Trip begins

To make this read in chronological sequence I attached external fake dates to it, like "August 19, 2004" above.  Real narrative dates are like "August 11" below.
There are 2 chapters beyond the "Oregon to California" chapter in the list at right.

This was the first "blog" I (Dick Dreselly) wrote.  Later I wrote other blogs, mostly about my adventures.  Some of them:

              DresellyFly.blogspot.com

              DresellySail.blogspot.com

              DresellyUshuaia.blogspot.com

              DresellyLabrador.blogspot.com

Since this blog is about a driving trip, here's my driving history:

In 1940 I bought my first car and got a Maine license.
Got international and Vietnam licenses later.

Drove own car in 49 states and all Canadian provinces and territories except Nunavut.  Rented car in 4 Hawaiian islands.

Drove in 31 countries, including 3 Communist countries in the "Cold War", 26 in my own car.   Countries where the car wasn't mine: Greenland (1950s), Vietnam, Finland (1967), Argentina and Chile (2004).

Drove twice Maine to Alaska. Once as described in this blog, and a 1996 drive.

Drove long tough mostly-dirt roads: Canada's Dempster Highway (1996), Argentina's Ruta 40 (2004), and then-new Trans-Labrador road (2010).

Drove to furthest north (1996) and furthest south (2004) road points in the Americas.

Circumnavigated (2002) the Gulf of Mexico, using brief Scotia Prince Tampa-Yucatan ferry, and  continued to Belize, Texas, Maine.
Drove many times and widely in Mexico and Canada, mostly from Maine.

Drove in big cities:  NYC, Paris, Berlin (1964), Danang (1967), Santiago (2004), Mexico City.  The last was the worst: made Boston drivers look like career driving instructors.
These too were hectic: 1964 London delivery of new USA-equipped Austin Healey Sprite (one of 4 I've bought new): rush hour, roundabouts, left side driving.

I was concerned about safety sine 1958.   What, where and how I drove  were not always safe, but since 1958 I've had seat belts in my cars.  At first I had to install seat belts that I got from airports.

****************************************************

This trip was much tamer than our 2003 circumnavigation of the Gulf of Mexico or our Journey to Ushuaia.   Unlike those trips, in this one the interstate highways and motels were familiar, corruption and poverty were not visible, and all the people spoke English, except some in California).    We left home on August 10, 2004.   We enjoyed a pretty drive through ME/NH/VT to a low quality "Quantity Inn" in Albany.

August 11:   We drove the NY Thruway and halfway across the Ontario "peninsula".

As a civil engineer I was fascinated by parts of the historic Erie Canal beside much of the Thruway.  This engineering miracle was considered impossible before it was built, and still seems so.  Engineered and overseen by two judges with zero experience as engineers or surveyors, built by the hands of Irish immigrant laborers assisted by mules, it was opened in 1825, before railroads.  The canal allowed boats pulled by horses on canal-side paths to go from New York City to the Great Lakes, opening up to development most of the USA east of the Great Plains -->  click . Consider that in about a single century, approximately a long lifetime like mine - the early 1800s to the early 1900s - most of the USA went from wilderness owned by other countries (France, Mexico, Spain, England) to mostly an industrial behemoth using planes and cars.

    

August 12:   We re-entered the USA in Michigan, continuing a fairly straight line from Maine to South Dakota.   We found the new high speed ferry across Lake Michigan was sold out, so we diverted northward to the eastern terminus of the slower old ferry Badger.

Friday the 13th:   Ferry to Wisconsin.   We shun-piked across most of that state, past many elegant multi-siloed farms like those in Pennsylvania Dutch country.  We paused at the Oshkosh airport, where the world's biggest gathering of small private planes is held each year.  We crossed the beautiful Mississippi, surprisingly wide so near its source, into Minnesota, ending the day at a motel in Albert Lea.

Each day the restaurants and motels seemed better than the ones before.   I was unable to connect to the Internet until Wisconsin.   Our new Corolla continued to please us.   Travelling through this beautiful lush green prosperous part of the USA reminded me again that, although it's sometimes hard to ignore the too-familiar warts of life like phone-voice-response-systems and our universal mortality and the IRS, still, considering how all the people before us lived and how all the people in most other countries of the world live now, we are in a very small group of the luckiest people who have ever existed.

Minnesota to South Dakota (SD)

August 14:  After leaving our motel in Albert Lea,  we drove 20 miles south to view about a hundred huge Dutch-built $850,000 wind driven generators in an Iowa cornfield.   Unlike in the eastern USA, most of the locals seem to like them, because farmers reap more per acre from them than they do from corn.   We stopped the car occasionally when something made us curious, but after lunch we realized that our destination for the night seemed further away than sunset.   So we set cruise control to the local limit, 75 mph, and arrived at our Hill City motel in southwest South Dakota as the sun disappeared from the clear blue sky.

August 15:  The reason for the accommodation shortage became clear.   All the previous afternoon thousands of motorcycles streamed by us in the opposite direction.   We'd never heard of the Sturgis (population 7,000) Motorcycle Rally, which was just ending.  This year about 515,000 people attended.   Click here for more on the Rally .    The bikes were mostly Harley.   On every little road and at every gas station the next two days they were thick like mosquitoes.  Apparently the typical biker was male, in his fifties, out of shape, tattooed, courteous, friendly, with a beard or long locks, traveling under the speed limit, on a rig costing a lot more than our Corolla.    He and his lady wore grimy black leather, but their Harleys were polished daily to showroom condition.

The rally ended the next day, but most of the bikes were still there.

This day we visited the Crazy Horse Monument, a mountain-size statue in the making, of a prototypical Indian (Native American) who died under a truce flag from a soldier's stab in the back.

The first photo below is of a small model of the far bigger eventual monument.

The second photo is of the actual monument.

We drove slowly through Custer State Park, where we saw hundreds of buffalo, as well as pronghorn antelopes, deer, scads of prairie dog colonies, and a few bighorn sheep.   Old-timers had killed all the wildlife except the coyotes and prairie dogs.  Beaver, which brought the mountain men here, are not among the reintroduced species.   Burros stopped traffic, looking for handouts.

 

Should I have said "bison" not "buffalo", as some insist ?  Then we'd have Bison NY, Bison Bill, the bison nickel,  "Well, I'll be bisoned", Bison soldiers (the famous post-Civil-War Black Cavalry), and
"Bison gals won't you come out tonight, and dance by the light of the moon?".   Click on that, then click on "Listen to this song".

Monday August 16:   We "did" Mount Rushmore, famously awesome, and learned a lot about the sculpture of the four presidential effigies.                                                                                                                                                         

We continued on a drive which included the ghost town of Aladdin, Wyoming (net photo), population 15 and some ghosts, with a seedy dark very-general store/post office/bar seemingly right out of a movie.

Tuesday 8/17:   Marge, especially, was very tired, from doing the weekly laundry and having insufficient sleep.   So we took turns driving and sleeping just 3 hours to a Comfort Inn (again "free" with accumulated points) in Pierre, South Dakota.   The next day: Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: what a nice alliterative sound !

Here are our impressions of South Dakota after four days of it:   Except for the pretty forested Black Hills, viewed from Interstate 90 this state seems mostly rolling brown prairie, treeless except in gullies and around homes.   The tourist industry seems counter-productive: rampant billboards touting countless "attractions", and too many casinos, not confined to Deadwood.   A sign proclaimed, "Car Wash and Casino"- what a combination !  Worth seeing: Missouri River, museums regarding Indians and the 1803-6 Lewis & Clark expedition, buffaloes, Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse statue project.   Away from I-90, the state's great agricultural engine is impressive.   But South Dakota does not inspire a return visit.

SD to ND to Edmonton, Alberta

August 18:

A good afternoon and night's rest brought us back to normal.    We toured the State House in Pierre, the capital of South Dakota.   It is an architectural triumph, especially considering that it was built in 1910, when the West was primitive if no longer Wild.    The exterior is domed like the USA Capitol, but smaller. The inside is spectacularly ornate, with imported tile floors, Italian marble, appropriate statuary. 

Here I sat in the Senate President's chair -->

The basement walls were lined with photos of previous governors, whose names mostly indicated their Scandinavian origins.

Then we drove north to Minot, the capital and capitol of the other Dakota, the North one.    The capitol was built in 1930, so not surprisingly it is 18 floors of art deco.   The basement walls were lined with photographs of famous North Dakotans, of whom I can remember only Angie Dickinson, Lawrence Welk and Theodore Roosevelt.   The legislative chambers were locked.

Outside, the flowered grounds were beautiful.  A Sacajawea statue reminded us of what a crucial part of USA history was that 16-year-old multilingual mother.

 

August 19: 

From our Minot motel we drove north into Canada.  That afternoon we realized that we couldn't reach our reserved room in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, before darkness and exhaustion set in, and we couldn't get to a phone booth before the 4 PM cancellation deadline, so we were surprised and pleased that we were able to cell phone to an 800 number and get our reservation changed to Regina.

TECHNOLOGY:  

**  Our Corolla had amazing electronic refinements new to us, for safety and monitoring and entertainment.  We hoped backwoods mechanics could make any necessary repairs.

**  I was slow in mastering the alleged simplicities of our Apple Powerbook 15" G4 laptop.  That evening I received an email from Apple saying its battery could be dangerous, and to arrange to have it replaced right away.    Free, but under the circumstances not possible.

ECONOMICS:

We had read that the USA Great Plains are losing population, because young people don't like prairie life, and because farms are being consolidated into ever bigger ones.   Local farmers told us the same thing.    That's like Walmart and its technological efficiencies killing off smaller businesses.   Our 2 day drive from I-90 north to the Trans-Canada Highway were on zigzag two-lane roads, through small or tiny towns where shuttered businesses reminded one of old Route 66.   Therefore it was a surprise to see the apparent greater prosperity on the Canadian side.    Big shiny new hi-tech grain silos,  construction activity, long trains all indicated Canadians were having better luck with their share of the Great Plains.   The many oil rigs on their side of the border contributed to the difference. 

SCENERY:

All the above made our trip over nearly flat country surprisingly interesting.  Through North Dakota we drove for miles with yellow sunflowers on the left smiling at us and the rising sun, while on the right they all had their backs to us.

WEATHER:

A strong northwest wind blew for days, so steady that the wings of a landing crop duster plane didn't wobble.   During our night in Regina the temperature went below freezing, damaging a lot of crops.   It was sobering to realize that this was mid-August, and we would go far to the north, a month closer to winter.    Until an hour before Edmonton the weather was beautiful, which meant the long term drought in middle America continued.    After a short rain it was overcast, cool, and damp.

We were in the Mayfield Hotel in Edmonton for 2 nights.   Either the city had grown a lot since we were there in 1996, or our brains had shrunk, or both.   The Edmonton Mall, where we shopped and ate that day, used to be the world's largest.

August 21.   For the next 7 days we were out of touch with phone and Internet.   We planned 3 days north to Yellowknife, capital of the province of Northwest Territories, 2 nights there, and 2 1/2  days southwest to Fort Nelson, British Columbia, on the Alaska Highway.   Yellowknife to Fort Nelson is 600 miles, half of it on a gravel road opened in 1984.

Edmonton to Yellowknife

We left Edmonton a day early, in the rain.   We had serviced our car and laundry, and it seemed better to spend a trip day in the far north rather than around the big city (population 700,000).     As we drove north habitation and infrastructure gradually gave way to a nearly straight flat 2-lane road through stunted forest, out of the rain.   We enjoyed our first-ever CD player, listening to a talk about the Alaska Highway, including the recorded voices of Robert Service and workers who built the road in 1942.   We were not on that Highway yet, but would connect to it near Fort Nelson in a week.   We had planned to drive the 940 road miles from Edmonton to Yellowknife in 3 days, but reduced that to 2.   Technology made the remote seem not so.   Our nearly new Super 8 Motel at the half way point of High Level, Alberta, was our fanciest of the trip so far, with satellite TV, free high-speed Internet, friendly people, and an excellent Boston Pizza restaurant next door.    Our next 3 nights would be in Yellowknife.

August 23.  We drove 450 miles from High Level to Yellowknife, capital of Northwest Territories (NWT).   We had left agriculture behind, so all unpreserved vegetables and most meats, except buffalo and fish, were imported.   Some wild wood buffalo had brucellosis and tuberculosis, so the government inspected every one killed for human consumption.   The trees, underlain by permafrost, were steadily shorter and more anorexic as we approached their northern limit, just beyond Yellowknife, which is where the vast Barrens begin.   (Note: "permafrost" is "permanent frost",  below the "active layer", which thaws in summer and allows plants to grow in it.). Sometimes the road was quite straight for 10 miles, with no other cars in sight.   We chatted with the lonely man at the tourist information post at the Northwest Territories border, the 60th parallel of latitude.   Soon after that we crossed the MackenzieRiver on a free ferry.   The river, which drains Great Slave Lake and thousands of square miles around it, here flowed at 18 knots as it was compressed to a narrow width.  Because of the current the bow of the ferry was pointed about 45 degrees to its path.   From there the river flows more than 1000 miles northward until it empties into the Arctic Ocean near Inuvik.   Northern rivers, especially the two biggest, the MacKenzie and the Yukon, were vital paths before the airplane, and are still useful avenues.   Heavy equipment originating in lower Canada is trucked up to Great Slave Lake, then barged down the MacKenzie and along the Arctic coast to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and other petroleum exploration sites.   North of the MacKenzie we passed many buffalo-beware signs, and a few small groups of grazing buffalo.   We began to see many inukshucks, which are aboriginal rock cairns used to mark trails, locate things, and assert "we are (Dene, etc.) and this is our land".   An example: 

At 8 PM we enttered Yellowknife, on he north shore of Great Slave Lake, an oasis of urbanity in the subarctic desert.   With 18,000 residents and buildings up to 15 stories, it prospers from:

**  MINING.   Only those products with a high value per pound are worth the cost of extracting and shipping them south.   There's so much copper along the Coppermine River further north that the "Copper Eskimos" (that's an Inuit word: "Eskimo" is offensive to them) extracted and used it, but copper from Chile is far cheaper.   Yellowknife had three waves of prosperity in the last 2 centuries: beaver skins, then gold, then diamonds. The last gold mine closed the year before our arrival, but diamonds had arrived just in time.  When diamond deposits were discovered in 1991, the biggest claim rush in Canadian history ensued.  Production/extraction began in 1998.   Production in 2003 was worth 1.7 billion Canadian dollars, quadruple that of 2002.   Since GE-made diamonds and cubic zirconia are just as pretty, Yellowknife's economy rests on vanity, imagination and hype.   Of course the DeBeers cartel has offices there.   Other minerals are mined, and emeralds were discovered in 2003.
**  GOVERNMENT.   In 1999 this province was split in two, with the greater area, including all the islands of the high Arctic, and peopled almost entirely by a few thousand aboriginals, became the province of Nunavut. The national and NWT governments still have to oversee the remaining 65,000 people and  1.3 million square miles in the Territory.  That's about 20 square miles per person.  In 1965 when Canada's big neighbor, the USA, sent its first ice breaker and oil tanker across the Northwest Passage, Atlantic to Pacific, Canada was compelled to pay more attention to its far north.

It takes (in 2004 ±) about three fall weeks for the great MacKenzie River to freeze thick enough to support trucks, and about 3 spring weeks to allow ferries to resume operation.  During those periods lettuce etc. comes in by air., and prices surge.   What's not imported: lake fish, three ingredients of concrete (sand, gravel, water), and buffalo meat.   Gasoline was about $3 US per gallon during our trip.  Headlines declared "The End of Cheap Oil".   However, Canada has tremendous reserves of fossil fuels.   About 2003 pipeline work began from the Arctic shore to the existing grid in the south.   In northeast Alberta (much nearer the USA) are the Athabaskan Tar Sands, more petroleum than in Arabia but up to 2009 too expensive to extract.   Then extracting petroleum from those Sands became a huge business, attracting many workers from Newfoundland, where cod fishing had nearly ended.   I remember from the 1950's that on two Nunavut islands oil seeps from the ground, too remote to harvest yet.   East of Inuvik whalers long ago found smoke from smoldering coal seams, which are still slowly burning.   Halfway between Yellowknife and Inuvik is Norman Wells, where the Canol Project started producing oil in WWII just as it was no longer needed or worth the expense.   From revenues of its oil fields nearer the USA, in the year of our trip Alberta had paid off all its government debt and was running a big surplus.

Consistent with what we read, pedestrians we saw on Yellowknife streets were about 40% Dene (Indian) and Inuit (Eskimo), 40% Caucasian, 10% Asian, and no blacks.   The legislature had an aboriginal majority, as did mine workers.

I wished I had time and energy to write here about the many friendly helpful Canadians we met there.

Yellowknife to Fort Nelson

August 26:   Yellowknife was the northernmost point we would reach on this trip.   About 3 hours drive south after leaving there we bought what might have been the last gasoline available for 150 miles, viewed the old Catholic church at the village of New Providence,













cautiously photographed a buffalo bull so close we were ready to duck into an adjacent shed in case of belligerence, ferried across the MacKenzie one last time, and turned west on a long lonely dirt road, of excellent 60 mph quality.   On arrival at Fort Simpson for the night, we discovered why it had been easy to make a reservation at "The Only Full Service Hotel in Fort Simpson" (population 1237).   It was the only hotel, and the quality was not high.   The hotel restaurant and the Chinese restaurant had closed early that day.   The hotel's "Joe" suggested the adjacent grocery store might be open, but we convinced him to sell us soup and sandwiches.

August 27:   In the morning ice coated the car, and we told the clerk our room had been only a little warmer than the car.   He said that the previous year new thermostats had been installed:  backwards.  I think the wires could have been reversed at 5 minutes per thermostat, or spoken or posted notices could have been provided.   We had adjusted the thermostat without result.  Later the clerk admitted the heat hadn't been turned on at all.

We had come there for a charter flight to Nahanni National Park, a World Heritage Site, legendary to kayakers and hikers, but decided to leave the hotel and the town.  However, as we left we checked the airport, and found there were two seats available for the Nahanni flight about to leave, and there was a superb B&B near town. 

The Cessna 206 on floats held the Quebec pilot and Dick in front, Margery and a young Mountie next behind, and his mother in back.

 We crossed a hundred miles of swampy scrub and suddenly were in surroundings of such beauty that neither I nor Google nor pictures can make much progress in conveying its magnitude.   Morning fog had vanished, leaving clouds around 5,000 feet and new snow on the jagged peaks above 4000 feet.   The Cessna approximately followed the many twists of the Nahanni River below, banking so close over ridges that we could see mountain sheep below.   We came in low over Virginia Falls, which is twice as high as Niagara and spectacularly split by a buttress, and landed above the falls.


We walked about a mile on a boardwalk and difficult tundra where the boardwalk was soon to be extended, to the top of a cliff directly above the falls, and a little beyond. Wow ! On the way back to the plane Marge caught her foot on a root, and so injured her leg that it was difficult to walk.  I, Dick, have a very courageous partner.  Perhaps the fall was due to hurrying, because the weather was deteriorating.  The pilot took off and flew in light rain at 3000 feet descending to 2000 feet, more closely following the river, with the canyon walls high on both sides, and often with an apparent closed white wall ahead. This resulted in a longer flight path than our approach, so when we landed back at Fort Simpson one of the two gas tanks registered empty and the other below 1/4.  The Quebec pilot agreed that "Pas beaucoup d'essence" (not much gas). We asked and were given a $100 (Canadian) rebate because the worsening weather had prevented a scheduled landing at a promised beautiful lodge location. We had never seen a more beautiful place, and only regret that we couldn't travel it at 2 mph not 120 mph.

Our B&B back in Fort Simpson was at least as delightful as promised, an architect's dream, with the confluence of the Liard and MacKenzie rivers outside our bedroom window.

August 28:  Our breakfast tablemates were an Israeli couple, she working at Outward Bound in Asheville NC, he a lecturer on his Everest ascent and other adventures.  We visited the little local museum, featuring a spruce bark (not birch bark) canoe, and the ornate fur-lined Dene-made chair made for the Pope to occupy on a cancelled 1984 visit.  He actually used it when his plane was able to land there in 1987.

Then we ferried back across the Liard, drove 38 paved miles and 136 dirt miles.  Recent rain kept the dust down, but made mud and filled potholes.   We went about 50 miles without seeing a car or any structure except occasional "emergency shelters", each with a door, wood stove, and bench.

We saw many buffalo, alone and in groups.

Once when they blocked the road we got some good pictures-->

   We went 3 miles on a side road to Fort Liard, population 588 of mostly Dene.   We'd almost switched to that place for a bed and flight, so for curiosity went to check the details.   The Nova Scotian proprietor of the general store said that the town's only restaurant had closed, so although he had simple rooms for $135, we would have to bring our own food.   At the airport we found the pilot charged almost as much as we had paid for a flight to Nahanni Falls, and would be much shorter. There we saw our only bear so far on this trip, a black one.  So that was our last visit to Fort Liard.



We'd made no reservation at Fort Nelson, since the peak of tourist season was past, and booked 2 nights at the nearly new Super 8, one of the best motels we've ever used.   We were told that the town is mainly a support center for the mining and oil industries, that heavy truck traffic surges through late in the year when ice roads start to be usable, and AK Highway businesses that cater mostly to tourists are apt to shut down September 1.   And we were headed north !

Sunday August 29:   Marge washed laundry, and Dick washed much of the Northwest Territories from our car, turning it from brown back to silver.   We visited the local museum, a very informal display of artifacts worthy of a much larger town or city.   That's apparently the result of more enthusiastic support than money.   About 30 people were holding a supper, to which we were warmly invited.   So we ate, and met several very nice folks with stories to tell.   We met the founder and chairman, who sported an old-timers long beard and had contributed several of the 20 cars from the '20's and '30's.

Fort Nelson to Anchorage

August 30:   The 307 miles from Fort Nelson, British Columbia, to Watson Lake, Yukon Territory, is perhaps the most beautiful section of the Alaska Highway.   The Highway keeps getting shorter as curves are minimized.   In those places the contrast between the present 60-mph road and the adjacent WWII Highway was night-and-day.   As when we drove to Alaska in 1996, about 5% or so of the road was under construction, to repair permafrost damage and to improve the few segments of the road that were unchanged since they first were paved.   We saw many Stone (a subset of Dall) sheep, caribou and buffalo, and of course photographed a few close up.

At Watson Lake we were the only guests at a bed and breakfast run by the man who pumped gas into our Cessna N3850V in 2000, and by his wife.   "Gloom and Doom", the elderly mechanics who told us how to fix the gasoline that ominously dampened our overhead upholstery as we flew over vast wilderness, were still there.   The huge hangar, a logistics miracle built in 1941 when there was no Highway or other road, and quite flammable, was to be fitted with sprinklers the next year.

August 31.   In 1942 a GI posted a sign pointing to his home town, others followed, and the Sign Post Forest of 50 thousand or so signs, steadily increasing, became famous.   Dick stood on the car roof and fastened with stainless lag bolts a red sign he'd routed.   It's about 9 feet up, 6 poles from the tourist office.  "& 2004" should be "& Corolla 2004".
                                        Click here for more on the Sign Post Forest

Along the whole AK Highway there were new little ma-and-pa businesses in long woodsy stretches, each offering the essentials: gasoline, food and bathrooms.   There were also many shuttered buildings which hadn't survived the competition.   However, the remaining oases and the paved road made this part of the drive less of an adventure than our trip to Yellowknife.    It would have been a nice day's drive to end at Whitehorse, capital of the Yukon, where 2/3 of the 29,000 people in this vast territory live, but Canada's Senior Olympic Games were beginning there, so there were no beds available and we had to continue 100 miles to Haines Junction.   Our motel was mediocre, but the nearby restaurant was truly "one of the best in Canada".

September 1:  Above the left shoulder of the AK Highway rose steep cliffs that were the edge of Kluane National Park, its endless convolutions and glaciers stark white in the sunshine.   There had been ice on our car that morning, but by noon temperatures were in the 60's.   At the international border the plate of each approaching car is scanned and its credentials inspected by computer.   The customs officer leaned out his window, and asked, "Did you cross at Calais and get lost ?"   He was from "BANGr" and made our crossing swift and pleasant.   We continued to  the Westmark Inn in Tok, which caters mostly to tour groups, and would close for the winter a week later.   The reservation rate was lowered $30 by friendly persuasion at the desk.

September 2.:  We headed north on the Taylor "Highway" to Chicken and Eagle.   The first 50 miles of that side road were through a charred Hell, the remains of vast forest fires that summer.   Errant smoke clouds and scattered smoke plumes from places still burning underground had caused decreasing visibility since Whitehorse.   Some locals and travellers had told of being slowed to 10 mph, or being diverted hundreds of miles.

In 1996 Marge and I had driven the dirt road aptly named the Top of the World Highway, from Dawson in the Yukon Klondike to Alaska.   On the USA side the road is named the Taylor Highway.

On it is Chicken, population 37, with no phones or indoor plumbing.   There in 1996 we had met Robin Hammond, postmaster, who persuasively explained that the post office is the heart of Chicken.   She told us that without enough stamp sales the post office would close, and  eliminate the year round delivery of supplies by mail, and ski plane when the road is closed by snow.   Similarly, some Maine island communities have died when schools close, although in Chicken the few students are home schooled, quite successfully.   She said we could buy our stamps from her at no extra cost by using free USPS envelopes she supplied.   Ever since we've bought our stamps from Robin in $50 increments.  So can you, by writing Postmaster, Chicken AK 99732.   Robin and her 2 teenage daughters were travelling in Egypt when we were there on this trip.   Her husband is a gold miner. 

Back in Brunswick we had long tried to find good homes for our  decades of National Geographic magazines and maps, but Robin enthusiastically accepted our offer thereof,  for the adjacent town library.   We brought and unloaded there about 150 of each: a heavy weight and use of space.

Gold has been extracted by various methods in this area for more than a century.  One method is the dredge, which floats on a shallow pond which travels with it, as ore-bearing gravel is excavated in front of it,  processed, and deposited behind it.  A few deteriorating old dredges remained, like this one near Chicken.   I cautiously clambered through it.       

   

Click here for more on gold dredges,

The 75 miles from there to Eagle, which smoke had prevented us from visiting by Cessna in 2000, took 3 hours.   The narrow dirt road twisted and clung to cliffsides, and all around, near and far, were the brilliant yellow and orange of aspens and the red of high bush cranberries, all at the peak of color. That was interspersed with still-green birches, green conifers, black cliffs, flashing streams far below, and signs warning "Beware Falling Rock".  Our memories are, and  original photos were, much brighter than seen below.

Finally we left the fires behind.   There were many hunters seeking caribou, but later we learned the fall migration of the great herd had diverted to the northwest.   We arrived at the end of the road, Eagle, population 182, on the mighty Yukon River, at 8:15 PM.   The only restaurant had closed at 8:00, but the owner of the little motel and restaurant opened up to serve us the "daily special".   The motel floor sloped, the walls were rough boards, there were no door locks, or nails on which to hang the single towels, or sink stopper, or drawers, but perhaps to show the priorities of our society there was super satellite TV.   No credit cards, either, and no jail.

The next morning we were given a tour of the little town.   It is rich in history (Billy Mitchell, Amundsen, gold miners...) and has a splendid little collection of buildings and artifacts.

The rain that started as we arrived the previous night continued, so much of the road back was slippery mud.   Nevertheless it was poignant to realize that as each beautiful view disappeared behind us, probably we would never see it again.   We stopped briefly at Chicken, and continued on pavement the remaining lonely 75 miles to the next house and the Alaska Highway.   Because of the rain there were no more smoke plumes, though only winter would end all underground hot spots.   As the road rose to about 3000' altitude, snow and dense fog enveloped us.   Three inches of wet snow on the pavement made for very tricky driving.   We were concerned that we might be trapped in a dip between two 8% grades, but after 15 miles we were back in clear air and on clear pavement.

September 4:   After another night at the Tok Westmark, we washed our Corolla back to silver again, and headed west towards Anchorage, while the Alaska Highway continued northwest towards Fairbanks.  The 6 hour drive to Anchorage was in constant view of nearby peaks, with new glistening white snow above 3000' or so.

September 5:   We arrived in Anchorage, population 260,000,  6900 miles and 25 days after leaving home.   Gasoline was down to $1.97/gallon.   Here was and is the world's highest ratio of planes to population, with many of them parked on the water in front of elegant homes.  We spent two nights at an excellent hotel, then two nights at a better but cheaper one, each hotel using half price coupons.  Between chores we visited Steve Widmer, a pilot who operated the airport at Norridgewock Maine for two years.  He was a social worker and retired peace officer.

Anchorage to Whitehorse

September 8:   We drove in fine weather from Anchorage to near the entrance to Denali (Mt. McKinley) National Park, to start a 3-day all-expense package with Denali Backcounry Safaris.   We usually shun the inflexibility and expense of packages, but because of the imminent seasonal shutdown of park accommodations and their popularity, this was the only way we could travel the only road into the park, ending at Kantishna, near the center of it.

After supper at our package lodging outside the park we each were given a bottle of water in case the pipes froze that evening, 2 nights before the lodge closed for winter.   We each left a faucet dripping, and the temperature only descended to 22 degrees, so there was no problem.   We were told that a previous group had left the faucets on full blast, so they had no water left in the morning. 

September 9:  After ablutions and breakfast we were herded into a small bus too early: 6:15 AM.   The sun rose soon after we were under way, and the erudite driver told us to call "Stop, stop" if we saw wildlife, and that each was allowed three "Sorry, it's a stone" stops.   Thus it took 7 hours to drive the narrow sinuous dirt track to our lodge at Kantishna .   We counted 6 brown (grizzly) bears, a dozen ptarmigans (Alaska state bird: "chicken"), 2 Dall (bighorn) sheep, and 12 moose.

Alaska meece are much bigger than Maine mooses.☺

The bears browsed about 100 yards from us, as we were cautioned to only whisper, as we climbed over each other for vantage points at the windows.

At Kantishna Marge and I spent the afternoon indolating on porch chairs, facing a beautiful rushing stream, golden aspens, and the glistening white Denali panorama beyond.  (Picture taken next AM).

We were told that only about one day in 50 was as clear as that day.   The smoke haze from the combustion of 1,300,000 acres of Alaska timber that summer had temporarily blown away.   That evening a professional photographer showed us slides of bears and Northern Lights.   The 3 of us had an interesting discussion earlier.   He had experienced only 2 "bluff charges" in his career.   In these the bear runs at you, then stands on his hind legs and roars, trying to scare you off by looking ferocious, which for a half-ton omnivore is not difficult.   How does one distinguish between a bluff charge and its lunch time ?   The answer was fuzzy....

I mentioned Timothy Treadwell, who tented each summer among the giant Katmai variety of grizzlies, telling the world in his books that they were misunderstood, until he and his girlfriend were found half eaten the previous year (2003):  click here for more on Treadwell.   In 1996 Marge and I, with some apprehension, had helped him break camp and get into our hired float plane.  He told us that in the unlikely event his furry friends killed him, it would have been worth it.   We wonder if he changed his mind in his last few seconds.   The photographer was quite critical of Mr. Treadwell.

Signs were posted at the lodge stating that if a certain signal were sounded, we were all to stay in our rooms until the grizzly was chased away.

September 10:  Marge and I, with the encouragement of the staff, walked a half mile to a beaver pond.   In mud we found a grizzly paw print, a big moose print, and some wolf scat.   On our bus ride out that afternoon we saw about the same number and variety of beasts, plus 4 caribou and a pika.   We were told that caribou have the biggest antlers in the deer family for their weight. The only difference betwixt caribou and reindeer, we were told, is that the latter fly on Christmas eve and have red noses.   Our package ended after the next breakfast.

September 11:  We headed east on the Denali Highway, the east-west 85% paved 134 mile road that connects the Anchorage-Fairbanks highway to Route 4, which follows the Valdez - Prudhoe Bay pipeline. We'd read and heard various opinions of the quality of this road, the last one being that we should carry 2 spare tires.   We had only the Toyota "toy tire" spare, but had no trouble. The route was at least as beautiful as all had told us.   I made compound errors in arranging a room for the night.   I'd booked, then cancelled, a coupon-half-price room at the deluxe Princess Lodge at Copper Center, because I mistakenly thought we couldn't reach it in time, then found the place full when we got there early and tried to re-book.   We settled for a friendly but more expensive hotel,  our worst accommodation since El Salvador.   We used the few square feet of non-bed floor space in our bedroom partly for storage and partly for careful stepping.   Three demented dogs had free run of the place.

September 12:  The semi-ghost towns of McCarthy and Kennecott in the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park was our destination the next day....  For millennia Ahtna Indians in the high glaciated mountains between what now are the Alaska Pipeline and the Canadian border had made weapons, tools, and ornaments from pieces of nearly pure copper they found there.   About 1900, the story goes, a chief told 2 white prospectors about these deposits.   The ore was so rich, 50% to 90% copper, that in some places the ground was green as grass.   So J.P. Morgan and friends started the Kennecott Corporation, and a 163 mile railroad was built in formidable terrestial and climatological conditions, at a cost of 23 million 1911 dollars, to the new town of Kennecott (spelling varies).   100 million dollars of copper was shipped out, until the operation was abandoned in 1938 because of the Depression and exhaustion of the richest ore.   Kennicott was a model company town, where decorum was strictly regulated so that families of officials could live there.   The town of McCarthy, five miles distant, was a typical mining town, where routine commerce and the usual iniquities flourished.   Both towns are still there, semi-ghosts, on private land in the middle of the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, the largest in the USA.

Surface approach to the two towns is on a 58 mile dirt road "recommended for the adventurous motorist", per The Milepost, the Alaska motorist's bible, on the bed of the former railroad.   The track is therefore nearly level, often one-lane with steep dropoffs and no guard rails. Every source warns that tires are apt to be impaled by old railroad spikes, which rise to the surface in the spring like rocks in Maine fields.   In the picture below the road diverts from the old rail bed and its ties for a short distance.

Of course the road also diverts from the several old railroad trestles.  Notice snow coming down to

lower elevations on the mountains, as winter approaches.

A seasonal van service and bush planes are available for the curious but cautious. We drove, averaging 25 mph, and had no trouble.   At road's end we parked our car, carried our gear across the long footbridge over the turbulent Copper River, and waited for the car we had summoned.  If we'd gone there on our 1996 trip we'd have had to sit in a seat suspended from a cable and pulled ourselves across.   Only the cars of the few residents are on the far side of the bridge.  They were driven there over the frozen river in winter.

We stayed 2 nights in the little McCarthy hotel, the former Ma Johnson brothel, in another tiny room with bath down the hall. 

A concentrator mill was built up the side of a mountain,  14 stories high, the world's tallest ghost town building.   It was connected by tramways to copper mines above it.   One of the few surviving structures in Kennicott,  its fame attracted Federal funds to restore and preserve it.

A young woman offered to guide us through the structure, so Marge and I ascended with her the 280 intricately constructed inside stairs to the top, admiring the complicated abandoned machinery.   Animals could come and go through big holes in the building exterior, so bear scat  was on one of the landings.  Following the photo of Marge on the stairs is one of some old rock-crushing machinery and one looking out one of the big holes in the walls.

Outside, our guide showed us that the road gravel was rife with pebbles of blue azurite and green malachite the size of wooden match heads.   We gathered a few, though they are too small for polishing into gemstones. More treasure remains in the mountains: aerial magnetometers have located 4 sites at least as rich as the original deposits, but these are untouchable in a National Park.

 

We hired a small Cessna to fly over some of it.   The mountains are not as tall as Mt. McKinley, but great in number, and mingled with vast untrammeled glaciers.   It was awesome, as our grandsons also would say. We were fortunate that was our last clear day for a week.  The second photograph below shows one of the mine headings that fed ore by tramway down to the concentrator in Kennecott.

The people who are attracted to work in those two towns in the summer may not be the same as you and us, and winter residents are even fewer and more different.   One category is open and friendly, mostly young people who have backpacked the world and some gays like those that ran our hotel.   The second category is not open.  Its 50 people in a circle of 50 miles diameter may include those in the witness protection program, and the local family with 15 kids and at war with their "neighbors".   Part of their income is the one to three thousand dollars that very Alaskan living soul is paid annually from oil revenues.

When we left McCarthy and reached paved roads again, we stopped at the broad shallow Chitina River to ask about the fish wheels we saw. A man from Colombia (!) explained that they were invented by white men not Indians, that they were being folded because it was the end of the salmon fishing season, and that their use was limited to residents of moderate income.

  

 

We stayed the night at a bed-and-breakfast in Tok.  Like all USA B&Bs the owner seemed more interested in showing her superior taste than in guest comfort.  We had hardly any shelf space, giant ornamental pillows had no place to be moved to so the bed could be occupied, a giant teddy bear held the toilet paper, etc.  However, nearly all Canadian B&B's we've used seem to be the neat and functional, run by couples we would have liked as neighbors.

The final day in this segment we drove the Alaska Highway back to Whitehorse.    It seemed if we didn't leave Alaska then our car would be stuck there until spring.  Enroute we saw snow on steadily lower elevations: on mountain tops, on adjacent tree tops, on shoulders, then on the road, getting thicker. The temperature declined to 29 degrees, and we went many apprehensive miles without seeing another car or building.  Finally the road descended, the road turned black again, and we arrived at the capital of Yukon Territory, where we stayed 3 nights.   The first was at Hawkins House, which must be the best B&B in the world: physically worth an Architectural Digest article, with hospitality and food to match.   Because the city was hosting yet another convention, we had to spend the final 2 nights at High Country Inn, where we had superb facilities and a half-price coupon was accepted cheerfully.

More blogger problems.    The rest of the trip story should appear below, but instead, to get it  you have to: 
click here for the     Rest Of The Story .