Alaskan Delights	Back to the Current Issue Back to Features
by Keith Lomax

If you haven't been, you've got to go - soon! Judging by the RV traffic on Alaskan roads, half the population of North America was there this summer! It is a long way up there and back, but the Alaskan experience is one not to be missed. It gives such a variety of adventures through the Inside Passage, the Yukon and Northern British Columbia as well as the delights of Alaska itself.

Making part of the journey by ferry is expensive but worth the money (or most of it anyway!) because of the relaxed atmosphere, the stunning scenery through the islands, and the relief from long hours of driving.

We wanted to catch the ferry at Bellingham but found that advance bookings of up to a year are necessary, so we took the chance of a connection at Prince Rupert. It is a pleasant drive through the Fraser Canyon and the Cariboo to 'Rupert, but be prepared for accommodation problems when you get there. The town's campgrounds were chock-a-block to the point where latecomers were being packed into a narrow strip between the roadway and a creek which held the mother of all mosquito populations. Just getting out of the vehicle was risky - passing traffic could take the passenger's door off, or the driver could slip down the bank into the fetid water. We complained and were sent to the overflow area atop Roosevelt Park hill right in the centre of the town where we had a wonderful parkland setting and a lovely view of the harbour!
On the ferry we indulged ourselves with cabin accommodation, but all the fun seemed to be had by the tent-city dwellers on the solarium deck at the rear of the ship. Tents of all colours and shapes were held to the steel decking by generous applications of duct tape, and the occupants seemed to have most of the comforts of life at hand. Ice boxes proliferated as did sleeping bags, reading materials, lazyboy deck chairs, playing cards and sunburn cream by the gallon.

The more conservative types like us spent most of the time in the observation lounge just below the bridge deck. The full sweep of windows from port to starboard gave us all a panoramic view of the passing parade of whales, dolphins and islands sometimes amazingly close by. There were times when it really was possible to toss a stone to either side and hit land!

Of course there were more people than seats in the observation area, and it was interesting to watch human nature at work. Some folk had a good window seat and held it at all costs, even to eating and dozing there, while others 'reserved' their seats with an item of clothing while they went and occupied another seat in the overcrowded dining room. Others balanced the chance of taking a bracing deck stroll in the nippy air against not finding a seat when they returned. Having a seat at all was the least of the worries of the more hardy types in the lesser accommodations - enjoying the journey was their first priority.

Ketchikan was our first port of call and while waiting to change ferries we did a tour of the area which must have the world's highest concentration of motor vehicles per kilometer (with less that 100 km of main road for them to use!). While the road traffic was as dense as you will find in any major city, the novelty was really on the water where majestic cruise ships lined the wharf. Out in the small harbour another sat gleaming in the sun like a great white castle, its passengers being ferried ashore and back in small cabin cruisers which wended their way across the water with an ever watchful eye for an approaching seaplane. At any one time we could count at least six float planes taking off, heading out for sight seeing trips, or on landing approaches which crossed the paths of the water taxis. The noise was ever present with the constant flow of traffic and the resonating roars of the big radial engines which powered most of the aircraft. It was worth the effort to climb countless flights of stairs to see all this from a high vantage point in the centre of the town.

Ketchikan, along with Sitka, further up the Inside Passage, and Skagway, at the end of our seaborne journey, is an old mining town with a colourful history of personalities and well preserved buildings from the gold rush days. History is everywhere, as are the gift and souvenir shops which tempt the tourist at every turn, but Canadians should be wary as the steep prices are in American currency - easy to overlook if you are using a credit card. The shock comes later when you get the bill in Canadian dollars!

All along the ferry route, and in the harbours, the distinct white flash from the heads of bald eagles is a common sight perched in treetops or soaring over the waters. To the Americans this is almost a religious experience as they gasp in wonder and record every sighting as if it were the last to be seen. We had the unusual experience of seeing an eagle land upon the water then sit there like a duck for several minutes before taking off with great beats of its wings.

Skagway is the start of the great White Pass & Yukon Railway which climbs through the mountains carrying tourists through the harsh country which once saw thousands of struggling optimists on their way to strike it rich in the Klondike. Of the 40,000 who set out only 4,000 made it, with untold numbers lost in glacier crevasses, frozen or starved to death. The carcasses of 3,000 horses once lined this route which was strictly eventually monitored by the Mounties of the day. They would allow no one to take the trail unless they had a year's supply of food with them. The enormity of the task facing those gold seekers and the shocking conditions faced by them along the way, left us very impressed with the power of gold fever to drive people to impossible lengths. The railway was built later to transport other less precious metals to port. The mind boggles at the engineering difficulties faced in building that line, let alone the fact that it was first traversed by so many folk on foot.

By the time the road from Skagway to Whitehorse is traveled you begin to get some idea of the dimensions of Alaska - the distances, the importance of the rivers as highways of the past, and the tempo of living today in such a remote corner of the world. There is a liveliness in all the towns, a bustle to get things done while the summer is here, a civic pride in what has been achieved and in what the future holds. At a remote place high in the mountains we came across a tiny service stop where a young fellow was busy repairing tires damaged on the Top of the World Highway's notorious surface. When I remarked that it was 9:30 pm, surely time to have supper, he replied "This is what the summer is for - WORK!"

We found ourselves losing proper sleep because of the long daylight hours of July. Nineteen hours of sunlight, a couple of hours of evening light and a couple more as dawn pushes through means that there is no real darkness to be seen. Several times we were awakened at 11:00 pm or at 3:00 am by people awake and moving about as if it were late afternoon or morning.

The man in charge of road maintenance in Alaska works from a faulty list. Somebody forgot to put a particular vital road on it! If ever there existed a disgrace to a state road maintenance authority, it exists in the American section of the Top of the World Highway. This road from Dawson to Tok is the only access to Fairbanks and other points West apart from a 1000 km loop through Whitehorse. Supply vehicles, tourists by the thousand and Alaskans as well as Yukoners use it as the only sensible way to go, but 'sensible' is a matter of opinion. Sure, it is 300 km instead of 1000, but at what cost! Washboard surfaces are met almost as soon as one leaves the Canadian section, but that is the least of it. Over the worst section there are pot-holes big enough to hide a small car. Filled with dust, broken logs and bits of stone they pose a menace for the sturdiest of vehicles, To be fair, there are a lot of road improvements going on in very difficult country. Their available working time is short and the severe winters are hard on the best of roads, especially in the marshy areas where it seems to be virtually impossible to lay a permanently smooth road surface because of frost heaves and permafrost.

The Top-of-the-World highway is aptly named, as it runs along the crests of the mountains at heights where no trees or shrubs can grow. Apart from the road condition it is a very beautiful drive with 'wow look-at-that' scenery that calls up a real sense of isolation. What a place for something to go wrong - and for us, it did. Our tires which were making their last trip before being renewed proved inadequate for the task and we were lucky indeed to be able to buy a couple of used replacements at the only habitation for 100 km in either direction. A flat tire is always a disappointment, but up there it is a real cause for real dismay. Eventually the road runs through a little village called Chicken, so named because of the plentiful ptarmigan inhabiting the area, but whose name the original settlers couldn't spell. That is the story anyway, and Alaska and the Yukon are full of such stories.

The original gold seekers who survived were called Sourdoughs, but you can be called a sourdough today if you were born in Alaska. You can also be called a sourdough if you have been attacked by a grizzly and survived. If you have survived two attacks by grizzlies you can be called a liar!

The stories about bear claw scratch marks being found ten feet up the trunks of trees might seem unbelievable until you see some of the mounted specimens to be found on display in some of the shopping malls in the larger towns. It's true! They ARE enormous things, and the sight of those displays made us anxious to see the real thing. Denali National Park is the place to do that.

For the price of a park permit ($3,00, good for seven days!) they will take you on a an 8 or 11 hour bus trip into some of the word's most magnificent scenery and bear territory. Each day 35 long yellow school buses wend their way along a dusty, narrow, cliff-hugging road, packed with goggle-eyed tourists enjoying the best value for money they will ever get. Nowhere in the world is there a greater density of cameras per person, and they are put to full use as the entertaining and obliging bus drivers stop at every opportunity to reveal every kind of wildlife which has become so habituated to yellow buses that they ignore them altogether. We stopped for a ptarmigan family only a few feet from the bus, a red fox and her cubs sunning themselves at the den opening halfway up a slope, caribou which will get off the road for you when they damn well feel like it and not before, the occasional moose with calf, and BEARS! We saw nine grizzlies (I swear it was nine but wife declares we saw the first three twice, so it was really only six, but I insist it was NINE because it feels better that way). In each case they were a mother and two half-grown cubs. They were too far off to be bothered photographing on the first sighting, but on the return trip we spotted ANOTHER three much closer. The mother bear was making a half-hearted attempt to catch a caribou, a hopeless pursuit because she was too fat and the caribou was so fast it wanted to make a game of it, The THIRD family came into view ten minutes later, this time close enough to get good pictures on the video camera.

We were hot, tired and dusty at the end of that but oh so satisfied at having seen so much. There is a waiting list up to three days long for these bus tours unless you join the queue at 6:30 am, for a two hour wait to (maybe) get a bus coupon for the NEXT day.

There are some impressive but distant views of glaciers from the ferry, and along the southern approach to Denali the grand Manatuska glacier is a frequent sight from the roadway, but to really get intimate with these geological giants you take a boat ride. At Valdez a bunch of tour-boat companies are vying for your custom for five hour trips to the foot of Columbia Glacier. We took the lowest cost offer ($55 US a head), and were eventually taken right amongst the 'bergs in the bay at the foot of the 120 km long glacier. We waited for the thing to calve, but nothing happened except for a lot of picture taking with blue-ice backgrounds.

An hour south of Anchorage you can take a $20 look at Portage Glacier, so named because the gold seekers actually used it as part of their trail (it is 130 km long). It is a splendid thing which obligingly leaves great hunks of itself floating in the lake at the foot of an excellent observation building where they have an information centre to beat them all. The boat trip is only an hour, but is very informative and again puts you really close to where house-sized pieces will break off without notice. (We heard a little splash and saw the ripples but that was about it!). At the information centre the wide screen film, the exhibit displays and the living specimens of iceworms, make it a place where a couple of hours has gone by before you have had another look through the great windows at all those 'bergs in the lake. Before leaving our nearby campground the next morning we went back for a final look and were amazed at the change in the scenery. Overnight great new 'bergs had been wind driven to the shore, some blazing white, some a beautiful blue and a couple as black as coal with the soil and rocks they had dragged from the side of the valley.

The famous Alaska highway from Fairbanks to Dawson Creek is surely one of the most remarkable engineering feats of all time - all 1500 km of it. They had l0,000 soldiers and unlimited equipment and funds to get that road through in 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Just as amazing as the terrain they put the road through is the fact that they did it in eight months. On April 12th 1941 heavy rains washed away 43 of their bridges! The statistics are mind-boggling but the effect on people has been tragic. Most of the Indian tribes encountered had never seen white folk or had immunity from their diseases so whole communities were decimated. The workforce too, suffered badly because most of the soldiers happened to come from the southern states and the bitter cold was pretty tough on them. Today the road is vastly improved, sealed most of the way with only a few horror stretches where roadworks are in progress.

After traveling for a long day pretty steadily from Fairbanks, for example it is a bit of a jaw dropper to come to a sign which reads DAWSON CREEK 750 (1200 km), and you already know that Dawson Creek is a helluva way from Vancouver! Strangely, the legs get longer. Where you start the trip happy to cover 300 to 400 km a day, it is not long before you are making 500, 600 or 700 km before making camp for the night. White-line fever, it is sometimes called, and the danger is that good things might be missed along the way.

The Sign Forest at Watson Lake is a must, and the traveler should be ready for it by having a distinctive sign ready to nail up amongst the thousands of others from all over the world. This is a unique display well worth wandering through for an hour or so.

Take your swimming gear for a bathe in the Hot Springs which are different from others in that they are not commercialized and are still in the natural setting of lush vegetation. The water is crystal clear and you can choose the temperature you want merely by moving a few feet up or down stream. We had no bother with mosquitoes and the roads were nowhere near as bad as we had been led to believe, nevertheless it is the wise tourist who will take insect repellent and who will set out with first class tires on his vehicle, because things could be different another time and it would be disastrous to be caught unprepared.

So, if you haven't been, you've gotta go! You can't be called a 'Sourdough' just because you've driven the Alaska Highway, but at least you can say you have done it - one of the last great motoring adventures on the continent.