Zach and I recently planned and started a vacation of biking from Anchorage to Denali National Park and back. We biked over the course of 3 days, 168 miles, to the Denali North View Campground, about 70 miles from the national park. Unfortunately, rain forced us to head back to Anchorage. Once back in Anchorage, we took a day to dry out and then headed back out for our vacation, this time with the car since the rain didn't stop.
We camped one night in Denali National Park at Wonder Lake Campground, which is 85 miles inside of the park, reachable by a 5 hour bus ride. The rain let up the following day, though the cloud ceiling stayed low. Rather than spend another soggy night at the campground for the slight chance of seeing Denali, we decided to hop the bus back out. Our bus driver must be a distant cousin of Bob Ross. The ride out was fairly devoid of wildlife - a single wolf in the distance, a few caribou and a bunch of dall sheep high up on the mountain sides.
Rather than return south, we decided to head north along the Parks Highway to Fairbanks. After finding dinner at Gambardella's Pasta Bella, longing for a dry bed we stayed the night at Ah, Rose Marie Bed and Breakfast.
Early monday morning, we explored Fairbanks and took a tour through the University of Alaska Museum. Highly worth a visit if you're ever in the area.
We next drove south along the Richardson Highway. Our first stop was just a short drive away, at North Pole, Alaska. There was everything you might want, even candycane painted lamp posts.
Further south along the highway, we passed through broad expanses of empty, mountainous terrain. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline runs alongside the Richardson, both above and below ground.
We saw the Black Rapids Glacier, which
apparently tried to eat the highway in the 30's when it advanced some three miles over the span of one winter.
After passing through Delta Junction and Glenallen, we pushed further south, headed toward Valdez. Our first stop was the former mining boom-town of Copper Center. We camped at a campground a short ways out of town, though returned the following morning for a warm breakfast at the Copper Center Roadhouse, which was a stop on the trail north for the goldminers in the late 1890s.
Back on the highway south, we passed through Thompson Pass, the scenic final high point before the long downhill into Valdez. A quick stop and hike revealed some beautiful alpine tundra and snow (in August) looming not far away.
Valdez was rained in when we arrived. Without much to see, we found some lunch to kill time and see if the clouds would lift. We drove around the town for a short while, saw Valdez Glacier, thousands of salmon spawning and a few sea otters out for a swim, before returning north along the highway.
We drove to a small campground named Liberty Falls just inside Wrangel-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. A beautiful, most likely glacier fed waterfall and creek flowed past our tent flap.
On the final day of our trip, we drove further along the road into Wrangel-St. Elias. We stopped in another former mining boom town, Chitina, for coffee and breakfast. While eating, we noted a turkey apparently making its nest across the street among some rusted out trucks from the 1930s. The town was quite large in its day, where the some of the workers at the Kennicott Copper Mine lived, until it closed in 1938. Today, the town is quite small, often a starting point for salmon fishing trips on the Copper River. The highway ends and turned into a gravel road for the final 60 miles into the town of McCarthy and the park. We only traveled a few miles down the road, crossing the Copper River in a beautiful valley. There were a few interesting salmon catching contraptions on the riverbank.
Back on the highway heading north, we passed through Glenallen again and headed west and south along the Glenn Highway toward Anchorage. We stopped for lunch at the Sheep Mountain Lodge, where there were a bunch of cute dog-sled puppies. After lunch, we stopped at Volvo-valhalla behind the lodge before heading back to Anchorage. We picked some blueberries and grabbed some wheel rims for snow tires. Maggie, the dog at the yard, growled until you rubbed her tummy.
