Tag Archives: Retirement

North to Alaska (again) – Part 5

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Once again, I am pretty close to a year behind on this entry. These are the continuing adventures of our 2023 Alaska summer trip.

We headed back to ‘civilization’, Anchorage. We parked in the Cabela’s parking lot for the night and got some necessities done in town, shopping, laundry, and moose hunting? We were on our way to the first two on the list and got sucked into the last one. We were driving downtown Anchorage, passing a park by a Post Office and George spotted a moose eating in the divider. He hopped out of the truck and pursued the moose throughout the park, it went through a pond and ended up in a park parking lot. Most other people were pretty non-plussed about the moose wandering around downtown, I guess this is Alaska.

The next night was just up the road to Wasilla and an overnight stop in the Walmart parking lot. The interesting incident here was that Walmart was evacuated due to a fire alarm. George happened to be in the restroom then, so he claimed he caused it.

We continued our northerly trek with a bit of eastward movement on our way to just south of Glenallen. We stayed in Glenallen on our 2019 trip but we found that there was another free location at a boat ramp parking lot just south of there near Tazlina, and we headed there.

We were on our way to Valdez. Roxie and I did a day trip there in 2019 from Glenallen but this time all of us were going to spend a couple of nights there. On the way down we stopped off at the Wrangell/St. Elias National Park Visitors Center. This is the closest most visitors get to the actual park.

Valdez was pretty rainy and miserable. It is a small little town with a Safeway, a very expensive Safeway! We braved the weather, it was pretty well flooded in the campground and visited the local fish hatchery. We got to see the salmon swimming back to the hatchery where they started their journey. They are unable to continue up the local river so they get diverted to the fish ladder and on to their demise. However, sometimes they don’t even make it up the ladder as other animals want to intercept them.

Leaving Valdez, we passed a glacier and headed to the town of Chitina, the mining town of McCarthy, and the Kennecott Mines. This is an area that few people visit when seeing Alaska and our first time doing so. We drove just past Chitina and there was a small free campground where we stayed for two nights.

Worthington Glacier along Richardson Hwy driving from Valdez AK

We took the day trip to McCarthy. It is a road that we would not want to take with the trailers, although some people do. You drive to the river that flows out of the Kennecott Glacier. You park your vehicle there and walk across a footbridge to the other side. The Kennecott Mine is quite a few miles up the road but the local businesses provide shuttle vans to get you up and back.

Once you get to the mine, you can walk around and see the buildings, utilize some of the vendors there, or perhaps walk up to the Kennecott Glacier. We just stayed around the mine area but did have a view of the glacier.

Coming back from McCarthy on our road less traveled, we encountered a gentleman on the side of the road with a flat tire. We stopped to see if we could assist. He was a man from France who rented a minivan in Denver, drove it to Alaska, and ended up where we found him but no cell service. We also had no AT&T cell service where we were at, however, we did have a Verizon signal. We have two different providers on our cell phones for times when the other doesn’t have coverage, precisely for this.

His minivan came with no spare tire and the flat repair kit they provided was unusable. He was able to use my phone to call the car rental company and they said they have no way to help him out in Alaska. We called the state troopers and they gave us the number of a tow truck service in Glenallen. We contacted them and they said they could send one the next day to get him transported to a repair location. He felt secure in staying the night on the side of the road, sleeping in the mini-van as he had done this since Denver. We were glad we could help.

Our journey continued back north through Tok where we decided to take the Top of the World highway. Conditions seemed to warrant it. A couple of days in Tok to resupply and on to a night in Chicken. The US/Canadian border closed each night at 6 pm and we wanted to make sure we had plenty of time to get through.

The border crossing was uneventful, or at least we thought it was, and we made our way on to Dawson City, YT. The Yukon River crossing is via ferry boat between West Dawson and Dawson City.

The ferry only runs in the summertime, in the winter the river freezes over enough to drive across. We got a video of George and Marcia crossing and they got one of us.

We did a few different things in Dawson City and went to see some of the old dredges in the area.

As we were driving back to town from the dredges I noticed a small stream alongside the creek and a large pond had been created. Beavers! We stopped to watch them for quite awhile and got this video.

We drove up to an overlook and got a good view of the town and the river.

In Dawson, I was able to recreate another photo from my 1964 trip. There is a paddle-wheeler named Keno that is drydocked in town, as it was in 1964. Normally the current tour does not allow visitors to the upper deck anymore but once I showed the docent the old photo, she made it happen. Here are the photos, 59 years apart.

I need to explain about the non-uneventful border crossing. While we were in Dawson City, I got a phone call from the Canadian Border Patrol and asked if I was with George Chen. I said yes, and he stated that they neglected to return George and Marcia’s passports at the border crossing. Fortuitously, the agent was passing through Dawson City the next day and would drop them off to George. Crisis averted!

Back to Whitehorse for our next ‘big’ city. But first a quick overnight in a free campground at Pelley’s Crossing.

Here another odd thing happened. We had stopped on the way for a restroom break and I found someone’s wallet which contained ID. I saved it and contacted the RCMP in Pelly’s Crossing. They drove by and retrieved it from me. Good deed done.

Whitehorse was two nights and we visited the transportation museum where they have the world’s largest windvane. A DC-9 DC-3 (thanks Roger Ritter) was donated and they mounted it on a swiveling stand so it could swing into the wind.

Now being back in Canada and heading to the lower 48, Alaska is no longer on our list, or is it?

North to Alaska (again) – Part 1

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We went to Alaska in 2019. It was a kind of ‘spur of the moment’ thing. We saw the RV’ing to Alaska group was having a 4th of July get-together near Anchorage. We signed up and made that a target for our initial travels.

Our friends, the Chen’s wanted to go to Alaska so we decided to go with them this year. We made a decision on a specific date to be at Denali National Park and used that as our target for this trip.

We left our place in Arizona on May 26 and had scheduled to leave Great Falls, MT with the Chen’s on June 19. This gave us time to head to California to visit family. The first stop was to see our youngest grandchild and her family (we also got to see our oldest grandchild here also). Here is Roxie taking Charlee out for a walk in her trike.

The next stop was the middle grandchild, Atlas, and his family. When Hannah and Roxie were doing something, we boys (me, Lukas, and Atlas) went to a park to wait and could overlook San Francisco.

As our whirlwind tour continued, we saw Roxie’s sister (Desiree) and her daughter (Tiarah). We were there for Tiarah’s high school graduation. She graduated from Central Valley High School which, ironically, is the same high school I graduated from 45 years previously. It was still held in the same venue.

After all this California ‘love’ we headed north. The first stop was Collier State Park in Oregon. It was by a beautiful creek.

We headed to Washington and stayed at Charbonneau Park, an Army Corp of Engineers campground. We spent a couple of nights there and did the ubiquitous laundry loads. Here is Roxie telling me something.

We turned east to get into Montana and eventually to Great Falls. We also stopped a few nights to see a family friend and his family, Jared.

Unfortunately, Jared’s family had to leave before we got there to attend to an ill relative. We are sorry we missed them but are glad they were able to go. Jared lives next to Post Falls, so we went to see the falls.

One more travel night and we made it to Great Falls and met up with the Chen’s. They had an extra passenger, their daughter Maya. We knew she was coming along on the trip for half of it. She would fly back home midway through the trip. Great Falls also has many waterfalls around the area.

George is king of the selfies.

We were off the try to get into Canada. I took a shotgun with me the last time and decided to do so again this time. You should declare, on the US side, that you are the owner of the shotgun and use a form that states such. This took a bit of time as the border agent came out to our trailer and verified it, but the longest time was waiting until an agent asked us what we needed.

Now the Canadian side. The initial questioning went easy. The agent did ask about guns and I had already said I needed to get a permit for the shotgun so she never asked about any other guns, which I did not have. Pull over to the side and come into the office.

I got a great agent for my shotgun permitting. All went smoothly and it took some time also. But we were in Alberta.

There was a caribou farm of some type on the side of the road and Roxie had an interest in them as they had a curiosity with her.

We headed north to get to Dawson Creek, stayed in small campgrounds (municipal ones if we could) and avoided large towns as we could. We did make a stop in a Calgary Costco and saw something very Canadian.

We stayed for a few nights in Morinville, AB, just north of Edmonton.

We went to Edmonton for a few days to see the sights. At the University we were able to do some solar observations (sunspots, corona, etc.).

A large replica Stanley Cup.

The city skyline.

And, of course, the largest mall in North America.

Back on the road and after a few more nights we made it where all Alaska travellers want to take a photo. Mile 0.

As mentioned previously, Roxie and I were in Alaska in 2019. However, I went to Alaska with my family in 1964. It was my dad, mom, sister and me. We drove from Southern California and had a total of 9 flat tires. Some of that 1964 story is here. I tried to recreate many of the 1964 photos that I have found. Here is the Mile 0 photo from 1964 (I am the short one).