning. The campground was mostly empty except for the boat launch area so we had our choice of sites. We drove through and they dump you back out on the highway and have you drive back up the road to drive back down their one-way road. We picked a nice pull through site with a big of a water view. It had been warming up steadily as we drove and by the time we had camp set up it was 83 outside and 84 inside. We made sure the trailer was in a bit of shade from a closer of trees to the west and we opened all the windows to catch the breeze off the water. It’s still 83 in here but the breeze helps.
We walked the block or so back to register for our site ($10) and talked to some fishermen who had just come up from the lake. They had waders on and said their feet were frozen. They were fly fishing for graylings and said this was some of the best grayling fishing in the state. They had done catch and release and were happy. We walked back along the shoreline on a trail that was full of roots and clearly was just a fisherman’s route. The mosquitos were out in force and I quickly retreated into the trailer.
We rested a while and cooled off and then I took photos of the crack to send to document it and to send to our insurance agent. I’ve downloaded my photos for the day and updated this and it’s only 4:15. Wow!
Tomorrow we have a 2 hour drive to Fairbanks where I hope to get the laundry and grocery shopping done so that we have Monday free to play tourist. Then we go on to Denali!
Day 26 June 24, 2012
Clearwater Lake State Rec. Site (outside of Delta Junction, AK) to Fairbanks
It stayed warm and clear last night and there were folks out on the lake with motor boats until 11 pm. We even saw a guy go by with a fishing pole in shorts at 10:45 and people were out walking with their toddlers at 10:30. The sun was still out and only dipping below the trees at 11:30 when we shut the blinds and went to sleep. Thank goodness that folks in campgrounds like this don’t get up at the crack of dawn when they’ve all been up so late!
It cooled off in the night and we actually pulled the blankets on and closed up the windows by about 3:15 when I saw a gorgeous sunrise paint the sky. I went back to sleep and we both got a pretty good night’s sleep. I made fried eggs (no toast in this little trailer, just bread and butter) and we packed up. I ran down to the lake edge to take a photo and there was a single bald eagle sitting at the water’s edge across the lake. He of course took off as I pointed the camera at him and all I got was a smudge in my picture.
There were tantalizing views of HUGE mountains to the southwest which we’d get in little clearings along the road on our way back to the highway but no place to stop once I’d noticed them. The wind began to kick up on our way to town and by the time we got to the highway there was a huge amount of dust in the air. The river bottoms here tend to be big wide sand and gravel beds full of glacial silt and flour. When the river isn’t at full spate there are all these sand bars exposed and they were the source of the dust. We drove into Delta Junction to get gas through a dust cloud that cleared as soon as we got past the river crossing. I took some photos of the mountains from the gas station ($4.26/gal) and we carried on north. Eventually the dust stopped kicking up and you could see views of the wide Tanana River valley which winds through the low country on its way to join the Yukon River. We stopped for photos of the Alaska Range again but I’m not sure they’ll come out since a bank of white clouds had begun to show up behind them and white mountains backed by white clouds make for challenging photos.
I was reading the Milepost as we went and had just read a line about watching for moose in the ponds and lakes along this area when I looked up and spied a bull moose swimming in the Tanana! Walter pulled over and I got out and jogged across the road to the take photos from the highway’s edge. He turned and looked at me from a low sand bar and then dove in to continue his swim. I just kept clicking and he kept swimming coming up on a much higher sand bar at last to give me a full shot of him skinny legs and all. You could see the start of his antlers branching and I was thrilled. I’ve wanted to get a good moose picture for years and here I got a moose swimming of all things. I can die happy now!
We stopped at the switch drivers at Birch Lake and pretty little lake about an hour south of Fairbanks. We’d begun to see wild irises along the road but flower ID even at 50 mph is a bit of a challenge. There were irises in bloom along the water’s edge so that settled that. There were also lots of yellow water lilies in bloom in the lake. They’re funny here, they never really open all the way so they’re really just yellow balls with open tops.
We rolled into Fairbanks at the Riverside RV Park a little before one to find a line of about 5 rigs and what looked like a pretty full park. This was a first for this trip. Most of the places we’d been before this were pretty empty but this place was jumpin’. They had a spot with just power and water for us about 5 spaces from the Chena River and we got parked and set up pretty quickly. This is what I call and cheek by jowl campground. Out our back window were the stairs to a camper. There was a traditional pop-up on our left and an a-frame Chalet pop-up from Oregon on or right. There were people out in chairs by their rigs and out on the grassy areas by the lake. But the place had free showers, good Wi-Fi and a Laundromat. There were lots of German tourists who were roaming around trying to find a way into Fairbanks to attend the Solstice Fair that was going on downtown (they had to take a cab) and there were people signing up for tours and riverboat cruises that the free shuttle could take you too. In other words, this was tourist paradise.
We had lunch and then got the laundry together. I sorted laundry while Walter was supposed to be taking a shower. When I came out from getting 4 loads of laundry going he was sitting on a bench on the deck next to the Mens Room which was closed for cleaning. Ah well. I took my shower and had more than enough hot water. Ahhh. It was wonderful to have it be in the low 80’s because there was no concern about drafts or being cold when you got out.
Walter finally got his shower and we talked to some folks from Campbell, CA (the Bay area) who had come up the Alaska Highway and gotten caught by the washout near Watson Lake. It had occurred the day before they got there so they had to wait a week plus to have it open back up and then for food and fuel to get through. They said it was amazing how quickly they worked to get it all back open.
With the laundry done we had time to check email and for Walter to take a nap. I downloaded my moose pictures and processed them and the mama grizzly photos from a couple of days ago and posted them on FaceBook. Our next door neighbors were loud talkers and it was hot, so I closed up everything and ran the air conditioning until I got it down into the low 70’s. When they left we opened things back up again and let the breeze cool us off.
We decided that one night in a place like this was plenty and that we would move tomorrow to the Chena River Recreation Site which is only a couple of blocks away. We have grocery shopping to do and we need to get a new lens and light bulb for the driver’s side front running light (amber) on the Casita. The lens broke a day or so ago (gravel no doubt) and then the bulb died yesterday. They have a coin-op car/trailer washing area we hope to use to get the worst of the mud off so we can change the change the lens and bulb.
Day 27 June 25, 2012
Fairbanks
The wind came up in the evening and really blew last night. Between the wind and the air planes and the traffic I could hear I was awake pretty late. Then starting at 6 am our neighbors came alive. First one set was out frying potatoes and onions and leaving at 6:30. Then the folks in the camper broke camp at 7. The people in the pop-up were up slamming doors and loading things (though they didn’t break camp) at 7:30. This is the first place we’ve stayed that was noisy in the morning (actually the first place that’s been noisy at all really).
After breakfast Walter went to take out the trash and get quarters for the car wash. There was somebody who had just finished using it on a rig about our size and he said it had cost him $7 in quarters to get it done. To add to it there was somebody using it. So he decided we’d skip it. I suggested we get the car washing sponge out and use the hose on the worst of it and that worked just fine. Rosita isn’t clean but she’s not awful anymore either.
We checked the email one more time and then motored off to Safeway to do our shopping. I remembered that today was the day I was supposed to re-up for our pre-paid Alaska cell phone so we sat in the parking lot to do that. Of course it was Monday morning so there was the obligatory long wait on hold. While I was holding a fellow we had met at the campground came by. He has a Burro he’s renovating. He had questions about the ferry so we talked and then he and Walter talked while I re-upped the phone and found out how to check for messages when in Canada (you call yourself using a 1 first, since the check for voice mail buttons and codes in the phone don’t work outside of the US).
The Safeway was very uptown with a full Natural Foods section and a nut bar set up like a candy counter of all things. Then we loaded all the food into the trailer and drove across the road to the Fred Meyer for yogurt and spelt bread. It had just been re-done and was huge but not all that nice, though today their produce looked better than the Safeway’s. I think it’s all a function of what day their trucks come in!
From there we followed the directions in our campground book to the Chena River State Rec. Site. You could see the rigs and tents in the park but the entrance wasn’t where the book said. We knew there was a problem when we crossed the Chena River and there was no bridge to get back to the campground. Going around the block was a major deal so we got out Carmine and put in the address and she directed back to the same place. But while we were doing that I saw signs for a campground. So we put Carmine and mute so she wouldn’t nag and took the secondary road that ran parallel to Airport way and sure enough there across from the Riley auto parts store, was the entrance to the State Recreation Site. We rolled in just a little after noon (check out time is noon) and there were 3 empty electrical hook up sites (there are only 11 total). We picked one we liked and got set up and paid our money. The mosquitos were pretty thick here. They clearly must spray for them at the Riverside RV Park because there weren’t any there yesterday or today. I’ve got a good collection of bites at this point so have decided that putting on DEET first thing in the morning is just going to be part of my daily deal.
We had lunch and then went in search of the local RV parts store. I spied the place just as Carmine was asking us to turn down the road so we found it without going on a wild goose chase. They had both the amber and red lens covers so we got 2 amber (one for now and one for later) and 1 red (just in case). There weren’t any bulbs of the size we needed but we asked at the desk and the mechanic fishes behind the keyboard at one of the computers and hands them to the clerk. They were his shop set but he’d ordered more so he was willing to let us have them. This was a great RV parts place. They had just about everything you might want including replacement sinks for goodness sake! But they didn’t have the cheap leveling bricks we’ve been using (and cracking from time to time). They only had the fancy expensive ones that don’t mate with the ones we have so we left them there.
From here we went to the Museum of the North up on the University of Alaska campus at the north end of town. The building is gorgeous. The parking was automated (50 cents an hour and they take plastic) and the museum is very nice. They have a wide variety of stuff all crammed into one big display room (divided up into sections). There are stuffed critters, fossils, bones, rocks, coastal native regalia, Athabascan (interior native) regalia and Aleut and Inuit (Eskimo) regalia. There are carvings and gold fines and nuggets. There is a wonderful video running in a back corner on the Aurora. There was another video that I missed but Walter saw on the Eskimo hunting whales that made Walter cry because they basically killed they whale by harpooning him over and over again until he bled to death—tons of blood blowing all over everywhere.
We stayed for an hour or so and then I was full and so was Walter. I just don’t have much museum stamina anymore and I’d much rather get my natural history outside. We drove from the museum to the Botanical Gardens. They had big Rainbird style sprinklers going in much of the place so it was hard to walk around. Walter stayed in the truck and I wandered a bit but was frustrated because they didn’t have any plant ID signs out. There were lots of gardens clearly designed and tended by kids and there was a group of kids getting ready to pull weeds. The best part was a little wet land with bridge that had a ton of irises in bloom. I took a photo and bagged it. But of course as I was reading the few signs I could see at the entrance someone asked what a bed of plants were that had seeds like peonies. So I told them that they seemed to be a relative of tree peonies (it may be one of the new crosses). They happily went off talking about growing peonies and I went back to the truck.
We came back to the rig and I tried to find the free Wi-Fi that’s supposed to be in the campground. The map says where the transmitter is supposed to be but there is no evidence of a public Wi-Fi to connect to. It turns out you can only get it right next to the transmitter at the little information hut. That's okay, we have electricity which is the most important part. Having given up on Wi-Fi we took a very long nap.
Tomorrow we drive 2 hours southwest to Denali National Park! We’ll spend one night at Riley Creek Campground which is at the entrance of the park. Then we’ll move to the Teklanika Campground at milepost 29 inside the park for 4 nights.
To read about our adventures in Denali got to Part VI of this blog.