In the last Alaska post, I said I would break up the recap in several posts to prevent your eyes from glazing over. Um, brace yourselves. This post covers three days, but they were eventful!
Day 3: Driving and Denali
So, after a day in Anchorage, we set our sights on Fairbanks, about a six hour drive north, into the “interior” of Alaska. The drive is stunning – lots of tundras, taigas, a few gulches, mountains and rivers galore. Alaska has done a great job paving pull-off spaces for both resting and taking photos.
Four hours out of Anchorage, DENALI NATIONAL PARK. Guys, this place was the coolest. Also, I’d like to give a BIG shoutout to our rental car, aka the best tripod ever.
So, Denali is pretty crazy. Admission is $10 per person and the ticket is good for seven days. Good deal. But, you can drive in 15 miles without having to pay. So that’s what we did. Gorgeous. We got a chance to hike a simple river trail and even saw animal tracks! It’s such a wild place. We spent about two hours there, but had to cut it short because we wanted to get to Fairbanks before it got too dark.
So, more driving. The first five hours of the drive were fairly flat. The last hour, right out of Fairbanks, took us up a mountain with a great view. It was impossible to capture on my camera (especially without a filter), but way out there we could see huge mountains jutting up. Haven’t got a clue what range it was though – there are so many in Alaska!! The bottom left photo shows the driving conditions the morning we left – holy low visibility, batman.
Day 4: Fairbanks Was Kinda A Bust
The main reason for going to Fairbanks was to see the aurora borealis. It was cloudy every night we were in Alaska, so that wasn’t possible. And Fairbanks…well…yikes. NOT a lot to do, at least when we were there. Plus, it was rainy and gross.
We ended up on the Riverboat Discovery tour. It was $60 a person, but we were so bored we sucked it up and paid up. I was delightfully surprised! The tour guide (more on him in a minute) was well-spoken and a bit corny in a good way. Anywho, we saw a lot of homes in different styles (“Alaskans’ rugged individualism”), sled dogs pulling a four-wheeler, a bush plane landing and taking off in water, a Native culture presentation, caribou (not wild, sadly), and the mouth of the spring-fed river merging with a silty glacier-fed river.
Oh, and about that tour guide: we woke up the next morning at our bed and breakfast (Dale and Jo View Suites) and turned on the news, only to see the tour guide anchoring the news!! It was weird. Yes, I fully expect that he’s also the mayor.
Day 5: More Denali
We couldn’t get out of Fairbanks quickly enough because it was dull and difficult to navigate, and I think it’s because we knew what was ahead of us: MORE DENALI.
We got to the park and bought bus tour tickets. There were a handful of options, the shortest being 6 1/2 hours long. Yeeeeaaahh. Haha. BUT! We got to go 50 miles into the park instead of 15! And it was only $26 per person, plus that $10 entry fee. Not bad for nearly a full day of entertainment. We knew we were in for a treat – I mean, even the parking lot has cool views!
There were only about ten people on the bus with us since it was the end of the season. The buses only run from mid-May to the second week of September, because any time between that, snow becomes an issue.
At the 15 mile mark, the pavement stops and the road narrows and turns to dirt. The more expensive tours have park rangers narrating the drive, but these cheaper bus rides have experienced folks who are great at spotting wildlife. The driver stopped when there was a pretty view and slowed down for potential animal spotting.
In fact, the bus tour was where we saw our first MOOSE! Haha. Or perhaps Bigfoot, given its blurriness. Auto-focus fail. But note: TALLER THAN A VAN.
My favorite stop was at the Polychrome Glaciers. Here’s how I’ve described it to friends and family: Imagine The Land Before Time. If a dinosaur just lumbered out from the misty mountains, you’d be like “Oh! There’s a dinosaur! Of course. Because this is where they live.”
Here’s a panorama from my phone of the same range. The mountains are really impressive here. In North Carolina, we have a lot of rolling hills that lead up to the mountains (or, now that I’ve seen these, glorified hills). In Alaska, it’s flat flat flat flat flat MOUNTAIN RANGE.
I wish I knew how hard the wind was blowing.
As we got deeper in the park, our elevation climbed and eventually the ubiquitous green spruces disappeared in favor of low, bushy plants. Hence, the crazy wind.
The little rivers throughout the park are fed by snow melt and glaciers. They run a bit deeper and faster June-August, then slow down, and by the second week of October, they’re frozen.
Our destination was the Toklat River, which was even windier than when we were on the ridge by the Polychrome Range! We saw a herd of Dall sheep, which was awesome. From here, you’d typically be able to see Denali, but it was cloudy that high up so we couldn’t see anything sadly.
Oh! And back to The Land Before Time thing. The park people found a dinosaur print in the park! Because, of course, dinosaur live there. They’re all just hiding.
The photos of the rivers make them look deceptively gentle. The water has really carved out a bed and runs quite swiftly!
Aren’t plate tectonics and erosion COOL, guys?!
Can you tell we loved Denali? Without a doubt, if we were to go back to Alaska, we’d center our trip around Denali.
We drove back to Anchorage and got in around midnight. My one tip: don’t drive on the highways in Alaska at night. It’s just not safe, and I can’t believe we did it. We just didn’t know. It’s SO remote (“96 miles to the next gas station”), and many of the rural parts have poorly marked lines, and the only other vehicles on the road are mostly 18-wheelers. But of course, if you go in the summer, that’s not a problem since it’s light at midnight, haha.
Next up: More Anchorage, glaciers and wildlife! And a much better (or worse?!) moose encounter.
