Land of the Midnight Sun

Day 13

    Our excitement at arriving in Alaska is maybe best illustrated by what happened last night.  Just as we were getting to bed, Irene suggested that I should get up like at 2:30 and see if we could see the Aurora Borealis. Auto suggestion, placed the thought in my mind or just set my internal clock, whatever!   Like a dummy, I got up at 2:15 am and went outside dressed in a light jacket and my skivvies, to see the northern lights.  HAH.  It was as bright as day.  No chance.  Got back in bed and hugged her tight so she could feel my chill.  AHA.  Take that.

    We departed Tok (prounced Toke) at a little after 8:00am.  Our drive today will only be about 253 miles so we feel like we can kind of take our time and really see the sights if there are any.  HMMMMMMM.  Today turns out to be one of the best days since the Ice Road Parkway.

    The scenery is gradually changing from patches of snow, and the smaller white and black spruce trees with some aspens to larger conifers, and great fields of snow.  The closer we got to the Richardson Highway, the more snow we saw.  Virtually all of the rivers, creeks, ponds and lakes were for the most part frozen over.

Worlds largest Pet Rock,  so valuable it is chained down

   

      We started seeing some amazing mountains off to the west with very high peaks.  
We stopped alongside the road to try and determine what we  were looking at.  Irene has become a significant imitator of Sacagawea, reading maps and identifying landmarks.  The mountains and peaks we are looking at are: Tanada Peak, 9240 feet, Mt Sanford 16,237 feet, Mt Blackburn 16,390, and Mt Drum at 12,010. 

     As we started driving, we began seeing another significant range that appeared to be taller still.  We were able to finally identify these mountains as part of the Wrangell range, but did not research the particular mountains.  The landscape gradually became all white with snow, with just a few patches of exposed earth.

    Most interesting was looking at the untracked snow and then seeing where various animals had traipsed through it.  The snow was obviously very deep as we could see where the animals had sunk deep into it and apparently had to make leaps to get out of it.   There were several places where it the paw prints were enormous compared to others, with a deep and wide scooped out area where the beasts belly drug.  Jim speculates that this was a bear moving across the snow.  Later in conversation with our fellow travelers Jim and Shirley, he came to the same conclusion.

    Halfway between Tok and Glenallen, the road became progressively worse with frost heaves and we had to slow down significantly.  We were surprised when 3 Caribou jumped up in front of us and ran across the road.  They disappeared from sight so quickly that we did not have a chance to take their picture.

                                 Frozen Chistochina river.  It is 1/3 mile wide at this spot

     Shortly we came upon the bridge over the Chistochina River.  We stopped in the middle of the bridge to take a picture, then decided to back up and park on the side of the road for safety.  We walked to the middle of the bridge and took pictures.    The river was completely frozen over and was a a beautiful sight.  During this 15 to 20 minute time frame, only one car passed over the bridge.  Rush hour in the wilderness I guess.

     We stopped and had lunch at the Billy Mitchell cabin, (yes that Billy Mitchell of Air Force fame).  We then began the long climb over Thompson Pass.  This is called the Top of the World Road although the pass is only at 3000 feet. 

Starting the climb up the pass.

View of an unknown Glacier

    The mountains were spectacular with a ton of glaciers and snow falls.  From the top of Thompson Pass, we looked down into the Lowe River Valley, east of Valdez.  This is the river that  Joey Ellis spent 3 summers guiding rafts and where Jimmy Jr, drove with Joey over the Cassiar Highway to. We even caught a glimpse of Prince William Sound.

 
 

 

                                                    View on Thompson Pass/ Top of World Road

 

The views were absolutely spectacular with  each turn of the road opening up to another breathtaking  vista.  We started seeing ski tracks coming off the top of mountains and glaciers and stopping about 100 yards short of the road.  We later learned that some seasonal employees had been working in Valdez to save their money just to do this Helicopter skiing.  Pretty amazing.

                                                                                  

 Starting down off Thompson Pass

  Nearing the bottom of the pass on the Valdez side, we were parallel with the Lowe river.  How anybody could raft in water that looked that cold is beyond us. We came around a bend and found Bridle Veil Falls (wait, I thought that was up Hwy 50 or on the Columbia River Gorge) on the left side of the road and emptying into the Lowe River.  Maybe one of the most unbelievable sights of this trip if not all time.  It was completely frozen over except for a couple of windows where we could see the water cascading. This is no small falls but maybe 50 feet in width at the bottom.

   

                                      Bridal Veil Falls Frozen with "windows" to see water flow

Taking as many pictures as possible we loaded up the RV and drove, maybe 300 feet where we encountered Horse Tail Falls on our side of the road.  Horse Tail Falls was exposed   to the sunlight and was flowing freely with no ice.  So we stopped  and got out.  Irene consented to have her picture taken in front of the falls.  She complained about freezing spray or something and I asked her to just grin and bear it.  Then a nosy tourist volunteered to take both our picture in front of the falls.  I did not think that was funny but Irene insisted.  Jeez was that water cold.                          

    We arrived in Valdez and the RV park at 3:00pm.  We had been warned that Valdez still had a significant amount of snow on the ground and campgrounds were struggling to get opened.  Valdez we would learn, has an average annual snowfall of just under 400 inches, with a record of 976.  The RV park we chose, Bear Paw, had about 15 sites opened with another 30 under snow.

     As we were checking in, they had a front loader scooping up snow and dumping it in the harbor across the street.  Yes we stayed right on the small craft harbor, right with the salmon and crab fishing boats, the sport fishing boats and the Prince William sound excursion boats. 

  

 

Irene at Bear Paw RV Park, note plowed snow

  We caused a bit of a distraction when we first arrived,  as the office was closed until 3:30.  The worker that was scooping snow told us to park in that space over there and wait till the office opened.  As we were setting up and getting level, the owner drove up and told us we could not park there, that space and the one next to it were reserved.  He was a bit annoyed even after Irene told him that we were told to set up there.  No big deal, we were told to move to another space about 50 feet away and we did.

 

I ride in this one? Really?

    After getting set up, we went to the office, registered and all was well.   We then went to the LuLu Belle’s office ( 1 block away) and secured our reservation and the time we were to board, (10:45 the next day).  We then walked back to the RV park and decided to first cross the street and take a look at the LuLu Belle.  It was the first boat in the Harbor closest to the street and our RV was the closest RV to the street.  By happenstance, we were camped no more than 200 feet from the LuLu Belle. We could see her flying bridge from our Motor Home.  A sign of good things to come.

   We spent the remaining afternoon walking the street in front of the harbor, looking in at a couple of café’s and a coffee shop, browsing a Tee Shirt shop and just generally killing time and getting some fresh air.  We now have about 3.500 miles on our motor home (it had 8.8 when we picked it up) and are starting to get road weary.  Whenever we get an opportunity to get out and stretch a bit or take a walk, we jump on it.

Best Western across Street, Prince William Sound behind, Aleyska Pipeline Terminal is across sound

      We had a great dinner of homemade spaghetti, garlic toast and a salad and relaxed for the evening.  Jim stayed in the motorhome  so he could plug the computer in and worked on the blog.  Irene went outside and sat at the picnic table and wrote in her journal.  Bright sunshiney day tho it became a bit chilly about 10:30 pm with full sunshine.