June 26, 2018

New Up North Record

This is our last day to be heading north. We don’t have far to go to reach our destination of Fairbanks so spend some time looking at the mountains and depleting the coffee supply of our B&B.  Breakfast is an egg stuffed pastry with a couple slices of bacon, again prepared well in advance.  Our little server’s patter is to announce the breakfast and you either want it or you don’t.  Some of the other guests are hanging out and chatting but zero interaction with owners/hosts.  We have not seen anyone who might be in authority since Bubbly Dawn at check-in.  Some people have the hospitality gene and others own a B&B in Healy.  We always say you don’t have a B&B experience if you aren’t hugging at departure.  We pack and leave with no check-out and no hug.

It is about a 2-hour drive to Fairbanks.  As we go north we are moving away from the Alaska Range and work our way down through foothills until we reach a fairly level treed plain.  It reminds Mary of the drive between Brainerd and Walker back home without the lakes. About an hour in the road starts to rise and we find ourselves riding a ridge among deep wide valleys in both directions.  The mountains are still in the background and we have some nice views from the side of the road.

Fairbanks is the second largest city in Alaska with a population of 32,500.  The last 500 is important because Juneau (the capital) is 32,200.  We ran into some folks in Anchorage who recommended the “Cookie Jar” restaurant which is our destination for lunch.  This is our second day in Alaska since arriving 2 weeks ago that the temp has reached 70-degrees.  This time of year, as you go north into the interior the temperature goes up.  The sun is shining, and we get a nice table on the patio.  Mary has a great chicken salad sandwich on home baked bread and John gets a Prime Rib Cheese Steak sandwich in which chunks of prime rib are tossed with bacon and three types of cheese, all melted together.  It isn’t a Philly but it is very good.  The service is outstanding which is a rare treat for us.

After lunch we take a drive further north to Fox for a pipeline viewing.  This is of course the Alaskan Pipeline that runs 800 miles from Prudhoe Bay in the north to Valdez in the south.  It is capable of moving millions of gallons of crude oil a day and is kept moving by 8 huge pumping stations.  It runs above ground in some places and below ground in others depending on soil conditions, animal migration routes and permafrost considerations.  Quite the engineering feat.

Just to say we did, we drive another ten miles north on the Dalton Highway, the rough ice road we all see on TV moving people and supplies to the oil fields 400 miles further north.  It is paved here so it isn’t much of an adventure, but we wanted to have bragging rights (who will care?) and we wanted to reach the 65th parallel north.  This is our northern record and 47-degrees south (Slope Point, New Zealand) is our southern record, neither of which will ever be broken by us.

We return to the Visitor Center in downtown Fairbanks.  It is a joint venture by the state and city tourism people and is very well done.  We surprisingly spend an hour wandering among the displays of the history of the native Athabascan people.  We have been constantly fed this type of info since the day we landed and through repetition it is slowly being beaten into our brains.  We have a deeper understanding of the history of this part of the world.  It is after 4:00 which means we have earned the right to check into our Best Western Hotel and take a nap.

After our big lunches we opt for bar food tonight and Yelp tells us that the Oasis has the best pub food and is 5 minutes away from our hotel. The high tables are full so we grab a couple seats at the bar where we are soon joined by Cheyenne, Brian, Luke and bartender Aron.  We share stories, drinks and food for a couple hours and we know everything there is to know about Fairbanks, Alaska, the Army Band, jewelry, secret defense installations and European trips.  In fact we are now within one degree of separation from knowing everyone in Fairbanks according to all of our new friends who feel, between the four of them, they know everyone.  Mary has a turkey melt and John has ribs but the real nourishment is our fun conversation.

It is pushing 10:00 when we get back to the hotel and ready for bed.  There are thunderstorms roaming around the area and it feels more like a midwestern summer to us.  Oh, except the sun is still high in the sky.

Todays new bit of knowledge:  We now know almost everyone in Fairbanks.

June 25, 2018

Northern Wilderness

Today is one of those days with a circle around it on our itinerary.  We are taking an 8-hour bus ride into the interior of Denali National Park, perhaps the biggest tourist attraction in Alaska.  We hemmed and hawed about the five hour vs. the eight hour before we made the reservations (the twelve hour never made the conversation) and decided that you do the most you can do after traveling this far.  Eight hours it is.

It is a semi-pretty morning with a hint of sunshine and high clouds that aren’t threatening.  Our B&B continues to unimpress with pre-made breakfast items, but the coffee and juice are good and get us moving for the day.  We have time to kill.  Our tour starts at 1:40 this afternoon and will end eight hours later.  We spend some time on the computer and with our books, all while looking out at the mountains.  No moose this morning.

Our first stop is the local grocery store in Healy.  We are encouraged to bring food on the tour.  They will provide a snack box but if that doesn’t get you through all 8 hours you better bring something else. What is really interesting at the little local Healy grocery store is that about 20% of the items are Kirkland.  They also have large containers of many products and full cuts of boxed beef (rib roasts, full strips, etc.).  We conclude that they are the local supplier of many of the local restaurants and resorts and supplement their inventory with weekly truck trips to Costco.  Something about necessity and invention here.

Our next investigation is the huge prison like building right off the main highway through town.

There are a lot of young people wandering about and when we spy the “Employee Shuttle” bus parked in front of the entry we think we have solved the mystery of all the eastern European young workers in the area. There are probably a lot of American kids on a summer adventure as well, but you do what you have to do to find enough help in a seasonal business.  The park provides a lot of lodging for its employees as well as those of their contractors, but everyone else who makes a living off the park needs employee housing where a lot of people don’t normally live. The grocery store is one block away and there is a brew pub two blocks the other way so no car required.  Bubbly Dawn at the B&B said the brew pub gets raucous late at night and now we know why.

We kill the rest of our time poking around the public areas of the park and along the park road. The public is allowed to drive the first fifteen miles of the 100-mile long park road.  That was a compromise reached back in the 70’s when the park service intended to close all road access, and the locals wanted full access.  Now the only way to access the interior of the park is with a special pass (with stringent requirements) or through one of the park shuttle buses or a contracted tour bus.  The number of buses allowed in, while significant, is tightly managed.  Our contract tour bus

will be the 35^th of the day and there are a few more scheduled after us, so at 52 people per bus there are a couple thousand folks doing what we’re doing.  Double that number with the park shuttles and it is easy to do the arithmetic to conclude that there would be thousands of cars going through the park with open access.  Those who have experienced traffic jams at Yosemite or Yellowstone will appreciate the difference.  80 buses evenly spaced throughout the day is very low impact.

The big deal of course is that limited access with trained operators is the ultimate protection for the wildlife while still allowing people to get inside.  Our driver, Mike, gets us loaded up at 1:45 for our long afternoon adventure.  He is an amiable fellow from Washington DC who has been doing this for seven summers.  He is a historian by trade and is deep into explaining the history of the park and the road.  This is the only National Park that was created to protect wildlife, specifically the Dall sheep. There are a number of mammals who make the park home, notably moose, bears, Dall sheep, caribou, wolves, wolverines, lynx and a bunch of little critters that serve as prey for the bigger ones.  Because of the sub-arctic climate and tundra terrain, a lot of land is required to support each large animal which makes them harder to find.  We are instructed to shout “Stop!” if we see a beast of interest and Mike will pull over to film and discuss what we’re seeing.  When the bus is moving Mike keeps up a fairly constant chatter which portends a future in talk radio.

The road is unpaved for the last 85 miles and rises to an elevation of 3980 feet.  There are a lot of

switchbacks and drop offs as we hug cliffs that provide great views of valleys and rivers below and mountains and glaciers beyond.  The glacial melt forms the rivers and silt from the glaciers is constantly filling river beds and changing river paths hourly.  These are referred to as braided rivers as you see strands separate, go off in their own direction and then rejoin again downriver.  Then do it all over again.

This blog would be many pages long if we went into detail about the whole day so here are a few highlights: we saw a lot of caribou including one that joined us moving down the road for a period of time; we had a close encounter with the elusive Dall sheep that is normally spotted as white dots on the mountainside.  In our case they crossed the road in front of the bus so we could almost touch them out the window; at the end of our road (62 mile marker) we finally got a look at the bottom half of the monster 20,000+ foot Mount Denali (formerly Mt. McKinley).  Very few people actually see the whole thing as the top is almost always shrouded in clouds; on our return trip we finally get our Grizzly, a big boy wandering through the brush a couple hundred yards away who entertains us for ten minutes. No Moose!  Mike is a little miffed because the moose have been hanging around the visitor center (as we saw yesterday) rather than out here where only the tour operators can show them off.  He is going to speak to the Head Moose about their behavior.  Here are a few pcitures from our crappy phone camera of our adventure today.

We arrive back at the parking area right at 9:35 so on schedule.  We didn’t know if this would be a fun day or torture and we both decided that it was moving and entertaining and well worth doing.  Our plan was to stop for a beer and burger at the brew pub in Healy, but we opt instead to go back to the B&B, fix ourselves a beverage and finish up the lunch parts that we didn’t eat on the trip.  We enjoy the sun on the mountain view until 11:30 and wrap up a long day.

Todays conclusion: National Parks are one of the things our government actually does really well.

Todays Fact: Many of the caribou we saw were laying or standing in snow patches because a.) they’re hot, and b.) the mosquitoes stay away from the snow.  A caribou will lose a pint of blood a day to mosquitoes.  Ouch!

June 24, 2018

Hi, I’m Denali

We really enjoyed our cabin experience in Talkeetna.  We chatted with our host Don this morning about the good and bad of the business.  His has a four-month season, period.  He has seven cabins and is building his eighth.  He does everything himself with part-time help from his Montenegrin helper and helper’s girlfriend.  Running the numbers, if he can generate a grand a night for 100 nights less helper wages, expenses and taxes he should be able to eat for the whole year.  He said he could make more with a job.  We compliment him on his attention to detail that makes life very easy for his guests.  Plenty of hooks in the bathroom, a work area and towel next to the coffee maker, lot of room and seating choices and plenty of amenities.

We hit the road at 10:00, backtrack down to Parks Highway and head north to Denali National Park.  It is spitting rain off and on (surprise) with occasional glimpses of brightness that make us think there is a sun up there somewhere.  The further we get up the road the more spectacular the landscape.  After an hour and a half of going north we swing to the east through a broad pass between two separate ranges. The pass is many miles wide with nothing but black spruce growing in the permafrost.  Bleak but beautiful.  Lunch is another Subway just outside of the Park entrance.  We had said earlier that if the local franchisee was smart there would be a Subway at the park entrance, and sure enough, there is a line out the door.  No tuna????????

This is our get-acquainted day with Denali.  As we first enter the park there are two moose grazing on the side of the road among plenty of bus and car traffic coming and going.  Cue the Moose is our first thought.  In scoring large wild beasts, we are now at Moose, 4 and Whales 4.  The moose will probably win.  Our first order of business inside is the introductory film in the information center theater.  We sit through an artful 20 minutes of sights and sounds of wildlife in Denali and then a half hour film of dealing with Denali hiking, camping, getting lost, wading in rivers and interacting with the critters who live there.  There are great educational displays of the flora and fauna of the park and instead of animal pictures there is one of each stuffed and mounted so there is no mistaking sizes.

A number of trails start from the information center.  The desk ranger has given us a couple suggestions and we pick one that is about a 2-1/2 mile round trip.  The trails are smooth wide gravel and easy walking.  We are wearing the same attire that we would have on strolling down Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis while many of the folks we encounter are dressed for a safari.  We all look strangely at each other.  This area close in to the visitor center is pretty normal National Park stuff.  Woodsy paths, rivers, wonderful natural beauty and an occasional animal sighting.  Tomorrow we do the guided bus trip into the interior of the park that is all tundra and mountains

There is a drop in elevation as we walk to the first of two rivers that we will cross.  There is a log bridge across the first and about a quarter mile farther on there is a pretty fancy looking suspension bridge across the second.  Both rivers are roaring with snow melt which makes for a full sensory experience with the mountains in the background.  On the return trip we encounter a fresh pile of moose poop on the trail that wasn’t there 20 minutes ago.  Our alert levels go up a couple notches but we don’t see or hear any movement.  There is almost sunshine as we finish our “hike” and we are right on the 2-1/2 miles as promised.  For a trip to Alaska we aren’t getting a lot of exercise.

We pick up our bus information for tomorrow afternoon.  We will be leaving at 1:40 on an 8 hour ride through the interior of the park.  There will be a lot of leg-stretching stops along the way. Our B&B for tonight is about 16 miles north near the town of Healy.  It is a couple miles off the main road and a very pretty setting. We are greeted at the door by bubbly Dawn who shows us the ropes and our little room off of a common area.  The designer touches are very well done with Keurig coffee machines, pretty finishes and lots of art on the walls.  In our tiny room there is no TV (only in the common area), zero amenities (not even a bar of soap), no hooks in the bathroom and no place to sit or work except in the common areas.  This place is all superficial and last night’s was all substance—we preferred last night.

Bubbly Dawn has recommended Black Diamond restaurant near Healy for dinner tonight.  It is just south of town and it is not only a restaurant but also a 9-hole golf course, a lodge with horse and buggy rides, and ATV rentals.  There may be more but that is all we saw at first glance.  The greens on the golf course have some low spots where the mower bridges so the grass there is a couple inches long.  Now those are some tough putts.  Dinner is mediocre—John with a fish sandwich, fries and a salad and Mary with a smoked salmon appetizer and salad.  Service is equally mediocre with a couple local ladies and one eastern European.  (The Subway had a couple eastern European brothers working the sandwich line today.)

It is a little before 9:00 when we get back to the B&B and there is a moose just beyond the parking area munching on some feed that was left there for her.  She glances at us and then gets back to the chow.  This must be a regular occurrence for her.  The views here are indeed spectacular, and Mrs. Moose just adds to the scene.  Mary goes up to the breakfast room to get a couple coffee pods for morning and the Californians and South Koreans who are chatting there are discussing the Caribou at the trough.  Mary eventually convinces them that is it a female moose, and they now believe that in spite if her non-safari dress she is the wildlife expert on site.  Off to bed with moose now leading whales.

Todays observation: Today was the day we saw the Alaska you read about and see in the brochures.