Prologue
Well, this is the last of our little travel adventures, so enjoy it. Next week, it’s back to the real world, devoid of exciting waterfall photos and glacier reports. We’ll check back in with the horses and call around to make sure none of our blog friends has been hospitalized with a mysterious ailment. It’s already Spring here in Florida and we’re on the verge of Garden Festivals and baseball games, so you know it’s slowly snaking its way north and west to the rest of you, and about time, too, after the wretched winters many of you have experienced. For today, however, return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear (2007) as your intrepid travelers, Bill and Siobhan make their way:
North To Alaska
There are strange things done
In the Midnight Sun
By the women who moil for gold.
We used to like Connie.
Connie is the American Express Travel Bureau agent who took over an hour to help us get our Amex Membership Rewards points converted into two round-trip airline tickets to Anchorage, set up a two-night hotel stay and reserve a car from Avis.
When we finally got to Alaska, after a mind-numbing six hours in the air from Phoenix (arriving at 12:30 a.m.), Connie became The Devil.
Our first stunned moment came when we reached the Avis counter and discovered that the car reservations had been made not for July 26th, when we arrived, but for May 25, the day we made the reservations. Oh well, no big deal, right? Just find us a car and….what?....you have no cars because it’s the busiest month of the year? I see. Are we having fun yet?
Fortunately, Budget did have a car and the hotel was just a couple of miles down the road. Except that—you guessed it—they had the same incorrect reservation date—and no rooms. By now, of course, it’s almost two in the morning and we’re glad the car is big enough to double as a sleeper. This fun experience was avoided, however, when the nice man at the hotel desk found us a room down the road at a Days Inn. We went there and stuck pins in our Connie doll.
A Brief Tour Of Anchorage
Next day, we explored Anchorage, which in many ways is a typical small city with tourist frills, sitting on the water (Knit Arm south to Turnagain Arm) and surrounded by some serious mountains. The daytime temperatures remained in the sixties during our stay, dropping into the forties (at worst) at night. Anchorage has a reasonable downtown and sprawls out a good distance to the east. Traffic during most of the day is modest and driving is easy. Hotels are mostly expensive ($250 a night is not unusual) but if you look around you can find something cheaper. Our place was $139 a night.
During our visit, we took in a Northern Lights show downtown (you can’t see them live til Autumn) and a play at a cozy little 96-seat theater called Cyrano’s Playhouse, both of them enjoyable. We also booked a trip on Phillips Lines 26 Glacier Tour on Prince William Sound, a few days hence. Anchorage is, at best, a two-day town, unless used as a base for hiking in the nearby Chugach State Park, an attractive possibility.
There Is No Mount McKinley
Leaving Anchorage, we travelled north to Talkeetna, passing through Wasilla on the way. We didn’t know much about Sarah Palin at the time, so we didn’t stop to chat. Talkeetna is home to a slew of little airlines which, for a fee, will fly you around Mt. McKinley (or Denali) and maybe even land (for an additional fee). The guide books told us there would be a few opportunities to see McKinley on the trip, but, of course, we couldn’t. Socked in with clouds, you know. The little airlines said it looked bleak for flying the day we arrived so all there was to do was stomp around Talkeetna—a gorgeous little town full of flowers—and visit what Siobhan calls “trinket shops.” We tried again on the way back from Denali National Park and once more later in the trip, all to no avail. To tell you the truth, we’re not convinced Mt. McKinley is really there. Oh sure, they show you pictures—we even bought one so we could finally see what it looks like—but one snow-capped mountain looks pretty much like another. It could’ve been Kilimanjaro for all we knew. The histories of the area say that the original explorers never even saw the place. Meanwhile, the trinket shops are raking in the dough from all the suckers who think Denali actually exists as they foolishly await their flights in vain. The airlines, once you get desperate, will fly you to “the base of the mountain” but you still will not see it. Is this a great scam or what?
Denali And Glitter Gulch
From Talkeetna, we moved on toward Denali National Park, passing through the tiny town of Cantwell on the way. Cantwell was about to become modestly famous as the town where Sean Penn filmed much of his new movie Into The Wild. The film is about a rich young goober named Chris McCandless, who forsakes the family fortune to “find himself” in the Alaskan bush. Penn portrays McCandless as some kind of visionary. Everybody in Alaska thinks he was a moron. He ended up starving to death in the remains of an abandoned school bus 22 miles from anywhere. Dipwad worshippers hike miles and ford rivers to visit the dubious shrine. “Show Them A Light And They’ll Follow It Anywhere.”
Back to Denali. The scenery on this trip is terrific, even without the fictitious McKinley. The park itself is a monster and goes on forever (one tour extends over ninety miles inside). A short distance from the entrance is the “Glitter Gulch” area, sarcastically named for the array of stores and services lined up across the highway and for the spectacular resorts owned by the Princess and Holland cruise lines. The buses never stop coming and going to these resorts. A railroad train from Anchorage also regularly deposits guests and a few people even drive in. We were booked into the imposing Princess Wilderness Lodge for two nights, but had to scramble to find a place to stay the night prior. Eventually, after much searching, we found an exotic place called the Denali Park Motel down the road in Healy. We didn’t run into the Vanderbilts there.
Alaska, The Cloudshine State
The first morning in Denali, we hiked to the Mount Healy Overlook (Siobhan is sitting up there among the clouds in the accompanying Images Of Alaska slide show). Halfway up the mountain, a modest rain began. We put on ponchos. When we reached the top, the rain relented and the sun, a stranger in these parts, threatened to come out. We celebrated by making cell phone calls from the hilltop (tell me again why I can’t get service in Fairfield). Halfway down, rain again. Ponchos back on. Are you detecting a trend here? The weather in Alaska was less than wonderful, there was no such thing as a sunny day. It was either misty, rainy, partly cloudy or threatening to be nice, but not convincingly. In all fairness to Alaska, maybe it’s sunnier in Winter. But then it would be Winter, f’cripesakes. And dark all the time. During our stay, at least, it was light 20 hours a day, which gave us more time to watch it drizzle. I thought this might deter sleeping, but it did not. We just pulled the curtains at ten o’clock and went to sleep. You could hear the rain tinkle on the roof.
A Brief Tour Of Denali
Siobhan thought it might be nice to take a tour of Denali so we booked a five-hour bus ride-with-narrator for the evening of our first day—5 p.m. to 11 p.m. What else are you gonna do? We saw wildlife on this trip to beat the band. We saw caribou. We saw moose. We saw wolves. We even saw a mama grizzly and her three cubs (no, it was not Sarah Palin). And the bus driver dutifully pulled over so that everybody could record the scenes. This was very nice for, oh, say, about three hours, but began to wear a little thin on the return trip when the mother of an ugly moppet behind us insisted on screaming “CARIBOU!” at the slightest sign of a rustling bush, slowing the bus time and again and glazing over the eyes of its put-upon passengers.
Never Go To Fairbanks
The next day, we headed north with no etched-in-stone destination. We ended up a couple of hours later in Fairbanks. Do you remember the expression “There is no there there.”? That would be Fairbanks. A small bland city with nothing to recommend it. We were so bored we went to see John Travolta in Hairspray, feeling a little guilty about wasting our vacation time on trivial pursuits. Until we saw half the town of Fairbanks in the theater with us. At noon.
Thank God For The Glaciers
On our way to the cruise in Prince William Sound, we visited the Portage Glacier, where a little black bear walked right out in front of us in the road, yawned, and before anybody could get a picture, meandered back into the bushes. That’s why there are few animal pictures in this travelogue—they’re fast and we’re slow.
To get to our cruise boat, we had to pass through a narrow mountain tunnel to Whittier. Every fifteen minutes, the traffic changed. First fifteen minutes, traffic in. Next fifteen minutes, traffic out. Then, train in. You get the idea. Don’t miss your fifteen minutes.
While we waited for the tour boat, we got lunch and fudge. Siobhan can eat fudge any time, night or day. You could, too, if you weighed 110 pounds. The fudge helped assuage the misery of the cold, rainy weather, which shielded from sight many of the promised 26 glaciers (would this be another McKinley Conspiracy?). But, eventually, we saw a bunch of them, even caught one calving (glacier talk for pieces falling into the Sound). Not to mention seeing seals, sea otters and whales frolicking close to the boat. A good, if wet, time was had by all.
Never Go To Seward
Well. That’s a little extreme. Seward is unexciting, but the journey is nice. As a matter of fact, the entire trip from Anchorage, along the Turnagain Arm (who names these places?) past Portage, through the mountains to Seward was spectacularly scenic. And just outside Seward is the Exit Glacier. A short hike puts you almost on the thing (see the slide show), something achieved a day later when we reached the Matanuska Glacier, north of Palmer. But first things first.
Don’t Give Up Your Day Job
Siobhan wanted to pan for gold. It’s Alaska, for God’s sake! So, on the return from Seward, we passed through the quaint little hippie-inhabited town of Girdwood on our way to the Crow’s Creek Mine, a gold mine in use until about 1940, where, today, modern optimists can rent their pan and shovel and go at it by—or in—the rampaging creek. Siobhan is not one to give up easily, but despite her scientific approach, the nuggets were not forthcoming. The mining village, with many of the original buildings still standing—or leaning—was worth the visit, however.
Visit Beautiful Palmer
Hotel prices in Alaska being what they are, we searched for bargains. It’s one thing to pay a fortune for a resort-quality room in Denali where there is little place to stay otherwise, but another to pay it in Anchorage or anywhere else. With diligent pursuit, we found several places in the $100-a-day neighborhood. The last four nights of our stay were spent in the Colony Inn in Palmer, a small agricultural town about an hour north of Anchorage, little more than an hour south of Talkeetna. The location made for a good base camp. We made several forays out of Palmer, one of our favorites to the Matanuska Glacier, a couple hours north. We liked this ramshackle place with its funky toll gate and debilitated trinket shop, one of the very few pieces of private land which contained its own glacier, which you could even walk on (slowly, very slowly) for a few bucks. Palmer also has a 24-hour restaurant and our hotel, a converted teacher’s dormitory, was quiet and roomy. Driving to and from Palmer was easy, the main highways in Alaska being surprisingly good and the traffic generally light.
Yes, But Do I Want To Visit?
A cautious “sure.” But not an unqualified “WOW!” Before we went to Alaska, we talked to several people who unfailingly told us it was the greatest thing since powdered milk. The great majority of these people went on cruises of ten days or more, leaving the boat to visit small towns like Haines or Skagway along the Inside Passage, but spending a preponderance of their time on the ship and out of the weather. We wanted to see parts of Alaska not available to these tourists and we did. But, since some of the people who receive these little travelogues subsequently visit the places we discuss and carry this information with them, we do not want to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Not to equate Alaska with a sow’s ear, you can see from the photographs it has rare beauty.
On The Good Side: Magnificent scenery in all directions, good roads, friendly natives who will talk to you all day if you wish, long days, an unhurried pace.
Not So Good: Drizzly, cloudy Summer weather, the lack of light Southerners are used to, the expense of cruises and flights, the long trip up and back, the sameness of much of what you see.
Avid fishermen are crazy about Alaska—some go back regularly. A moron could catch fish there, and many do. For a true wilderness experience—just you and your tent with nobody around for miles—it would be hard to beat. And, in all fairness, we saw only a relatively small portion of the state, although much of the busiest and most populated part. We’re glad we saw Alaska, it’s physically magnificent. We’re also in no particular hurry to go back.
Unless, of course, somebody can prove to us that Mount McKinley is really there.
That’s all, folks…
