Excellent roadtrip...Part 3...the Alaska leg

Haines, Alaska prides itself on its scenery (the postcards look good, but thanks to cloud just off the deck we didn't see much above 100 meters while we were there) and, judging from the signs around town, the fact that it isn't on the cruise ship itinerary.

haines from pier

Indeed, it appears to the casual tourist to be a pretty normal small Pacific coastal community, with the exception that it has Fort Seward, reputedly the first permanent American army base in Alaska, built in 1904.

fort seward

These days many of the houses are being maintained by private owners, and that seems to be working just fine.

Haines also has a fine Tlingit pole, the only public Tlingit art I recall seeing on this trip.

tlingit pole

siltat lookout

We crawled into the mountains and, shortly after we were back in BC, the clouds lifted.

haines summit

As Sandy said at the time, the views of Tatshenshini-Alsek and later Kluane from the Haines Road are worth the entire trip: spectacular high country, amazing mountains.  Tourists who do this before going to look at the Rockies might well find the Rockies less impressive than had they done them first.

kluane rv park

We met two other Westfalias in Kluane RV Park in Haines Junction, one  a newish conversion of a Sprinter from Colorado, the other a Vanagon, considerably modified by its California owner.

The temperature dropped to minus 1 that night (the coldest night on this trip) and taking down the bug tent in the morning, while it was still covered in hoar frost, made us wish we had had the foresight to do it before turning in.

There's a sign at the Visitor Information Centre in Beaver Creek, Yukon which explains that the section from Axehandle Lake to Beaver Creek was the most difficult section to construct of the entire Alaska Highway, because of the muskeg on permafrost.

Apparently it took the builders some time to figure out that if they scraped away the soil, the permafrost melted, and then you were towing vehicles out with bulldozers.  Eventually they learned to protect the permafrost by piling more material on, and then covering that with corduroy.  There are still sections of the original corduroy road left, under the blacktop.  Large sections of the blacktop heave every spring, making close attention to driving this part of the road even more imperative than usual.

Tok is in Alaska.  Besides at least one most acceptable RV Village, it has some 3300 people and a courthouse. 

tok courthouse

Which looks just like the washrooms of the RV Village and is located right next door, as Sandy found out when looking for the latter. Fortunately the Assistant Magistrate set her straight, or we might have had to extract her from an unfortunate mistake.
And Tok is, in fact, pronounced "toke". The Alaskans we met were all able to say this without smirking, which is perhaps because they're Republicans by massive preference, and thus have never felt the need for an alternate pronunciation.

The part between Tok and Glenallen is undistinguished if you cannot see the promised vistas of the Wrangell-St Elias National Park.

copper-gulkana confluence

We did catch occasional views of the Copper River, which the road apparently follows.  And we did see our first moose here, not far from Gulkana, but didn't get a photo: no shoulders on the highway.  We've noticed this, very uncommon on Canadian roads, is the norm on most --maybe all-- the secondary highways of the USA.  At least, in the parts we've explored.

nelchina glacier

After Glenallen it quickly gets mountainous and we were able, in spite of the occasional drizzle, to get views of both the Nelchina and Matanuska glaciers.

matanuska glacier

That drizzle had turned to rain by the time we arrived at our campsite in Palmer.

We were a bit worried that we wouldn't find a place, as the Alaska State Fair, held at the Alaska State Fairgrounds in Palmer, was in full progress.  But maybe thanks to the rain, maybe thanks to Palmer's relative proximity to Anchorage, this proved to be no problem.

devil's club

 We didn't much take to Palmer, reputedly a hotbed of Alaskan agriculture during the 30's, but it does have a large Fred Meyer grocery store with a very adequate wine selection, so we stocked up.  We didn't see any evidence of agriculture except the occasional hay field and a sign pointing to a muskox farm.

The next day it was off to Anchorage, just 35 miles down the divided highway.  It's an American city, and American cities, even those on the fringes of the civilized world, all seem to follow a common development plan, so we followed the freeway right through the middle until we could turn off on the road to Landslide Park, which commemorates the 1964 Good Friday earthquake (9.2) and tsunami that destroyed much of Anchorage's infrastructure, wiped out a number of nearby villages, and killed 131 people directly.  This is of more than academic interest to people living in our part of BC, as it was a subduction zone quake, the kind we're expecting to have here sometime in the next 300 years.  The commemoration is a concrete "totem", depicting blocks of land separating, which pretty much sums up the science of the event, if not the emotional context. 

anchorage

Landslide Park is beside the airport, and planes taking off sounded as if they were directly overhead.  By that time, however, they were high enough that we couldn't see them from the ground.  Happily, the fog lifted just long enough for a telephoto shot of downtown Anchorage.
We headed south from Anchorage along Turnagain Arm (apparently Captain Cook thought the Kenai Peninsula was an island, and rather than attempt to navigate through the glacier at its head, turned around and exited the area via Cook Inlet) as far as Girdwood, one of the villages wiped out by the tsunami, and presently the site of a ski hill.

mt mckinley?

When the weather permits it is apparently possible to see both Mt Foraker and Mt McKinley in Denali National Park from Landslide Park, but we didn't see anything until we got to the viewpoint at Denali State Park.  And that was it.

broad pass

However, We didn't feel cheated.  The areas of both Broad Pass, before Cantwell, and Nenana River Canyon, right after the entrance to the park, are gorgeous, made even more spectacular by the fall colours.

nenana canyon

The road follows the Nenana River until it flows into the Tanana River, and then follows that upriver to Fairbanks. 
The Tanana is navigable, and is still used to transport goods to remote villages.

tanana plain

As it approaches Fairbanks, the road climbs onto a ridge.  This provides views of what used to be, during the last ice age, an ice-free corridor that stretched from Siberia to the Yukon.
In the late summer Fairbanks doesn't look very much like the northern city it undoubtedly is.  This may be due to its typical North American city infrastructure,and the fact that it appears to take up much more space than its population (36,000 in town; area population 100,000) would suggest: it has the road system of a city many times its size.  It also has large army and air force bases; it's probably not a coincidence that the highway reverts back to typical at the end of the airport runway. 
There are signs on the highway running alongside the base prohibiting parking, stopping, or photographing in the area.  So we didn't.

tanana river

From Fairbanks to Tok is miles and miles of taiga, punctuated by the occasional river that meanders (however briskly) through its bed. 

gerstle river

alaska pipeline

We had always associated Alaska with mountains; it turns out that large areas are flat as the proverbial, and filled with the most delightful, and sometimes colourful, muskeg.

taylor highway