Location: Anchorage, AK

Car Mileage: 225,720

Trip Mileage: 15,429

 

The day before getting on a plane to WV for a wedding, I was milling around the Kenai Peninsula just killing time. The past couple of weeks since surviving the Dalton Highway weren’t very dramatic. I visited all three parks (Denali, Wrangell St. Elias, Kenai Fjords), saw wildlife, went on tours, and my car held up. On Monday I spent some time with God. There was something about this ongoing season of solitude and the vastness of his creation around me that I needed to dig into. I wrote down the things I wanted to leave behind in Alaska, and then I lit a match and burned that piece of paper. (This is the SECOND most masculine way to deal with emotions. First is bottling it all inside.) Anyway, I felt like this went really well as one of my missions has been to gain clarity, perspective, and vision from this adventure. The looming departure to WV was also making me a little homesick and probably more open to self-reflection.

 

I wrote down “Just Breathe” on some Duck Tape as a W.W.J.D.-esque reminder and put it on my dash. Corny? Maybe.

The same phrase that, when tattooed onto Miley Cyrus ushered in her Bad Girl Era, I was hoping would usher in my Clarity In What I Am Supposed To Do With My Life Era. I then stopped to read in my car, but when I tried to get back on the road my car was dead.

I got out to walk around a bit, trying not to let the nearby fishermen or the lady metal detecting, catch wind of my issues. I saw the “Just Breathe” in my car and laughed. Had my recent spiritual reflection all been to help me cope with this moment hours later? In that moment, I thought yes. However, thanks to a gadget my sister Bethany gave me for Christmas, I was able to jumpstart my car and be on my way.

So, the most dramatic sequence of the last two weeks really ended up being a blip. A few hours later I learned I had placed the tape right over the dashboard icon indicating my headlights were on the entire time I was reading. So while that morning had inadvertently killed my battery, it had also given me the patience to deal with it. Perhaps a short-term loss and a long-term gain.

 

But onto the good stuff! Here is how the last two weeks went down.

Denali

 

For as much time as I spent planning this trip, I didn’t get very detailed. Only the first 15 miles of Denali National Park’s singular road is open to the public, and I was lucky enough to see Denali’s peak from here (only about 30% of people get to see it due to clouds).

This is the highest peak in North America, and from mile marker 15 it is still close to 100 miles away as the crow flies (how did crows get to be the avian flight measurement?) The mountain almost looks like a cloud itself: it’s pure white and has a rounded profile. I was excited to take the Denali bus that goes all the way to mile 98 and trim the distance between me and the mountain. Only after I bought my ticket did I learn that a melting glacier caused the road to be shut down after mile 48. Travel tip: don’t go to Denali until 2027 when this is fixed. The bus got me 30 miles closer to the mountain and I tried to hike a couple miles closer, but from a peak-seeking perspective, the day ended up being a bit of a bust.

 

The hiking was great here though. The park actively encourage you to go off trail, so I did (with bear spray of course). The off-trail hikes yielded some fun results. I had a fairly close encounter with a caribou and learned that the only distinction between caribou and reindeer is that reindeer are domesticated.

I also saw some unmistakable bear prints and found most of a moose antler.

I am definitely NOT smuggling the moose antler back home in the bottom of my clothing crate. It would be irresponsible to try and bring that back across the Canadian border. I’d wager that if you did try to keep the antler and wash the mud off in a stream, that it would actually end up soaking up some water and would make your car smell wretched for the next few days. That’s why I definitely just left it where I found it.

 

I’d give Denali a 10/10 on animal score. I saw four of what they call “The Big Five”: caribou, moose, bear, and Dall Sheep. It only lacked wolves. The road score would be a 4/10. Paved, sure, but not having a detour route around the construction and instead “protecting nature” from additional “ecological road pollution” really cramped my style. Trees and animal habitats are important, but I also want to get closer to the big mountain to have a cooler Instagram post.

 

 

Wrangell St. Elias

 

The drive from Denali to Wrangell St. Elias NP is among the most spectacular I have experienced thus far. The splendor of this park lies in its horizon, which stretches as far as you can see to the East and West. This is the largest of the US National Parks, outsizing Yellowstone, Yosemite, and all of Switzerland combined. It also holds 9 of the 16 highest peaks in North America.

You can’t explore 13 million acres, but at the heart of the park are two small towns: McCarthy and Kennecott. There are only two roads that go more than a mile into the park, and one of those is an unpaved 60 miles leading to McCarthy. 

 

My amateur opinion is that McCarthy really only exists due to the tourism provided by Kennecott, which is an abandoned copper mining town from the early 1900s, five miles uphill from McCarthy. I booked a 1:30 PM tour to see the Kennecott mill. The tour company said to show up to McCarthy for the shuttle 90 minutes before your time, but I showed up 55 minutes early erroneously assuming that was plenty of time. I missed the shuttle by 5 minutes. 

 

I asked the parking attendant where I could get the second shuttle option mentioned in the email. She said, “Oh, that’s just Dean. If you have his phone number, you can call him and he will sometimes pick you up.” Well, Dean was just a guy on an ATV. I’m not sure even someone from Wayne County would read “Shuttle” and assume you need to have Dean’s personal cell phone number for an ATV ride.

Seeing that I didn’t have Dean’s number nor was she offering it up, for what is the second blog in a row, I started running. I was running and doing the math for what my mile pace needed to be to get to my tour on time. Judge me all you want, but I am not running five miles at a 10-minute pace uphill in hiking boots and a backpack. Therefore, I met my arbitrary boundary for non-confrontation.

Giving up after half a mile, I called the tour company, apologized for being out of breath, and asked if they could move my tour time to 3:30. “No problem. Just a party of one, right?” Not sure why the reminder that, yes, I am a party of one, alone, single, without romantic prospects was needed, but I had been obliged, nevertheless. 

 

The mill was deadly. Both in the surfer sense of being rad, and the sense that there were nails scattered everywhere, protruding from the walls of a 1910s era wooden structure spanning 14 stories (similar to how I would describe The Beast at Kings Island). I’m not sure it is competing with much, but the mill was the coolest historical manmade structure I have seen in the National Park system.  The residual copper deposits and the remoteness of the settlement made it feel untampered with (even though I am sure millions have been poured into maintaining this aesthetic). 

 

Next, I stopped at the coastal town of Valdez; this is the finish line for the Alyeska Oil Pipeline that starts at the Arctic Ocean where I had been ten days prior. I was only going to spend a few hours in Valdez, but when I arrived I saw they had a restaurant called “The Potato.” In all the world there is only one Evaroni’s (Huntington reference). And almost as exclusive, in all the world there are only two “The Potato”. One in McCarthy where I had eaten the best burrito of my life the night before. The second, in Valdez. This location was closed until the next day, so I decided to camp out. The views were stunning and only eclipsed by the splendor of that burrito.  

 

Anchorage

 

I showered at Planet Fitness and slept in a Walmart parking lot.

 

Kenai Fjords

 

The town of Seward, Alaska, is stuck between Kenai Fjords National Park and the Gulf of Alaska. If you’ve done an Alaskan cruise, then you likely stopped in Seward. While shopping, I overheard the clerk brag to a customer that they had been named the top small town in America by USA Today. I looked it up, and not to be an “Well AcKtUaLlY” person, but it was named the top small town in the West. Interestingly, Lewisburg, WV, also appeared on that list as the “Best Small Town Food Scene”. I guess Jim Justice can buy just about anything. 

 

In the best way possible, Kenai was more of the same. That is, more panoramic mountain views. More waterfalls toppling down on the side of the road. More glaciers. Much of Kenai NP is just a fjord cruise. The land portion mainly consisted of hiking around Exit Glacier. 

 

Kenai is pretty far south for Alaska, so there are a couple hours of near-darkness each night. It’s still light enough to be able to hike pretty late. After a short excursion around Exit Glacier, I heard some rustling leaves and sticks to my left. I wasn’t initially startled since it was so subtle, but as I stopped walking and looked around, I saw a black bear about 30 feet away from me. It made a half growl: more like it was clearing its throat. I had inadvertently been walking very quietly and I hollered at it to make sure it knew that I knew that it knew I was there.

 

I was the only person left in this part of the park, and I was only a few hundred yards from my car. It was a black bear though, and I found myself less afraid than I had been two weeks prior when I was taunting the Grizzly bear from the relative safety of my car. I pulled out my bear spray and slowly walked backwards in the direction of my car. Someone might critique me moving away, but there was enough foliage between us that I thought we perhaps had a mutual parting of ways. Once I had put another 50 yards between me and she, I waited on the path ready to shoot a picture with my left hand or the spray with my right. A few minutes later her outline emerged, checking to see if I was still there.

I wish I had snapped a picture before getting so far away, but I guess that is what ends up putting you in danger. I assume “she” because of these signs warning about the sow in the area.

 

The Rest

 

In the last blog, I mentioned meeting a Polar Bear Biologist and her husband, Susannah and Brian, while visiting the Arctic Ocean. I had hoped I would see them on the return trip on the Dalton Highway, but it turns out I was going too slow. After my last post they managed to find me: assuming a millennial would have a blog.

I’m not a fan of this millennial tag and the baggage that comes with it, but I also don’t think I want to be attributed to the “iPad kid” generation behind me. Anyway, they offered to give me a place to stay, and we planned it out. Unfortunately, Susannah got chicken pox a couple days before I was due to visit.

 

This gave me a couple days to kill. Since I had already been to the most northern highway in North America, I decided to check off the most western highway as well. This was just a few hours from Seward in Anchor Point.

I find it surprising that the most western highway is still so far east in Alaska. There is no main roadway connecting most of the state’s land mass, so “The Last Frontier” is a rightful state nickname. The road to Anchor Point was marshier, and I saw the highest concentration of moose, including my first mooselet (baby moose). I spent most of the time driving and sitting by the ocean.

 

It was when I pointed my headlights back towards Anchorage that the battery died.

 

A grapevine of women back home were able to come up with an Anchorage contact, Scot Hines, for me to leave my car with while I fly back to WV for a week. He also cooked me a steak and let me do my laundry. Thank you to all those that helped with that.

 

Have you had a vacation yet this year? Because I am literally about to take a vacation from my vacation. I get to come home for a wedding and to celebrate my birthday with friends and parents. 

 

The journey isn’t over, but it has reached its turning point. When I get back to Alaska, I start the long meandering journey back to… my parent’s house. To live with my parents… whom I love. At age 27. Ya know, I think I’ll stretch my trip out as long as I can. Maybe Everglades NP in Florida would be a good addition.