7/19 Healy to Fairbanks to Tok

By the end of these journals you will be sick of my weather descriptions. Sunny, hot, dry. That's it. We had only a few short experiences with rain on the entire trip, and nothing in Alberta or the lower 48. Aftern negotiating the driveway from hell for the last time we headed for Fairbanks and what we hoped would be a quick visit to the HD dealer to get our plates. I'm not sure if I noted this before but we had a slight mix up at Anchorage HD. They were unable to provide our plates by Monday and promised to express them to Fairbanks HD for our pickup on Thursday. Well, when we got to Fairbanks HD, UPS had not delivered yet so we visited the Alaska Pipeline interpretive site on the north side of town. It was a good photo op and provided answers to questions we had about the design and construction of the pipeline. They also had two "pigs" on display that are used to clean the pipeline and check for wear and damage. We got back to the dealer and UPS had delivered the plates. As you will see in photos they are consecutively numbered 9631, 9632 and 9633. We slapped them on, bid farewell and rode down the road to the North Pole. Of course we had to stop and ask Santa if he would kindly send a note to the little ones at home. I had a brief discussion with their staff about the true home of Santa at the North Pole near Wilmington. My impression of Fairbanks was a depressing as Anchorage. I know, I really didn't see all of each of these cities, and didn't talk to many of the people (and those I did were uniformly pleasant). I'm thinking it may be the light that made me feel this way. There is no yellowness or softness to the sunlight. It is very bright, white and doesn't turn off in the summer. Of course, it might also have been because I was sick as a dog and had a fever when we ran through town. Lou and I both caught something early on that made us hacking fools. Sneezing and coughing in a full-face helmet is absolutely no fun, especially with a microphone that you have to have up against your lips to talk into for the rest of the trip.

7/18 In Denali National Park

We arose early in clear sunlight, navigated the driveway from hell, had breakfast at Rosie's and arrived at the Park to caatch our shuttle bus. We had a driver named Heidi who I would guess was a woman in her fifties. She was a schoolbus driver in Anchorage during the school year and loved the Park and driving so much that she got this job during the summer. She indicated that although shuttle bus drivers didn't have to provide commentary, she had spent a lot of time learning about the animals and plants of the Park and liked to talk, so we were going to get extra for our dollar, whether we liked it or not. She was very good. She had a very good working knowledge of wildlife biology, animal and plant ID and geology. Also, she had driven the road so many times she knew the good vantage spots and where we might see wildlife. She really produced since we saw a wolf and a caribou walk past the bus as we were parked on the side of the road. We saw 5 grizzly bears quite a ways off, but still clearly visible with binoculars, and we saw many Dall sheep as wel as snowshoe hare and ground squirrels. We rode in to Fish Creek and them disembarked. As the bus pulled away we walked off into the bush and spent an hour and a half roaming the hillsides, sneaking up on caribou (not very well), eating lunch and relaxing It's very difficult to put into words the huge scale of the place, the quietness and the sense of wildness that I felt here. Eric, Lou and I talked about this and agreed that although a road runs through the Park and planes take tourists on flights over it, this is a truly wild place where whoever walks off into the bush to camp or hike, takes that walk with the understanding that there are forces out there that may prevent you from returning.

7/17 Talkeetna to Healy

I already described our flight over Mt. McKinley this day in my last post. After picking up our gear and checking out we had a relatively uneventful ride toward Denali NP. It turned cloudy and cool and began to rain enough to stop and put on rain gear. Strip mall type development is beginning to occur around the entry to the Park. We decided to move on to our accomodations. We ate at Rosie's Diner and then proceeded to Ridgetop Cabins. Eric already mentioned this place, but he didn't really give the driveway in the detail it deserves. This driveway was steep, paved with cobbles, gravel and loose soil and had blind ascending switchbacks. The bike radios came in real handy as brother Lou called out the line to take. It really was every man for himself though as we used the hogs like dirtbikes many hundreds of pounds lighter. We all made it up, and then made it down, up and down again over the next two days. Very intense. The cabin was very nice, clean and nestled in to a trembling aspen grove. I had been noticing that the trembling aspens had gray foliage. You could pick out the groves on the hillside because of this peculiarity. At the cabin I was able to examine the leaves closely to determine why they had the color. It turns out that throughout Alaska the trembling aspens have a leaf miner that eats the chlorophylous tissue out from between the upper and lower leaf surfaces. This gives the individual leaves a greyish cast as you are really only looking at the cuticle on the upper and lower surface. Typically, grey birch has a leaf miner but that turns the leaves brown. It seemed that this insect pest was uniformly spread throughout the aspen in Alaska.

Additional Notes From the Trip

Hi All. I haven't posted to the blog since July. Fortunately Eric has been updating you on our progress. My excuse is that we spent so much time on the road that by the time we pulled in to a motel at night, cleaned up and got dinner, it was too late and I was too tired to begin typing. Again, thanks to Eric for keeping you at least minimally updated. As he notes in his last post he will fill in more detail. I intend on doing the same thing so keep checking back for more updates.

The last time I posted I was sitting on the deck of a cabin we had rented for the evening on the banks of an overflow channel of the Talkeetna River in Talkeetna. The semi-fiasco with the license plates at the dealership in Anchorage was behind us and the plan was that the sales manager would overnight them to his buddy at the Fairbanks HD dealership where we would pick them up on Thursday, July 19. Lou called all over this morning (July 16) to see if we could charter a flight around Mt. McKinley. He was successful and the flight was incredible. We flew in bright sun approaching the mountain. The terrain below was quite flat and very wet. Ponds and peatlands pocked the landscape. The dense vegetation of the flats and river floodplains quickly gave way to the bare rock in Denali NP. We began to gain elevation and as we did so it began to rain. The dull gray/blue color of the clouds was beautiful and Jock, our pilot, steered us back into bright sun. We were high enough to see several glaciers occupying different vallies. This was a perspective that any glacial geologist would give a right arm for. Circques and arretes, tarns and morraines and ice embedded with rock; Jock twisted and turned the plane and gave us great views. Seeing this raw landscape either in the grip of the ice or very recently released provided insights on how our northeastern landscape has evolved since the glaciers left. Jock landed us on Pica Glacier very close to base camp, where climbing parties stage for the attempts on McKinley. The surface of t he glacier was very soft and the snow/ice was granular. It was apparent that there was much freeze/thaw/freeze going on. We were warned not to walke too far from the "landing strip" because of hidden crevasses. Several other planes had landed and it was quite surreal to be surrounded by huge silent rock and ice mountains, but have brightly colored planes flying in and out. We flew back to Talkeetna where the first of many coincidences occurred. During converstation Jock indicated his partner in the plane was from Saranac Lake. His partner is Mike Richter. I knew the name but had never met the guy.

I had tried to connect with Hilmar and Kurt Gruendling in Anchorage with no luck. At least we talked. He too was heading up to Talkeetna but our dates just didn't overlap. Another coincidence! It's been since 1991 that we had been in ALaska together and now after all that time, we appear in Anchorage in the same week.

More posting later.

Home again

After a stop for the night in Niagara falls, I made it home late last night. Great trip! I will update this with some details of the trip and product review of some of our gear.