| When thinking about traveling to Alaska, most people think of cruising through the inside passage from Seattle or Vancouver B.C. to Juneau, sailing past glaciers and snow caped mountains, with stops in some of the few towns in the area such as Ketchikan, Wrangel, Sitka and Skagway.
This area is referred to as Southeastern Alaska, and represents a tiny fraction of the entire state.
Alaska is BIG! - Alaska is about one-fifth the size of the Lower 48. The next largest state, Texas, would fit into Alaska 2.5 times.
In fact, if you combined the area of Texas, California and Montana, it would still be less than the size of Alaska. Yet there are less than 800,000 people in the entire state, 50% of them in Anchorage.
That’s less than half the population of Santa Clara County and there only 4 other states in the U.S. with less population (the Dakotas, Wyoming and Vermont).
There are maybe 10 named highways in Alaska, none are freeways as we know them. There are another 6 to 7 dirt and gravel highways and your rental car contract is void if you drive on them.
The two main highways go from Homer/Seward to Anchorage, ending in Fairbanks (the Parks Highway) and the other from Fairbanks through Tok to the Canadian border via the Alaska Highway. More than 90% of the state doesn’t have roads.
Our Journey My wife and I both have been to Southeastern Alaska so, we decided to the other Alaska- the midnight sun, vast open spaces, snowcapped mountains, dirt highways, grizzly bears, swarms of mosquitos and flies, fjords and glaciers, the Alaska pipeline, the Yukon River and old gold mining towns, wild animals roaming freely, the Arctic circle and Denali Park with the highest mountain in North America at 20,343 feet.
We left July 15th for a 12-day trip, flying from SFO to Anchorage and picking up a rental car for a day ($92). We stayed two nights at the Sheraton, a somewhat past its prime hotel 6 blocks from the downtown area.
A better place to stay would be the Captain Cook Hotel, a 20-story hotel with a restaurant and bar on the 20th floor that provides an outstanding view of the mountains and Cook Inlet.
Anchorage is on the banks of the Cook Inlet, where the tides drop up to 30 feet twice a day, leaving the water levels hundreds of feet from the shoreline. The Cook Inlet meets up with Turnagain Arm, a large inlet that is home to some of the largest Bore Tides in the world.
Waves up to 6 feet high come in so fast as to allow some locals to surf them. We planned to watch this phenomenon on our return to Anchorage later in the trip.
Southeastern Alaska We visited the Alaska Native Heritage center with representatives from various Native tribes showing their skills in games and dancing, living quarters and discussing their lives and culture. Worth 2-3 hours.
There were shortages of restaurant workers and many restaurants were crowded and did not take reservations. It seems like everyone in the state and all the tourists wanted to eat at the same time.
It didn’t help that a power outage hit right at dinner time, causing us to wind up at an outdoor taco diner a few blocks off the beaten track. Turned out to be good food and fun.
The weather was very nice, 65-68F with no rain. On Saturday, we boarded the Alaska Railroad’s Denali Star for Fairbanks, a 12-hour journey. We picked the Gold Star Service option since all the food and beverages were included and there was more space to view the sites and less people.
Only issue was they kept the air conditioning on at a cool 64 or 65F degrees. It was warmer to go outside and stand on the open-air platform car. The train makes several scheduled stops along the way and made several unscheduled stops to let passengers on and off the train.
Since there are no roads in some of the remote places, locals put up a white flag to let the train know to stop for them. That and the relatively slow speed of the train accounts for the almost double the time it takes to drive to Fairbanks from Anchorage.
The scenery was outstanding; the tracks run along several rivers and lakes. We arrived in Fairbanks at 8pm and took a taxi to the Westmark Hotel. Our room was very large and cost $172.
The next morning, we took a taxi to pick up the Northern Alaska Tour Company bus for an 11 hour ride to Coldfoot, 259 miles north of Fairbanks on the Dalton Highway of Ice Truckers TV show fame (about 50% paved and the rest gravel and hard packed dirt).
Trucks have the right of way and barrel down the roads at up to 90mph. Rental car contracts ban renters from this highway and for good reason.
The road crosses the Yukon river 140 miles north of Fairbanks, and we got our first good view of the Alaska pipeline, which runs 800 miles from Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic ocean to Valdez on the Gulf of Alaska.
There is only one bridge over the Yukon river. We crossed the Arctic Circle (200 miles from Fairbanks) around 4:30pm. The Dalton highway was only built in the 1970’s after oil was discovered in the Arctic and remained a private road until the 1994 when public access to Deadhorse became available.
Our tour was for 3 days and 2 nights, including an Arctic Mountain safari tour which went further up the Dalton highway through the Antigun pass and across the continental divide and where the tundra starts and a float trip on the middle fork of the Koyukuk River (Total of $1700).
We also took a 2 hour float plane tour ($400 each) over the Brooks Range and the Gates of the Arctic National park with a stop at a lake to view the pilot’s homestead (in the middle of nowhere).
The Yukon river runs 2,000 miles from Canada to the Bering Sea.
Coldfoot was an old gold mining camp in the early 1900’s and took its name when most of the miners got cold feet and left after a few weeks there.
The summer temperatures can get into the mid 70’s while the winter is just a little cooler (like -30F below). There is not much in Coldfoot, one of the only places to get gas, food and lodging in the nearly 500 miles to Deadhorse on Prudhoe Bay at the Arctic ocean.
Coldfoot Hotel The hotel consists of what look like shoved together cargo containers but the two twin beds were comfortable enough; a restaurant catering to truckers (decent food) and the few tourists that venture this far north, a post office, a landing strip and a ranger station pretty much sums it up.
Gas was $5.15 a gallon, cheap considering where it is.
Northern Lights Coldfoot and Fairbanks are two of the best areas in the world to see the northern lights (aurora borealis) as they sit directly below the auroral oval. Since it doesn’t snow or have too many cloudy nights during the winter, the chances of viewing the lights are better. Best time of year is between August 21 and April 21.
There are hiking trails around the area but the constant threat of grizzly bears and a stray moose made it too nerve racking for us to consider.
People do get dropped off by plane into the wilderness and navigate their way to a prearranged pickup point some days or weeks later. There are no trails or roads of any kind of the national parks up here.
In fact there are no roads between the Dalton highway and the Bearing Sea, some 2,000 miles west, or the Canadian Border, some 1,000 miles to the east. You are all alone out here. Walking in the tundra is arduous with many sink holes and ankle twisting opportunities.
Wiseman, AK, population 11 The weather was great; warm every day in the mid 70’s and cool nights. Mosquitos were not an issue. We were very surprised at our good fortune as it had rained the previous week and rained every day the week we left.
As part of the tour, we flew back to Fairbanks renting a car at the airport and driving two easy hours to Denali National Park.
The Alaskans seem to like to put lots of bends in their highways, sort of a way to control the speed limit to around 55 or 60mph. We spent 3 nights,and two days in Denali at the McKinley Chalet Lodge, which had a nice shopping area, restaurant and outdoor music venue on the premises (Rooms around $220/night). |
