The Inside Passage

We had planned the trip to conclude with the Alaska Marine Highway System auto ferry to get home. If you want to do the Inside Passage but hate the thought of going to sea in a floating hotel with 6000 other people, this may be for you. If you love continuous food, shore excursions with large groups of old people, nightly shows, and swimming pools, you may prefer one of the cruise ships. But we thought the M.V. Columbia was great. A couple of hundred passengers, brief stops in Scagway, Haines, Juneau, Sitka, Petersburg, Wrangell, and Ketchikan, and your entertainment is what you provide yourself. Food you either bring aboard or can buy at a snack bar or a very nice restaurant.

We boarded the Columbia at Skagway on Monday evening. We had to be there 2 hours in advance, and were among the first cars loaded since we were going all the way to Bellingham, WA. The loaders motioned me out of line as one of the first cars to load, and I drove in through a big door about midway down the side of the ship. They motioned me to the far side of the car deck to where there was what looked like a metal plate of some sort in the deck. I thought they might be going to weigh each car, but with a rumble a metal cage descended from the upper deck and I was motioned to drive into it - the metal plate was a little ramp up into the elevator. We were raised to the upper car deck, then motioned to drive forward and park behind another vehicle. We got our bags, dodged other cars as they exitted the elevator, and made our way to the purser's desk where we got the key to our cabin. There were two decks of cabins - ours was 201 on the upper deck and just behind the lower viewing lounge. Very convenient. The cabin had bunk beds, a bathroom and shower, sink, and small closet. Basic and cramped, but clean and comfortable, with a nice-sized window. Plenty of room under the lower berth for luggage.

We went out to explore the ship. On our deck (Deck 5) were the viewing lounge and a theater with reclining seats and two big-screen televisions. Aft was an open deck, partially covered, where people later pitched tents. Since the ship only had a hundred or so cabins, many of the passengers either slept in their tents, in the reclining seats in the theater, or on the floor in the lounges. There was a wait-list for cabins in case somebody didn't show up who had reserved a cabin. The ship had restrooms and showers on each deck for the "homeless."

The Boat Deck (Deck 6) had another viewing lounge as well as the snack bar and restaurant. Both lounges had windows the entire width of the deck and down the sides, with comfortable seats and booths with tables and bench seats. The National Forest Service (Dept. of Interior?) had a young woman on board who gave daily talks on the area we were going through, with catchy titles like "Our Flippered Friends." Other than that, we passed the three days watching spectacular scenery, reading, working puzzles, and doing counted cross stitch. Linda caught a couple of movies, but with limited choices (e.g., Baby Mama) I chose to read.

We didn't see a lot of wildlife, although there were some sightings of whales, porpoises and eagles. The stops in Juneau, Petersburg, and Wrangell were in the middle of the night, but we stopped for three hours one afternoon in Sitka, and six hours the next afternoon in Ketchikan. In general, except for Scagway the ferry dock was miles from the towns we stopped at, so the time available ashore was very limited.

When we got to Bellingham we were resigned to being one of the last off the boat, and were prepared for it to take several hours. They moved fast, though, and it took less than an hour and a half. Then the drive home was all that was left. Sigh! Back to crowded roads, big cities, and urban development. But the Columbia River Gorge does not have to take a back seat to any scenery we saw while we were gone.

This photo was taken as we backed away from the ferry dock in Scagway.

The photo above is near Sitka.

Leaving the ferry dock near Sitka.

The auto deck as we prepared to disembark.

So, the trip is over, we're home safe and sound, and the car survived with only minor dings.

The Penultimate Adventure

Today we had our next-to-the-last adventure, the trip on the White Pass and Yukon Railway. We were picked up by the driver of a small bus, since there were only nine of us. The bus would take us to Carcross in the Yukon where we would meet the train and come back by rail. This was a repeat, in reverse, of the drive we had made from Whitehorse on Friday, but our driver had a line of patter and filled us in on a lot of aspects of the Klondyke gold rush. He took this picture of us at the overlook on the Dyea Road. We turned around here and started up the Klondyke Highway.

There were only nine of us on a train of three or four cars from Carcross to Bennett. We travelled for thirty miles along the shores of Lake Bennett, and then along a series of long, narrow lakes that served as the headwaters of the Yukon River. I posted pictures of some of these a couple of days ago. Lunch was at Bennett in the railroad depot (below) where we had beef stew and apple pie, both apparently made by the cooks at the depot. Very good. It had begun to rain so we didn't do the walking tour of Bennett, which was too bad because there was an interesting old log church there, on the hill above the lake. I think the railroad is the only way to get to Bennett - no road in. At Bennett we picked up a bunch of hikers who had walked the thirty-some miles up the Chilkoot trail. One poor girl was bandaging blisters on most of her toes and both heels as she waited for the train to leave.

The trip from Bennett started out across a level terrain of lakes, muskeg, and spruce forest.

Then from the Canadian border we started down what they call the "Oh My" section of track along a very deep, narrow, rocky gorge with tunnels, trestles, and stomach-wrenching views down to the rocks and class 6 rapids of the river far below. We didn't cross this trestle, which has been replaced by a newer one, thanks be. The newer ones are bad enough. The train rocked back and forth and the brakes squealed. What a ride!

I got the picture below of the train on a curved section of track, which doesn't give any indication of how steep or deep the gorge was. In fact, none of my pictures did.

Our trip is winding up cold, wet, and windy after the hot, dry, and smoky start. We've pulled out the "cold weather" suitcases we had packed when it was 104 in Hood River - sweaters, down vests, down coats. We'll need them on the boat, I think. Tomorrow evening we board the ferry for home. No blog posts for awhile, I don't imagine the internet will be available on the ship, so we may see you before the final post is made.

Saturday, Skagway

Today we did only a short drive around to the next inlet where the site of the booming gold rush town of Dyea (prounced Dye-ee) lies on the Taiya River. It is cloudy and windy with spatters of rain, sorta like October in Hood River, which discouraged lingering very long outside the car. But we stopped at a few places for some photos. This first is from across the valley that Skagway lies in, looking back at the town. The Klondyke Highway and Skagway River are in the foreground.

This (below) is the Taiya River, looking back towards the townsite of Dyea. That is mostly spruce forest, with cottonwoods along the river.

This (below) is looking the opposite direction along the tidal river towards the inlet and the sea.

This is Dyea (below). Nothing is left of the town of 10,000 that stood here a hundred years ago, except for some pieces of stove pipe and part of the false front of a store that is currently propped up with some 2 x 4's. The forest has reclaimed the site, but there was a great trail where we walked back into the forest. The park service had warned us of habituated bears in the area but didn't tell us what to do if we saw one. It would probably have been an occasion for one of Patrick McManus's "Full-bore Linear Panics," however the occasion didn't arise. In fact, we saw no wildlife at all, although I think I will go looking for one of the little creeks that flow through the town where spawning salmon are now visible. I'll let you know what I find.

Skagway and Robert Service

This is the land of Robert Service, a poet that I never particularly liked before coming to Alaska. But his poetry fits this land, expecially "The Spell of the Yukon":

It's a great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,
It's the forests where silence has lease'
It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It's the stillness that fills me with peace.

It just keeps getting better and better. The drive from Whitehorse to Skagway is beyond superlatives. The mountains are closer and higher and steeper, the lakes are like fjords, the rocks are glacier-scoured to the bare bones of the earth where little life has taken hold yet. It was a drive of only 110 miles, but through breathtaking valleys with long narrow lakes and finally down the side of a deep, narrow defile where you couldn't see the bottom and the river from the road, although you could here it way down there.



This first picture is Lake Tutshi, I think. We drove beside it for miles.




Just beyond it was an area of glacier-scoured rock, granite it looked like, and Lake Bennett (third photo) lay in the rocky potholes that the glacier had left behind.

Starting down the side of the gorge towards Skagway, we could see the railway on the other side of the gorge.

Skagway is a delightful old town at the head of a real fjord, with towering mountains all around. It is a cruise ship stop for a few months in the summer, but that is apparently not enough to support much of an economy. There are only 800 or so residents and the town is not all tarted up as a resort - not condos or expensive homes or resort hotels or lodges. Just the small downtown with its old buildings painted up and selling souvenirs, furs, and a lot of jewelry. The port and railway depot are the focal point of the town. We walked around and looked in the windows and stopped for a cinnamon bun (Linda) and chocolate croissant (Diane).

Tomorrow we'll visit Dyea and the Klondyke Goldrush National Historical Park a short drive into the next arm of Taiya Inlet. The Chilkoot Trail, the route to the gold fields during the Klondyke gold rush starts here. For the young and/or ambitious, you can hike the Chilkoot Trail. We don't plan to, except for maybe a few hundred yards.

Tok to Whitehorse - Things we missed the first time, or why you should always travel a highway at least twice.

Today we backtracked for 380 miles and we are in Whitehorse tonight. We had a chance to find some things we had missed on the trip up. The first were the mountains that dominated the southern horizon, that the smoke had obscured earlier. Turns out the route was a lot more scenic than we had originally thought - first the Alaska Range and then the Wrangell-St. Elias range, the two just sort of merging with each other somewhere near the Canadian border. The second was the border markers. Here you have the sign welcoming you to Alaska. There was also one facing the other direction welcoming you to the Yukon.

A stele and line on the pavement marked the actual border.

Someone had told us that part of the treaty between Canada and the U.S. required that you should be able to see from one end of the border at the Arctic Ocean to the other end by sighting between markers set in a cleared 60 foot wide strip. Sure enough, from this marker you could see the cleared strip, visible here stretching south. Looks rather like an electric highline right of way.

The third thing we had missed was a little museum in Burwash Landing in the middle of nowhere - the Kluane Museum of Natural History. Built largely by volunteers and contributions, using a building that was supposed to be a Catholic church, it was outstanding. The displays were well thought out and well executed, covering the animals of the area, the native peoples, and the native minerals. If you ever come this way, watch for it, somewhere between Beaver Creek and Haines Junction. And it only cost $2.95 Canadian for us senior citizens (so THERE, $30 drive to a glacier!).

We had a couple of good animal sightings to cap the day. We saw a cow and bull elk engaging in a little lead up to the rutting season - he was chasing her and she was being coy. And a bald eagle landed on the road ahead of us, forcing us to slow way down to avoid hitting it. We didn't see what little delicacy it was scoping out, but it took off again and flew right past the passenger side window.

Tomorrow we have a short drive south to Skagway where we will spend three nights.

Catchup - Anchorage to Tok

Yesterday evening we were in Tok, but if you will remember, internet was pretty new to Tok, so I didn't even attempt to post to this blog. Yesterday was probably the most spectacular drive so far, both because of the scenery and because it was neither smoky nor foggy, and there was quite a bit of sun.

We drove back north a bit from Anchorage, then at Palmer turned east on the Glenn Highway. Our plan was to drive to Glenallen and continue to Tok on the Tok Cut-off, Hwy 1 all the way (Alaska highways have names and numbers. Most people use the name rather than the number). The road entered the Matanuska Valley, a deep narrow valley with steep, rugged mountains on both sides - The Talkeetna Mountains on the left and the Chugach Mountains on the right. The Chugach are by far the most impressive, snow- and glacier-clad.


This is the Matanuska River with the Chugach Mountains beyond.

The Matanuska Glacier comes to within a mile or so of the road. There is a private road that will take you right up to the edge of the glacier. We drove down a dirt road to the campground where you could pay to drive to the glacier, but they wanted $15 per person, or $30 for the privilege. I think that was a little steep to drive 2 miles on a bad road, get out, look at the muddy terminus of the glacier, say "Yep, that's a glacier alright," and drive back to the highway. Besides, we probably got a better view from the highway.

Another picture of the Matanuska River and Chugach Mountains. When we got to the upper end of the valley, we came out onto a high plateau of muskeg bogs, tundra, stands of stunted black spruce and hundreds of small ponds. Driving towards Glenallen the road went directly towards a big volcanic peak just emerging from of the clouds, which we found out was Mt. Drum in the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. It is over 12,000 ft, and as the clouds cleared further we spotted Mt. Sanford at over 16,000 feet. We never had a good enough view of either to make a photo worthwhile. We had lunch at Glenallen while we pondered whether to drive directly to Tok or to alter our plans and drive north to Delta Junction and then southeast to Tok, essentially two sides of a roughly equilateral triangle, rather than just one. Our guidebook said that the route to Delta Junction, the Richardson Highway, through the Alaska Range crossed one of the most spectacular passes in Alaska, so we opted for that. As a result, we also followed the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, so we are able to claim parallelling it for its entire distance except for the bit from Valdez to Glenallen and from Atigun Pass to Prudoe bay.

This is the approach to the pass on the Richardson Highway. It's hard to see, but there is a glacier coming down at that low point, and you can see a bit of the highway in the center right of the photo. I'm not going to post any more photos from yesterday because it takes forever to download them, but take my word for it - the Richardson Highway is well worth traveling, although I think the morning's drive through the Matanuska Valley was far more spectacular.

At Delta Junction we found the marker for the official end of the Alaska Highway, which we had missed on our trip up. The drive to Tok had been very smoky a couple of weeks ago, but yesterday the smoke was gone and we found that the Alaska Range dominated the southern horizon all the way to Tok, and indeed most of the drive today to Whitehorse.

Back in Anchorage

Last night in Anchorage.

Yesterday when we drove down to Homer it was mostly sunny but very hazy so we didn't really appreciate the magnificence of the country we were driving through. We had a waterfront motel and towards sunset the haze disappeared and we could see the mountains across the bay from Homer. The sun didn't set until about 9:30 and it was still light when we went to bed.

This morning it was still sunny and only a light haze, so we could see the mountains. We stopped at the Two Sisters Bakery before leaving Homer where Diane got a ham and cheese croissant and Linda got a berry and cheese Danish. The bakery was in what appeared to be the "old" Homer, rather than the tarted up tourist destination that we had seen the day before. I could see the Homer of Bodett's "End of the Road." I'm glad some of it was still there.

On the drive up from Homer to Soldotna we saw two volcanoes across on the west side of Cook Inlet. One of them was, I think, Redoubt Volcano that was erupting earlier this summer. The eruption is over for now, but it was a very impressive mountain anyway, about 10,000 feet rising abruptly from the edge of Cook Inlet. It looked a little like Mt. Adams, while the other volcano was more pointed, more like Mt. Hood. At Soldotna we turned east and drove through towering, steep, rugged mountains, many with snow fields and glaciers visible. No photos, unfortunately. The best views had no place to pull off the road, and the residual haze did not encourage photo taking anyway. You'll have to trust me and look up any picture of the Kenai Peninsula. We reached the south end of Turnagain Arm and followed the shoreline north to Anchorage. It was an altogether beautiful drive.

For dinner we decided to splurge. We went to Phyllis's Cafe and Salmon Bake in downtown Anchorage where Linda feasted on king crab legs and Diane indulged her passion for wild Alaskan red salmon. Both were served with corn-on-the-cob and red potatoes, and Linda's crab came with about half a cup of melted butter. Delish!

As we were finishing, two young men in black suits and missionary name badges came into the cafe. We asked the waiter if we could pay for their dinners, but he said that Phyllis was a Mormon and she treated them to dinner whenever they came in. Linda wondered if they got tired of eating crab legs. I wondered if that was possible. We stopped to say hello to them on our way out.

Tomorrow we start back home, although we won't get there for another week and a half. We're driving back to Tok on the Glenn Hwy and Tok Cut-off. By the time we get to Skagway we will have driven on most of the paved highways in Alaska and quite a bit of the unpaved highways. It's been quite an adventure.