I hope I’ve prompted at least a few of our readers to hum the ‘Play School’ theme song to themselves. Ha!
We’ve seen quite a few bears and moose now, plus assorted other critters, and I want to write down what we’ve learnt before I forget what we’ve been advised to do when we encounter something furry and potentially dangerous.
The rangers at Exit Glacier and Denali all spent a lot of time educating campers about the safest ways to interact with wildlife. Bears tend to want food, toiletries and other highly perfumed stuff and are usually not aggressive towards people, unless you accidentally get between a mother bear and her cub, or you’re near a bear’s kill site. In both cases the best thing to do is get away, fast. Generally it’s a good idea to keep a distance of a few hundred metres between oneself and a bear – we’ve only seen them from the safety of our car or a bus, thankfully. We have bear spray that we take when we go walking, and keep at the door of our tent in case one decides to pay us a nocturnal visit. We keep all our food, toiletries and rubbish in the car overnight when we camp, or in the food lockers provided at some campgrounds. When walking, it’s best to make some noise so that any nearby bears know you’re around and don’t get a surprise if you get to close to them. A few people in Denali had ‘bear bells’ attached to their packs – very annoying and ineffective anyway. At best the bears ignore the bells, and in some places they have learnt to regard them as dinner bells.
So – making noise, standing up tall and looking big, talking in a loud voice are all good tactics to use if a bear is looking interested in you. If one decides to get too close, either lie down and ‘play dead’, or use bear spray if you’re carrying it and the bear is within 10 metres.
Ranger Kara at Wonder Lake told us a funny story about a woman who ‘played dead’ when a bear was about 100 metres away from her. The bear wandered up her, lay down beside her and fell asleep!
Moose seem to be more scary to me. They can charge without any provocation, on those skinny spindly legs with that huge body on top. The general advice is to keep a distance of at least 25 metres, and if one does charge or even just notices you, hide behind a tree or other large solid object, or run away in a zig-zag kind of pattern. Moose can’t change direction quickly.
No other big, scary, furry creatures to worry about …. so far. We just get excited when we see any wildlife – eagles, falcons, ptarmigans, elk, caribou, fox, gopher, bears, moose and even squirrels. A woman on the Inside Passage ferry trip told me that her first meal at her in-laws place in Arkansas was Squirrel & Dumplings, so now I look at squirrels a bit differently than I used to. I think it must have been a different type of squirrel though. The ones we have seen look tiny!
Dinner sitting in a tree, unfortunately out of reach.
We are in Prince George for a couple of days – more about that later – and as we were driving around town I noticed a sign on Hwy 16, and it reminded me of this song from the mid-’70s
When we first started this trip, Greg bought a copy of The Traveler’s Guide to Alaskan Camping by Mike and Terri Church, and we have used it constantly for information on where to camp, what to see and, occasionally, what to avoid. There are good sections on side-trips, including one just off Hwy37 that they strongly recommend. So we took their advice and spent a day visiting Stewart and Hyder, 2 little villages that are either side of the Canadian/US border. It’s a 65km detour down 37A, plus another 35km to get out to Salmon Glacier, which was the highlight of the day for us. On the way to Stewart, we stopped to look at Bear Glacier, which was pretty impressive (and much better than Exit Glacier near Seward – good thing that was the first one we saw otherwise it would have been a bit of a let-down)
Stewart is the northern-most ice-free port in Canada. It’s a pretty place nestled among high mountains, population 700, a couple of grocery stores, cafés and even one that started its life as a food truck and got built around as the business expanded. Hyder is just across the border in Alaska, population 100, lots of businesses closed. The Canadian customs officer told us that one of the hotels is run by an Australian woman, but it wasn’t open as it was Monday. The drawcard to Hyder is the bear-viewing area at Fish Creek which is a few kms northwest, and then the glacier another 30kms further on along a gravel road.
We saw a black bear beside the road to Fish Creek, but the salmon haven’t started running yet, so there’s not much activity yet. We were probably just a couple of weeks too early. There’s a chart at the Fish Creek ranger station showing the date that the first salmon made it there each year for the last 20 or so. Last year it was in late July, but that was because beavers had dammed the creek downstream and the fish were all there, waiting. As soon as the rangers broke down the dam, the fish started swimming upstream and the bears appeared. We asked the ranger about the condition of the road to Salmon Glacier and he warned us about a 100metre section, but told us that the rest of it was okay. It was. And so worth the drive.
Salmon Glacier is the biggest one we’ve seen, and the only one we’ve been able to see from above. Magnificent. Greg’s photos will tell more than I can put into words …
One of the bears we saw by the road near Fish Creek viewing area
Stopped near Bear Glacier on the way to Stewart
Fish Creek bear viewing area, no Salmon swimming upstream so no bears.
Looking down on Salmon Glacier, without doubt the best glacier we have seen yet.
Parked above Salmon Glacier. Its a little car park and there is hardly anyone there, which is surprising for such a fantastic view
Salmon Glacier
The windy narrow unsealed road of 32km to the viewpoint for the glacier
We’ve been off the grid for a few days as we drove south-east from Whitehorse to Prince George, boondocking (freecamping) in various idyllic camp sites as we made our way down Highway 37, the Cassiar Highway, the road less travelled.
The first night out of Whitehorse, we were still on Highway 1, the Alaska Highway, intending to camp at a provincial campground, but we stopped and chatted with an Englishman who was cycling from Anchorage to Yellowstone and he was planning on ‘stealth-camping’ so we figured we could too. Found a nice spot in forest far enough from the road that the trucks didn’t sound like they were going to drive through our tent, kept an ear out for bears and other critters, and even had warm showers thanks to our new bush shower and a few kettles full of boiling water. Greg went for a walk a bit further down the track and found a proper campsite with a little burnt-out log cabin, but by then we’d got all set up where we were.
A few people had told us that Hwy 37 was a beautiful scenic drive, and a really good alternate route to the Alaska Highway, but a couple of our maps showed long stretches of unpaved road which made us hesitate a bit. When we bought fuel at the junction, we asked the attendant and he told us that the first 100kms were pretty torn up, but the rest was fine. As we’d just driven a few hundred kms on pretty dodgy torn-up parts of the Alaska Highway, we opted for Highway 37.
We had a funny conversation with the gas station attendant – when Greg started talking to him, he commented that Greg had a ‘commonwealth accent’, ie Australian or New Zealand, because he can’t tell the difference, and in fact on this trip we’ve had more people think we’re New Zealanders than Australians. Hadn’t heard that one before, but I’ve learnt to ask people whereabouts in North America they’re from, rather than assume they’re American …. Canadians don’t like that.
Within half an hour of driving down Hwy 37, we had seen 2 bears and then an hour or so later when we stopped at a rest stop, a mother moose and her calf started walking towards us to check us out, but a passing motorbike scared them off. We took those animal sightings as a good sign that we had chosen the right road, and we got to see more wildlife as we drove along – a couple more bears, a fox, ptarmigan, a gopher. The road was pretty good, certainly no worse than Hwy 1, and with much less traffic. It was probably more winding, but very scenic driving along forest, rivers, lakes with a couple of lovely sections with snow-capped mountains on either side of us. There are a few villages along the way, and it’s possible to refuel every 200kms or so. The whole road is sealed and there is a good assortment of private and provincial campgrounds/RV park. We stopped beside a beautiful lake one night, and in forest just off the side road to Steward/Hyde the next night. We had great views of several hanging glaciers across the valley. That one was … interesting, as there was recent evidence of bear activity nearby. It was very windy and we kept thinking we could hear bears, but if there were any they didn’t bother us.
Stealth camping by the Alaska Highway
Wild strawberries Judy picked at a roadside stop
Not big – wild strawberries
Judy picking wild strawberries
Another Free Camp. Camped by Kinaskin Lake near Mount Edziza in sunny weather, snow capped peaks in the background.
Camped beneath hanging glaciers near Stewart BC Canada
According to local legend, the original settlers wanted to call this place ‘ptarmigan’ after a native fowl, but they couldn’t agree on how to spell it and decided to just call it ‘Chicken’ instead. We saw some ptarmigan with a clutch of half a dozen chicks on our bus ride to Wonder Lake in Denali.
Chicken has a summer population of around 50, and a winter population of 10. Even 10 people seems like a lot, when they only have vault toilets, no telephones and the roads are closed between October and May.
We drove on the Top of the World highway between Chicken and Dawson City, and it really felt as if we were. The road went along the top of a mountain ridge for a lot of the time, with amazing views over both sides to the north and south.
We camped at the Yukon River State Campground, which is across the river from Dawson City. The only access to the other side is by ferry. Lovely campground with 50+ sites for tents, caravans and RVs. We found a nice site almost right on the bank of the mighty Yukon River, and after we’d got all set up, we realised that there was s site across the track that WAS on the river bank. The sheer, high rock face on the other side of the river is home to peregrine falcons who nest there and raise their young, but I couldn’t find any.
Dawson City sounds like something out of the wild west, doesn’t it? And it is! Dirt streets, lots of old-fashioned timber buildings with names like ‘Gerties’ and ‘Kates’ that might have been bordellos in a previous life, and are now restaurants and hotels. Plenty to entertain tourists. We’re heading to Whitehorse today.
Downtown Chicken Alaska
The Chickens in Chicken Alaska
Greg’s favourite food, Apple Pie, a speciality in Chicken Alaska
So now we’ve been as far north, and as far west in Alaska and the US as we’re going to get. It’s all south, and mostly east from here. We spent a rainy night in the Regency Fairbanks Hotel, and felt relieved that we weren’t in our tent. I heard varying reports of how much rain they got, ranging from a couple of inches to 4 inches. However much it was, it was better experienced within 4 walls rather than that flimsy stuff tents are made of these days, although canvas would have been worse – we would never have got it dry!
Yesterday was a ‘town day’ – shopping, getting fuel and sorting out other bits and pieces. We went to the local Farmers Market in Fairbanks, and even though it was wet with part of the outdoor area under water, and early in the Alaska summer growing season, there was an interesting range of produce, food and other homemade goods. We bought raspberry salsa, rhubarb jam and morning tea (Cookie Dough Apple Pie for the sweet tooth, Potsticker dumplings for the savoury lover). A stall was selling wild strawberries that were smaller than my little fingernail, for $8 per small container. We didn’t buy any, and I understand why they were so expensive, it would have been a lot of work collecting them. I would have happily paid a dollar or so to just try a few to see what they were like.
We went shopping for a few things and I saw stuff I’ve never seen before (one of the true joys of traveling) – boxes of new, empty tin cans for people to can their own fish, a stack of preserving jars that was taller than me! The growing and harvesting season here is so short, people make the most of fresh produce by preserving it. We also saw some really heavy-duty vacuum sealers and pressure canning units – like a huge pressure cooker. We went to Subway and had their new Applewood Pulled Pork sandwich for lunch and it was delicious! Note to self: add Pulled Pork to our Thanksgiving menu this year. Greg thinks we should have Deep Fried Oreos as well as our usual Deep Fried Turkey.
Heading east along the Alaska Highway towards Tok, we just had to stop at the little town called North Pole, because it might be as close as we ever get to the real thing. They have a bit of a Christmas/Santa Claus theme going on there – candy cane street light-poles, huge Christmas store where Santa Claus is in attendance every day from 9am to 8pm, and as we drove around the side streets we noticed permanent Christmas decorations in some houses and Santa’s Rest Home. We figured it would be full of old men with long white beards and little old ladies with white hair done up in a bun, wearing aprons and baking cookies.
We camped a few miles west of Tok, at the Moon Lake State Forest campground – 14 sites around a crescent-shaped lake with toilets, water pump, hardly any mosquitoes and only a couple of other campers. Tomorrow is Independence Day, and a long weekend. We thought we’d see more campers, and maybe there are … just not where we are.
We’re heading to Chicken, north of Tok, and then driving on the Top of the World Highway back to Whitehorse. With a name like that, we can’t miss it!
Where could this be other than North Pole Alaska
Reindeer under tight security
All the required Christmas icons are here at North Pole Alaska
We’ve just spent 4 days camping in a couple of different campgrounds in Denali National Park, and got to see Mt McKinley/Denali/’The Great One’ for several days in a row. What a treat!
We drove north on the Parks Highway from Anchorage with a brief stop at a lookout on the south side of Denali, but her top was covered in cloud. We heard of someone who has visited Denali 3 times and never actually seen the top. Then we read that in an average June, there are only 4 clear days. So our chances of seeing the whole mountain weren’t looking good. Anyway ….
We headed straight to the Wilderness Access Centre to pick up the bus tickets and campground permit for Wonder Lake, which we’d booked online a few days earlier, and to book a night at the Riley Creek campground, right at the entrance to the park. It was a wet night, and packing up the next morning was a pretty soggy affair, but the forecast for Wonder Lake was ‘fine, partly cloudy, maximum temp 55F/13C’for the next couple of days. We were booked on the 11am camper bus the next morning which picked us up at Riley Creek, and we were able to leave our car on the Riley Ck car park, so it all worked out well. I got a bit closer to a moose than I would have liked at Riley Ck – there was a young one wandering around and he spotted me walking back to our tent from the toilets. I walked for a few metres, so did he. We did that a couple of times, until I got to some trees and hid behind one, then he lost interest and wandered down to the creek.
The park is closed to private vehicles at the 23 mile mark inside the park. From then on, it’s only park buses, park vehicles and one private tour company which charges $165 for the same thing that we paid $34 for … although they do include lunch. We brought our own. The bus driver was very knowledgeable, has spent many years in and around the park, and stopped several times for us to view wildlife along the way – a couple of small herds of caribou, and a grizzly bear that got very close to the bus and walked right in front of it while we were stopped looking at it. It took us 6 hours to drive the 84 miles to Wonder Lake, but that included a couple of longish stops at ranger and information stations along the way to pick up/drop off campers and for us (and the driver) to stretch our legs. It rained a lot in the national park last week (10cms in 48 hours), and it had snowed above 2000 metres, so all the snowy bits looked like they had been freshly dusted with icing sugar. By this morning, it was all looking grubby again because of more rain overnight.
We got to Wonder Lake just before 5pm, found a campsite and set up the tent without the fly so it could all dry out … and it all did. At that stage, the top of McKinley/Denali was still covered in cloud, but that cleared a few hours later and we got our first full views of that magnificent mountain, and of the whole Alaska Range. It’s a stunning sight. I could not take my eyes off McKinley, she really is something very special.
Each evening one of the park rangers gives a talk about something Denali-related. The first evening was about history of climbing the mountain, the second night was about porcupines and the third night was about mosquitoes. The porcupine and mosquito talks were given by Kara, a young woman from Wisconsin. Great presentations – she really knows how to work a crowd and get them interested in topics she was clearly passionate about. The porcupine one in particular was excellent.
Our first day at Wonder Lake was, as the locals would say, a ‘real pretty day’ – fine, warm, not much cloud. We walked to the McKinley Bar, a wide stretch of river bed that gets run-off from the glaciers around McKinley and her neighbouring mountains, including Mt Mather. By the time I realised there was a mountain with such an interesting name, it all got too cloudy for me to be able to work out which one it was. Drat! We were joined on our walk by Jonathon, a young man from Philadelphia. We walked, and talked, and sat for a while along the way and generally enjoyed the fine weather and the wonderful view of the northern aspect of McKinley and her neighbours. The following day started off fine, and it was warm enough for Greg to have a swim in Wonder Lake, but it got cloudier as the day progressed, and when Kara came to give the evening talk on mosquitoes, she told us that rain was forecast – between .5 and 5cm in the next 24 hours. Yikes!
We decided to get the first bus back to the park entrance the next morning at 6.30am … a good decision as it has rained all day. We packed as much as we could the night before, and were lucky to pack the rest of it and the tent without getting rained on, but it rained the whole time on the drive back. Very low cloud made visibility difficult a lot of the time, and the people who were doing day trips would have been very disappointed as they wouldn’t have seen any of McKinley, and even spotting wildlife would have been difficult. Some parts of the road are built into the sides of hills, and at one stage Greg commented that he was glad he wasn’t doing this trip in Thailand or Colombo or anywhere else where the traffic was busier than, well, just us on the road.
The days here are very long at this time of the year. Not quite ‘midnight sun’ as we’re still a couple of hundred kms from the Arctic Circle, but sunrise is around 3.30am, sunset around 12.45am, and it really doesn’t even get dim in between. When we were at Seward, I would have to use a torch to read at ‘night’, but now we’re several hundred kms further north, the light seems to stay the same all the time.
We’re at Fairbanks (northernmost city in the US) now, staying in a hotel tonight. It’s good to be out of the rain, and to be warm and dry. We’ll start the long trip east tomorrow. It’s not over yet, although the Alaska part is, almost. We keep hearing about must-visit places in Canada and the ‘Lower 48′, as the Alaskans call the rest of the US (a bit like Taswegians call the rest of Australia ‘the mainland’).
The 130km long parks road to Wonderlake Campground, narrow and windy, with lots of stopping to allow other buses to pass.
The Camper Bus (just like the school bus in “The Simpsons”!)
A Grizzly Bear that decided to walk by the bus.
20,000 ft of Denali appears on a sunny afternoon
Our campsite at WonderLake with Denali in the background
The forest we walked through to McKinley Bar
Boardwalk on the 12km return trip to McKinley Bar
The several kilometre wide McKinley Bar (McKinley River) fed by a glacier upstream
Wonder Lake
The Alaska Range with Denali
And finally, a cute video clip of a porcupine eating corn on the cob. He loves a chat!
We’re back in the Big Smoke for a night, to have a shower, resupply, do some washing and dry out … from excessive rain not alcohol consumption. It rained all of last night and a couple of things got a bit wet. Our REI tent is a bit strange by Australian standards in that the fly only covers one end of the tent. The other just has a little bit of the fly overhanging the door, but doesn’t really stop the rain if it’s heavy. We tried to get a zip-on extra bit from the REI here, but they were out of stock, however their superb Customer Service department phoned the Fairbanks store and organised for us to pick one up there next week. Gotta love REI. Great products and customer service that really goes above and beyond.
The drive back from Homer was rainy, with very low cloud, so we didn’t get to see any of Cook Inlet, the mountains and volcanoes on the other side or even the glaciers across the bay at Homer. I’m glad we got to see it all on the way down when it was clear. It was pretty special the previous morning, getting out of our tent and seeing glaciers. The fishermen were still fishing at the Kenai/Russian River Junction, and it reminded me a lot of a public swimming pool on a summer’s day (apart from the rainy weather, that is) – loads of people standing in water not doing very much.
Our next stop is Denali National Park tomorrow. The family from Sth Carolina that we met at the Exit Glacier campground told us that they had camped inside the park at Wonder Lake, and had great views of Mt McKinley. Access to the park is quite restricted, understandably, and it is only possible to travel around inside the park by bus or on a private tour, no private cars or RVs allowed past a certain point a few miles inside the park, so if you want to see the park, you have to do a tour or get a bus. There are several campgrounds inside the park, with a limited number of sites which of course are very popular at this time of the year. We were very lucky – we got online last night and managed to book a tent site for 3 nights at Wonder Lake, and the Camper bus to take us there and back. It’s a 4-hour drive in on dirt roads. We’ll be off the air again for a few days while we enjoy the magnificence of Denali and Mt McKinley. Fingers crossed for clear skies – we heard of someone who has visited 3 times and never actually seen all 20,300 ft of the mountain, the top has always been covered in cloud. Weather forecast for the next few days at Denali is for rain tomorrow, then partly cloudy over the weekend, with a 10% chance of rain.
While we have a few modern conveniences (ie, power and internet thanks to the McDonalds at Homer), I’ll write another post before I forget what’s happened. We’re now at Homer, which is as far as the road goes down the Kenai Peninsula. Next stop: Kodiak Island and then the Aleutians, but probably not for us – Denali is calling us.
We had a bit of car trouble yesterday – flat battery ‘cos the headlights were left on for a while, but a nice young man in Seward came with his huge Toyota and gave us a jump-start. We now have our own power pack and jumper leads. While we were parked at the Seward marina we had showers at the Harbor-Master’s building. Hot showers, $2 for 7 minutes. Excellent.
There is a lot of Russian history in the area – Russian churches with onion domes, place names, people’s names. We have seen a few places called ‘Alyeska’ and wondered if that was the Russian name for Alaska. Thanks to Wikipedia, I now know that Alyeska is an archaic spelling of the Aleut word Alaska meaning “mainland”, “great country”, or “great land”. The American state of Alaska derives its name from this word.
As we drove south to Homer, Halibut Fishing Capital of the World, we went along the eastern side of Cook Inlet, with spectacular views across the water to the snow-capped volcanoes and mountains of Lake Clark National Park. We still get surprised that there are so many people, even down here at the edge of Alaska. There are 5 council-run campgrounds, including 3 right on The Spit, a narrow piece of sand that extends south from the town, plus lots of privately-owned RV parks as well. We looked at one, but it looked a lot like a gravel car park full of buses, then went to one of the council-run ones that is not suitable for RVs – small sites, no ‘pull-throughs’ – which means it’s great for tent campers like us. It’s a lovely park set above the town, with amazing views over the bay and across to the glaciers in the Katchemak Bay State Park.
The days here are very long – sunset around 11.30pm, sunrise around 3.30am, and it really only gets just a bit dimmer at night anyway. Most days I can only tell that it’s ‘dawn’ or ‘evening’ by birdsong, and then it’s quiet during the 4 or so hours of ‘night’. Our headlight torches won’t get used until we get a long way south of here.
We just had a chat with a local who very proudly showed us photos of a flowering lilac tree that grows in his front yard. Magnificent tree, and it has twice as many flowers this year as this area had a very mild winter because of the drought in California. Unlike the eastern part of the state, and of North American which had a very cold winter.
Ninilchik – Russian Orthodox Church
Katchemak Bay outside Homer Alaska
Homer spit
The double decker food truck bus where we had lunch of Fish and Chips (Halibut)
