Home

Trip log: RV Trip to Alaska 2014

5/29/2014 Day 22 moved to Sourdough RV Park in tok, Alaska, 15 miles,

Then drove up to chicken and back

Although this is a commercial RV park, it’s more like a forest campground. We have an electric-only site for $32. There’s a dump site here and water available but no hookups at our site. Other sites have combinations of electric + water, water only, full hookups, etc at varying prices. Electric is nice, and all we need, especially when we’re not traveling and thereby charging the batteries. They also have a car wash of sorts, but just a pressure wand, no brush. We moved from Tok River early in the morning and the park offers all-you-can-eat pancakes and reindeer sausage (or pork) starting at 7 AM for $10, which we joined. Absolutely the best pancakes I’ve had in a restaurant.

Then we drove 90 miles up to Chicken. Lore has it that the old prospectors who established Chicken really wanted to name it Ptarmigan but couldn’t spell it. Chicken is the last major city (population 7 in winter) before Tok if you come through Dawson City, Yukon, west over the “top of the world highway.” About 50% of this highway is unpaved, some

5/28/2014 Day 21 Conglin Campground, Yukon to Tok, Alaska; about 240 miles

Once again, through US customs entering Alaska. Our remaining grapefruit, which we thought had been behaving beautifully and up to now hadn’t offended any customs official was deemed persona non grata this time. The road to the border was no beauty today. Very slow going, lots of bad road surface, frost heaves, potholes and road construction. This comprised miles of dusty gravel followed by more miles of dusty gravel that had been recently watered down, thereby creating muddy, dusty gravel. So we were towing a rectangular block of dirt which, when hosed off, resembled a Jeep.

6/1/2014 Day 25 Layover day in Fairbanks; visit to mary shields

A visit to Mary Shields to talk about dog mushing in Alaska. We found Mary via a brochure, but the experience actually felt like we had a mutual friend who told us about this amazing woman in Alaska and got us invited to her home when we were up there! We came away with an appreciation of year round life in Alaska for mushers and why they love it. For us, the unforgettable visit with Mary, experiencing her world and meeting her dogs went beyond being fun, interesting and informative. It was a true joy.

5/30/2014 Day 23 Tok to Fairbanks, AK; about 108 miles

We hosed off the RV and left the campground at around 6 without breakfast, stopping later on at a turnout. Finally, a moose! Actually two, females, right alongside the road. We whizzed by the first one so fast she didn’t get a chance to even wave. We slowed alongside the other one but she turned tail and scampered back into the forest before I could get a picture. So you have to take my word for it. This was a short run and we were in the Cheena Lakes Wayside Park in Fairbanks by noon with electric and water hookups and a dump station which we used on the way in. $30 per night here. They also have no hookup sites for $20. The park is about 1/3 to ½ full unless you count mosquitoes.

5/31/2014 Day 24 Layover day in Fairbanks

We drove 71 miles north on the Elliott Highway to Livengood where the Dalton Highway takes off north to Prudhoe Bay. The 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline (TAP) parallels this road and there are a number of places you can see it. The pipeline is buried where possible; in the permafrost areas it must be above ground. Where visible, it zig-zags to provide for thermal expansion and contraction. At its peak, the pipeline transported 2 million barrels of oil per day from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. Oil took 5 days to reach Valdez from Prudhoe Bay. This is an 800-mile trip in 125 hours, or about 6 miles per hour. Declining production and declining functionality of the pipeline due to ageing has reduced that to about 600,000 barrels now. The Elliott Highway is good 2-lane road with the usual Alaska frost heaves and potholes up to Livengood. From there, the Dalton haul road is dirt and gravel north 400+ miles to Prudhoe Bay.

Trans-Alaska pipeline photos Page 1

fountainhead automobile museum, fairbanks Page 2

Visit to mary shields

We filled up in Beaver Creek, Yukon, not knowing how far the next station was. Gas was $6.12/gallon, the highest we’ve paid so far. Just across the border it was $4.60 (yes there was a station) and here in Tok it’s $4.09.

This is supposed to be prime bear country. Not like the little training bears we saw in BC—these are *real* bears: grizzlies. And the campground has lots of warning signs about bears, and it’s even been closed because of bears. But did we see any? No. And no moose, caribou or anything else.

So here we are in Tok, Alaska, in the Tok River Campground just 4 miles east of the town. We went in to get something to eat and almost missed the entire town. We were headed for Anchorage before we knew we were out of town. Tomorrow we will drive the Jeep up to Chicken and back, maybe Eagle as well.

Tachal Dhal (Sheep Mountain) Visitor Center

Sheep way high on the mountain too far away

to photograph.

Chicken photos

First, we were welcomed into Mary’s log cabin home. (She was the first woman to complete the Iditarod in 1974.) We interacted with her irresistible dogs and learned about their lives, personalities, breeding and what makes a good sled dog. In her garden, we heard about what is unique in Alaska gardening. We all sat around the winter camp she has set up with her tent and her sled on display and talked about why she loves mushing off into the wilderness in winter and what it involves. We did a little howling and the dogs howled back. (This is how Mary and the dogs say goodnight to each other in camp). Then, back inside her home (how it was built is a story in itself), we sat around the dining room table, had coffee/tea/juice and fresh, HOMEMADE Brownies and chatted with Mary and the other guests. We were treated to stories about her experiences on the Iditarod and how it all works, her other adventures like a mushing trip in Siberia, fascinating people she has known and her love of her dogs and the mushing life.

By the way, the sled shown in the pictures is “original” but was completely rebuilt after being totaled in a collision with a car.

6/2/2014 Day 26 Fairbanks, AK to Denali National Park, Riley Campground; 125 miles

One thing that you come to understand driving through Alaska is that there’s a lot of it. Driving down Alaska #3 from Fairbanks you gaze out upon hundreds of miles of pure wilderness on both sides, completely unbroken by any roads or other evidence of mankind. But no, you can’t see Mt McKinley. They keep that covered up most of the time with the clouds that are used to produce the perpetual rain in Denali. It’s raining now as I write this. This keeps the tourists hoping, “maybe it will clear up tomorrow.” Sure it will.

We have a campsite with no hookups in Riley Campground, Bear Loop, site 19A. They have a unique reservation system here: you can reserve a site of either size A, 40 feet and under, or B, 30 feet and under, but they do not assign you a specific site. You can cruise through all three loops, Bear, Wolf and Caribou and pick any vacant one of the size you signed up for. They are $28, but $14 with the senior pass.

We had to wait until 4 PM today to start our dinner because it required the toaster oven which requires the generator whose hours are limited to 4PM to 8PM at night. We have our own personal moose who wanders by periodically tearing chunks off the bushes.

Speaking of night: it’s rather a vague concept up here. Sunset is about midnight and sunrise is about 4 AM. And it never really gets dark. We attended a lecture at the Learning Center which, as it turned out, was way above our heads and targeted to a research audience. Interesting nonetheless; it was about prey and predators.

Lots of road construction and delays today. It took 4 hours to get from Fairbanks to Denali. The road is otherwise fine. Once we got settled in the campground we drove out to the 15-mile point which is all the further you can go in a private vehicle. We will do that probably several more times before we leave in hopes of seeing animals.

Denali national park

Mt McKinley (Denali) from Mile 9 in Denali Nat Park

of it really rough and blow-out-the-tires rocky, which is why we decided to take the more southern route from Haines Junction via Beaver Creek to Tok. But that meant we would not see Chicken. Who wants to miss Chicken? The road from Tok to Chicken is pretty good and paved except for the last couple of miles so it was an easy run in the Jeep, leaving the RV in the campground.

Chicken has exactly three businesses, one of which is a combined curio store/liquor store/bar/restaurant, where we bought the obligatory t-shirts in the store and cinnamon rolls in the restaurant, upholding the MTBCR (Mean Time Between Cinnamon Rolls) of the trip. We did not make the trip to Eagle as it’s a long, 85 mile dirt and gravel road from Chicken. We talked briefly to one RVer who had come over the “top of the world” highway from Dawson to Chicken and he said there were lots of tire blowouts along the road which is full of sharp, pointy rocks.

We got the Jeep at least superficially cleaned up in the Chevron car wash in Tok. The RV is so bad I had trouble getting the drain hose connected for all the mud. Tomorrow we will take it to the car wash. Donna did a short load of laundry here.

At night they have a pancake toss here in the Sourdough campground, and Donna was the first to toss the pancake into the bucket and she won a token for a free breakfast the next morning. However, like “The Price Is Right” you have the option of trading that token for a chance at bucket number 1, 2 or 3. She traded for bucket #2 and won a deck of cards instead.

The highlight of this day was the Fountainhead Collection of antique automobiles. This is by far the best, though not the largest, automobile collection I have ever seen. About 80 cars total are in the collection and all of them run and are regularly exercised with the exception of about 3. It ranges from very early cars such as the 1904 Curved-dash Oldsmobile and similar early motorized buggy styles up to a 1936 Packard and a V-16 Cadillac, both the size of small trucks. Nearly all are completely restored, a few are “preserved” meaning they have not

<<<PREVIOUS PAGE HOME NEXT PAGE >>>

Alaska Pipeline just out of Fairbanks

been restored but are in nearly perfect original condition. About 3 are in “barn” condition, meaning they are not restored, not functional and there are no plans to do anything with them. Presumably the mice have been removed.

The University of Alaska, Fairbanks has a Large Animal Research Center and they were holding an open house where you could view the captive reindeer, caribou and musk oxen. Reindeer are domesticated caribou, commonly raised on farms for meat. The musk oxen look like rather large, badly used carpet remnants with feet.

Then we went to the all-you-care-to-eat Salmon Bake at Pioneer Park, just a mile up Airport Way from where we are moored. For $32 per person, they serve salmon (pretty good), prime rib (fair), king crab (pretty skinny) and all the fixin’s buffet style.