Chop Chop Billy Goat

I have posted anything on the blog for a couple weeks, so here is my take on where we have been since I last posted.

After spending time in Skagway and then taking the ferry (aka the Alaska Marine Highway) over to Haines and spending a few days there, we decided to make a beeline for Anchorage, 750 miles away. When we looked at the guidebooks there wasn’t a lot to see or do between Haines and Anchorage, and we were eager to get to the Kenai Peninsula, which is south of Anchorage, so it made sense to put in a few long driving days.

The first thing we did after leaving Haines was leave the United States again.  Although Haines and Skagway are both in Alaska, and they are probably only about 15 miles apart as the crow flies,  the only way to reach either of them by road, or even drive between them, is via Canada, so a few miles out of Haines we had to re-enter Canada in order to get to the rest of Alaska.

After over a week in Skagway and Haines, it was strange to be back in the emptiness of the Alaska Highway. Once again we were by ourselves on an empty two lane highway, with miles and miles of wilderness interrupted only by the occasional roadhouse (a roadhouse is a combo of a gas pump, cabins, restaurant and store). Probably 80% of the roadhouses were defunct or on the way to defunct. The first stage of roadhouse decline is the “for sale” sign, which almost all open roadhouses had. Then there are the recently closed ones that look like they closed in the last year or two, some of which still have an optimistic “for sale” sign. Next are the ones with broken windows and structural damage. Finally, there are full on ruins with collapsed buildings that are being reclaimed by the forest.

Between Haines Junction and the Alaska border we finally ran into truly bad road. This section of the highway is built on permafrost, and apparently roads built on permafrost don’t hold their flatness very well. We would be driving along on normal pavement, and then suddenly there would be a stretch of highway with humps and dips in it, like the pavement was an unmade bed or someone had put in unmarked speed bumps.  Hitting one of these wavy sections at any speed would send everything flying in the RV, so I learned to always be looking as far ahead on the road as possible, and to slow down to about 15 mph or less to navigate the rough parts.  Even with keeping a careful lookout, we had a few carnival ride experiences when we hit long slow humps that were hard to spot.

After two days of driving we finally got to the Anchorage area. After weeks weeks in the wilderness and small towns, it was like hitting the rewind button and suddenly being returned to the lower 48. Out of nowhere there were four lane highways, exit ramps, fast food restaurants, traffic lights, multiple radio stations, cell service, traffic, and big box stores.  The backcountry parts of northern Canada and Alaska are in many ways unchanged from the 1940s or 50s, so coming into Anchorage felt almost like time travel.

After a provisioning and pizza run to Costco, we spent a couple days at the pleasant Eagle River Campground a few minutes north of Anchorage. While in the Anchorage area we stumbled upon the Bear Paw Festival in Eagle River, which Big Kid really enjoyed, and spent a day walking some of the 122 miles of trails in Anchorage. The trail system took us to a playground every mile or so, so the kids had a great time with that too.

Our next stop was the Williwaw Campground in the Portage Valley, about an hour south of Anchorage. The main reason for stopping there was to visit the nearby town of Whittier. Whittier is a strange place.  It consists of a container port, a railroad station, a marina, and a few shops for tourists.  Most of the 177 residents live in a single 14 story high rise, and there is an even bigger abandoned high rise a short distance away.  The only way to reach the town by road is to go through a 2.5 mile tunnel (one of the longest tunnels in the world), and since the tunnel is one lane and shared with a railroad, cars and trucks have to wait for a 15 minute window once each hour for each direction to use the tunnel.  During World War II the US Army wanted a deep water port linked to the Alaska Railroad that was closer than Seward, so they built a railroad tunnel through the mountains at the head to Portage Valley to reach the shores of Prince William Sound, where they built a port. During the Cold War the Army built a base at the port consisting of two large high rises instead of a collection of smaller buildings. They closed the base in 1960.  One high rise became private condos and the other was abandoned, but never torn down, apparently because disposing of the debris would be too expensive.

After a couple hours walking around Whittier we hiked up to Portage Pass from the Whittier side of the tunnel. From the pass we had amazing views of Portage Glacier down below us, and even saw some chunks of glacier crash into the Portage Lake.

After a few days in Portage Valley it was time to move on to Seward. We were looking forward to Seward because the city had a number of campgrounds right in town and right on the waterfront. I guess we envisioned the typical government campground, with lots of space and vegetation between each space, because we were a little taken aback when we pulled up and saw that the campgrounds were a series big gravel lots along the waterfront with RVs packed in like sardines. However, we lucked out and managed to snag the space at the end of a row so that we had views of the bay out our windows instead of views of our neighbor eight feet away.