Tag: Alaska

Another end of the line – but with glaciers

September 14, 2026

I left you last in Mat-Su Valley, thinking that I was going to head back to Canada and down to Washington. But that wasn’t to be…

It has been raining and my solar is down. For the most part, I can live without power. If it’s not pouring rain, I can make coffee with my camp stove (but reminder to myself, I need a good coffee pot for use on a fire. Using a drip system with boiling water yields lukewarm coffee when it’s this cold out, when you want it hot the most). But since it’s been pouring rain, I haven’t had coffee in two days. Caffeine, yes, but nothing warm, and I’m not quite right without coffee. But worse than no coffee would be to let Kristie’s salmon go bad. She gave me some beautiful, fat cuts, and that would be tragic. I snuggled them into the ice cube trays, so it’s okay for now. 

I spent the night on the side of the road, which is not as bad as it sounds. Except for a highway, I’m surrounded by nature. A rushing river and a forest, pretty good deal. Whenever I’m stopped for the night, which is early due to my crazy dog, I notice that most travelers start pulling over or into campsites or RV parks between 5-7. So the upside of the curvy, narrow mountain roads is that very few people drive at night and it’s dead quiet, especially far away from a town. Then I got a good look at a downside of curvy, narrow mountain roads the next morning. 

Just a random fall color pic – who knows anymore where this is.

It had been raining for a couple days, and fairly cold. Too much rain to make coffee, and it was tempting to fire up the propane grill inside the van. But without power my roof fan won’t work, and it might be weeks before anyone tows the van and finds our carbon-monoxide-saturated corpses. I should remember to research that later. Worse than the rain was the thick fog. The highway (Glenn Highway) was in a mountain pass at this point, so I’d drive up and into the impenetrable fog, rise above it, drive down and into the fog, drop below it, over and over and over. Add construction and a single gravel lane that didn’t have any markings or guard rails. The drop off on the right was steep (think Crawler’s Ledge steep), and single, sad, tiny orange cones dotted the cliffside every so often. And I was stuck behind a couple cars and a double semi. And no coffee. And my solar power alarm started screaming as I tried to make out the tail lights of the guy in front of me through the rain and fog, worst time for a jump scare. I had switched off my power for the night and put it back on for the freezer, but it wasn’t enough. Thankfully I could switch off the alarm with a switch I installed behind my head above the driver’s seat. I was starting to stress about gas and didn’t have any reception to find the next station on a map. And no coffee. It was just a complete shit morning. I’d chance a quick look out my right-hand window and see that I was driving above a glacier, and start to stress about ice on the road. It was a terror-filled morning drive.

Oh, and don’t forget Lucy – head butting me in the arm the entire time so I’d stop scaring her, but the road was too narrow for any rest stops. I think this was the only time I ever asked myself “what the fuck am I doing here?”

The only way I could deal with the driving scenario I found myself in (second to worst scenario, but only to snow) was to scream-sing with the stereo blasting. That is my extreme distress coping mechanism. So I made a short list of my favorite scream-songs from the playlist I was listening to (no radio stations). 

Top 5 scream-song list: 5. Dream On – Aerosmith, 4. Hit Me Baby One More Time – Brittany Spears (but I only have the Travis version), 3. Whipping Post – Allman Brothers, 2. Bad – U2 (and if you don’t remember that great mullet Bono had during Live-Aid or whatever fest from the 80’s you should totally watch it on YouTube), 1. Oh! Darling – Beatles. Honorable Mention: Dry the Rain – Beta Band (in honor of the John Cusack movie reference, but also a good one). Second Honorable Mention: Bend – Middle Kids (because it’s too new to bump the classics). I’m listening to music as I’m writing this and I keep wanting to change my list. Led Zeppelin just came on. 

I should have asked Santa for a better stereo when I was at the North Pole. Every time I hit a pothole, the music cuts out. I can’t figure out why, because it’s the connection to my phone, not an internal wire. How does a bump in the road interrupt bluetooth?

Anyway, I had a decision to make at Glennallen: follow the Tok Cutoff north (ugh north again) to Tok and back to Canada for the road south? Or south along the Richardson Highway (along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline) to Valdez? I quickly went from what the fuck am I doing here?” to “I’ll probably never drive this way again so I have to.” I’m really starting to worry about the weather (Denali roads were closed last week for snowfall, and all tourist bus trips cancelled), and a side trip to Valdez would add four days at least. Now if I had been actually planning this, I would have known that a trip to Valdez does not mean seeing the Prince William Sound, which I want to do. I would also have known that I could have caught a ferry from Whittier, east of Anchorage, saved myself days of driving (including the terror-filled morning), and sailed across the northern part of the Sound. But alas, done is done. The drive to Valdez was stunning, but the tourists drove worse than the usual idiots – in proportion to the level of beauty, I guess. 

(Roxanne – The Police)

I nearly had two accidents on that road: one was a sedan driving about 20 in a 65 with no flashers, just people leaning out the window taking pictures. That may not seem so bad, but coming up on them around a mountainy curve with cars in the other lane is enough to make Lucy jump up and head butt me when I had to slam on the brakes. The second was car stopped dead in the road – in a hairpin turn – in the canyon to take pictures of the waterfalls. At least I was only going about 30 at the time to navigate the curves. With the morning starting with a driving nightmare, then the afternoon filled with morons, I was glad to arrive in Valdez. 

Bridal Veil Falls

Valdez is the end of the line, too, like Homer. Alaska has a lot of them. The camping in town is limited to parking-lot style RV parks, which I hate, but since the park was closing in two days I nearly had the place to myself (I made a note that it closes on September 10, just for my date references).

Valdez is charming, a port town with docks and a ferry and seafood and cute shops. But covered in giant, nearly-empty RV parks. As scared as I am of the snow, I would have hated this place in high tourist season. It was a perfect time to visit (also, very few bugs now). The town is overrun by the cutest fluffy bunnies, cartoon-type bunnies, in all colors: black, white, gray, brown, some a mix of all colors. They lived under the buildings and hung out under the RVs and Lucy thought she had died and gone to heaven. 

(Thunder Road – Bruce Springsteen)

Valdez has a ferry, and my map shows a line connecting Valdez to Haines, another town I would love to see. A ferry would cut off the entire drive back north to Tok and put me near the road in the Yukon. So Lucy and I walked down to the terminal and there is only a ferry going to the place I came from, not the way I’m going. I have no idea what the dotted line connecting Valdez and Haines means. So if I’m going to see Haines I’ll have to add another four days along the Haines Highway, down and up. I could do it much quicker but that doesn’t sound like fun.

Since I didn’t see the Prince William Sound, I booked a glacier trip to get on the water. It only covers a teensy portion of one arm of the Sound, so technically maybe it’s not even considered “the Sound.” Lucy wanted some time apart, so I got up the next morning and made it to the boat. It was so foggy I could barely see the van. The boat captain was required to blow his fog horn every two minutes since no one could see anything. 

On the way out

On the way back

The trip visited the Colombia Glacier, arrived at by a speedy motor to a bay filled with icebergs, which slowed us considerably. A couple was getting married onboard, so the captain was trying to get as close as possible and it was COLD! The guy I bought my ticket from told me I’d be fine in “what I was wearing” the day before, when he should have told me to pack my winter coat and gloves. Jerk. But it’s a glacier tour, so my bad, too, I guess.

Columbia Glacier

We saw a mama and baby humpback whale, otters relaxing on icebergs, seals on a giant cement marker. The glacier was beautiful, the floating blue icebergs carved into crazy shapes by the wind and water. Ice chunks everywhere in the glassy water. It was a nice tour, but I’ll never need to do it again. 

I was adopted by a couple families with adult children and we stood on the top deck and made fun of a group of women below with their backs to the ocean and mountains, posing for selfies. Hours of selfies. I don’t recall seeing them actually look at the scenery. But it was cold, so they had to go inside and edit pictures until they warmed up to take more. The wedding was short and sweet, possibly because the bride wore a sleeveless gown.

(Fire Woman – The Cult)

The captain mentioned that we would not be anywhere near the Exxon oil spill of 1989, which spilled about 11 million gallons. He said you could barely see damage anymore. Most of the wildlife is back to the previous populations, but if you dig on the beach you’ll find layers of degrading black oil. So still not great. He further mentioned that two men were at the helm at the time of the reef collision, and although they later testified that they turned off the auto pilot, neither of them did. All their course corrections were overridden by the auto pilot and they didn’t notice. The sophisticated radar that could have prevented the reef collision had been broken for two years, too expensive to fix, apparently. The ship ran aground in 35 feet of water and no one started the cleanup for days as they argued about who should do it, then a late-winter storm blew in and no cleanup was possible at that point. I read later that Exxon sued both the Coast Guard and the State of Alaska for making it too hard for them to do a cleanup. Corporate greed and negligence certainly haven’t changed since then. What has changed is that two boats are now required to accompany tankers in and out of the Prince William Sound, along with the pilot – a tug and a boat capable of beginning an oil spill cleanup. 

(You Oughtta Know – Alanis Morisette)

Otter family on icebergs

I haven’t caught up yet to where I am IRL, but this is getting kind of long. More coming very soon because I have wifi right now! (Sept 18, 20206)

And hurray, it’s warm again (but this is where I’m sitting right now, about a week or so after the events above).

Moose crossing

August 29, 2026

My last post was called “Denali National Park” but it didn’t really contain anything about the park itself. I was just in it. So it’ll be in here somewhere. 

After finally crossing the Alaskan border, I decided to spend the night in Tok (pronounced ‘toke’) at a campground. Showers, laundry, etc. It was so empty that Lucy and I had acres to walk (if Lucy would have gotten out of bed more). Tundra RV Park, very pretty and clean. We were exhausted from the bumpy-ass ride from the Yukon so all we could do was sleep and eat. I decided to stay another day for cleaning and relaxing, and went to the bar located at the park. It was in a beautiful room, log beams, very rustic but casual. The clientele was like I’d just walked into the American Legion with my dad. Fairly old, kinda rough looking (in the hard work way, not the criminal way). I had a couple Alaskan White ales while Lucy mobbed every person who walked close enough. She was ecstatic to be in an actual building, one that doesn’t have wheels. 

From Tok we headed to the North Pole, which is an actual city in Alaska. The entire town is Christmas themed, and the red-and-white-stripe street poles are shaped like candy canes. The McDonalds sign is on top of a candy cane pole. It wasn’t like a Christmas town from a cartoon, all pretty and gumdroppy. It was just an industrial kind of town with funny street poles, for the most part.

The big attraction at the North Pole is Christmas Village, with the ginormous Santa Claus statue and real reindeer. And gift store, of course, with an actual Santa you could sit on and tell what you want for Christmas. I’m not a huge Christmas fan, but I wanted to send postcards from the North Pole, just for fun. And the giant retail store/restaurant, with hundreds of trees covered in thousands of ornaments you could buy plus anything Christmas-related that you can possibly think of, didn’t have regular old cardboard post cards. Wtf? I was so angry. All they had were these stupidly expensive, thick 3-D type cards, so I got just a couple and mailed them.

The only reason I drove north was to go to send postcards so it seemed like a waste of a day (but if you are a Christmas super-freak then you would love it). I never wanted to go to Fairbanks, but drove through anyway so I could take the road south to Denali. If it weren’t the end of August I’d consider driving all the way north to the Arctic Ocean. Another time. 

We arrived at Denali National Park fairly early and did a scenic hike along the Nenana River. You can only drive 7 miles into the park unless you’re a commercial tour bus or have a special permit, so we stopped as far as we could go. There was a hike, but no dogs allowed, so I didn’t do it. The ranger told me that there is too much bear activity for dogs to be around. Yesterday, there was a bear in the parking lot so all the people had to jump into the buses. And a grizzly killed two moose calves nearby as well. 

The park was filled with buses and thousands of tourists and it was too crazy for me. But much less crazy than Banff or Jasper, probably because it’s so late in the season. So we went to the bottom and did another pretty hike and got back on the road.

I am now parked on the Denali Highway – 137 miles of bumpy dirt-and-gravel road. I’ve been driving around 25mph, and there’s no way I’m going to spend 5 hours driving the entire thing. But I might. The road is rough and pot-holed, but ridiculously beautiful. I’ve only driven the first 10 miles from the Cantwell (west) side so far. As you drive up the peaks of the hills you see spruce forests dotted with lakes, surrounded on all side by mountains. It’s a bit of a panic-attack area, so remote and open. 

But not lonely. Every tenth of a mile or so is a gravel pullout. Some are big enough for 5 or 6 cars, but most are 1-or-2 sized. I would’ve stopped earlier than 10 miles if an earlier one had been open. I imagine the people who are in the ones with the ‘postcard of Alaska’ views got there very early today. 

My view, however, is not to be dismissed. Under a blue sky with puffy white clouds, I see a dark green mountain range, nothing tall enough to have snow. By my estimate, they are approximately I-have-no-fucking-idea miles away. From the mountains to the van are millions of thin spruce trees. A small body of water, sparkly blue, is not far off but partially hidden by trees. This water flows to a culvert that runs under the road, and is surrounded by foot-tall light green grass with golden tassels blowing in the wind. While some of the other views are dramatic like postcards, my view would make a pleasant painting. Happy little trees.

Rear Window view

I believe those are the Talkeetna Mountains, but I’m going by my map and you know how I am with those. I am not in Denali National Park anymore, but about 25 miles away. 

I pulled into one that can easily fit 2 vehicles but I really hope no one parks next to me. I backed in and am using the rear windows to lay in bed and look for bears. That is what I’m going to be doing for the next several hours (because it’s cold and I’ve been outside quite a bit this morning). 

Front window view

August 31,2026

Ha. I hope no one parks next to me. Why do I even say that? I spotted a mama moose with a baby walking up the road toward the van, so I got out to take pictures. Yes, they were far enough away so I wouldn’t die, and Lucy stayed inside. Then they walked through the woods to the water below where I was parked, drinking from pond. Then a swan showed up. 

I was standing by the road with my camera because the entire area on both sides of the road is the private property of Ahtna, Inc, an Alaska Native corporation. They own just under two million acres, so you have to stick to the easement, no hiking. As I stood there taking pictures, a car stopped to see what I was looking at. A woman gets out with her camera. After a few minutes, another car with 4 people stops to take pictures. Then one of those jeep tours happened by, and they all stopped (13 jeeps), each adding 4 more people to the gawkers around my van (one guy was actually leaning on it, and I was going to yell at him, but the filth that probably rubbed off on his jacket is punishment enough). Then a couple more cars stopped. At one point I believe there were close to 60 people standing with me taking pictures. One woman told me that these moose were the first animals they’d seen all day, and it was getting toward sunset. It was a pleasant scene.

It was getting cold and dark so everyone left except one truck. I had gone into the van to warm up, then went back out to see if anything else had shown up. Just as I got up to the road I saw a wolf gracefully loping toward me. And I immediately backed around the van and jumped inside. No wolf pics, sad to say.

I think I mentioned the wildfire in Tok but not what I found when I got there. Which was nothing. I didn’t see or smell smoke, didn’t see a single burned tree. All available Alaska Smokejumpers were working, plus the Missoula Smokejumpers, and 7,300 acres burned (according to the news). I have no idea how I didn’t see any sign of it. 

Anyway, I decided not to drive the entire unpaved Denali highway, so we went back the way we came (10 miles), and headed south. The morning was cold and clear so Denali was visible.

I’ve been noticing as I go through my photos that Lucy looks angrier and angrier at me. I really think she is considering murdering me while I sleep.

Do you see what I mean?

We ended up stopping at Reflection Lake for a nice walk, then camping at Eagle River, a pretty spot with miles and miles of hiking trails and a fairly large river with falls and rapids. Kayakers were playing in the rapids yesterday but today is freezing and rainy and very quiet. 

Today is dedicated to cleaning the van and relaxing, and tomorrow we will continue south. I found a dog wash nearby and as mad as Lucy is at me now, wait until she’s forced to take a bath.

This caribou was from a few days ago. Cute, yeah?

Denali National Park

August 27, 2026

The Yukon river is the longest free-flowing river in the world while being the world’s longest inland Pacific salmon run (taken from the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council). Pretty cool. At the Mile 0 campground in Dawson City, I joked with the manager about paying for a campsite with salmon on my way back; he seemed very open to that.

The Yukon begins in British Columbia and southern Yukon and ends in the Bering Sea on the west coast of Alaska, about 1980 miles. The Bering Sea is part of the northern Pacific Ocean, and separates USA from Russia by way of the Bering Strait, which connects the Pacific Ocean to the Arctic Ocean.

And this is not today’s only geography lesson. 

Another nifty fact you may have forgotten from grade-school geography is the location of the 60th parallel, and which other countries share this latitude. And the reason I’m so cold right now. It separates the southern Canadian provinces from the northern, crosses southern Alaska, and crosses Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, etc. I am a bit north of it right now, at 63 according to my phone. It was 39 degrees in Tok, AK last night, and Denali has snow in the forecast in a few days.

Nothing that I’m telling you about geography is anything that makes sense to me. As you probably know, I do not have directional sense, and thank god there is only one road for the majority of this trip. I have to park facing the direction I need to go in because I can never remember where I came from. After I camped at Lake Park, with no reception to power my map, I drove up to the highway and had no idea which way to go, being surrounded on all sides by mountains, lakes, rivers, forests. I sat and considered, then turned the wrong way (as I do about 87% of the time). My compass did work this time because I could only be going north or west to get to Alaska, so I U-turned. 

Last fact (but probably not). I mentioned some time ago that I spent the night at a borrow pit. I finally googled it today. A borrow pit is an excavated area where material has been dug for use as fill at another location, per Merriam-Webster. Do only rural people and construction workers know what these are? Anyway, a ditch is a borrow pit because the dirt is used to elevate the road. And the large ones, like the pond I camped near, are often filled with water and reclaimed as a wildlife area. 

The ever-helpful AI asked if I wanted some examples of a borrow pit from the web, and promptly gave me, “Noah was found dead May 16, a day after he was reported missing, in a borrow pit filled with water near his home in Jesup, Georgia…” Super helpful.

August 29, 2026

Today I am in Denali NP, and wow is it amazing. I can’t see Denali due to cloud cover, but the rest of the mountains are out. So here are some fun Denali facts, as long as there is more name change idiocy happening (Lake Ontario will always be Lake Ontario, imo). 

Denali is the highest peak in North America, and it is “Deenaalee” in Koyukon, which means “the high one.” It was called Mt. McKinley in 1896 by a gold prospector (McKinley was president at the time), and adopted by the US in 1917. The name Denali was always used in Alaska, and in 1975 the Alaskan government petitioned for a permanent change. It was denied, of course, because Ohio has always been run by douchebag politicians (birthplace of McKinley). 

Along comes Obama, and while he did not change the name, the Secretary of the Interior did before Obama visited in 2015 (over the protests from Ohio). And the name stayed as Denali, until the 2025 inauguration of our pedophile-in-chief, with executive order 14172, changing it back to Mt. McKinley, because, “President McKinley was responsible for creating a vast sum of money.” Yes, he said that. 

And how did I get to Denali? Through some pretty horrible roads. I mentioned previously that the frost heave section was not that bad, but that’s only because I hadn’t gone far enough. If you have ever driven the road to Polihale, imagine it worse than the worst it’s ever been. The potholes weren’t too bad, but the washboard was intense. I spent a lot of time driving under 10mph so my furniture wouldn’t shake apart. 

I’m about to drive the Denali Highway (not the road that partly runs through the park), and it is only paved for 24 of its 134 miles. It will probably take me all day, and I’m going to get started since I don’t want to be stuck in the mountains at night. 

Have a great day!