Alaska - Page 2

Like I said on the prior page, on 4 September I took a trip up to the Arctic Circle. The company I went with, Northern Alaska Tour Company, offered a lot of options. I wound up going with a round-trip motorcoach tour instead of fly-up drive-back or fly-both-ways; it was cheaper, but more importantly, I couldn't think of what I would do with my time before or after a trip of this nature whcih only lasted part of the day.(An awful lot of my philosophy of vacations is summed up as "I would rather spend time than money". Not all of it. Just a lot.) And hey, even though it meant sixteen hours on an unpaved road covered in pebbles, I had a fantastic time. I feel kind of sorry for the poor sods from Pensacola, Florida and from West Virginia, though.

This is a photograph taken at our first stop on the unpaved section of the Dalton Highway. Said Highway, formerly called the North Slope Haul Road, runs from the community of Livengood, which is a bit north of Fairbanks, wayyyyyyyyy the heck north to Prudhoe Bay, where the oil is. The road was built as part of Alyeska Pipeline Service Company's big construction project- the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, to get the oil from Prudhoe down to Valdez on the south coast. As of September 2003 it was the only Federal highway in the United States with a majority of its length unpaved- the maintenance on a paved road in that kind of environment would devour any Federal highway funds to be gained by paving it over. If you want to know more about the highway, ask the Bureau of Land Management. They've got a page about it right here.

Side note: if y'all go to visit Alaska? Don't EVER try and take a rental car out on the Dalton. It will CHEW UP THE CAR'S BELLY and anyway most rental companies in that state have specific clauses in the contract forbidding you from using their vehicles on certain roads- the Dalton chiefest among them.

This is the vehicle in which I, my twenty-two companions, and our driver made the journey. Did I mention it's a two hundred thirty mile round trip? There's a bathroom in the motorcoach and it really isn't a bad one, but it's probably a better idea to wait for the bus to stop somewhere. We pulled over at a trading post in Joy, Alaska, which had outhouses; we also stopped at a truck stop just north of the Yukon River, which served the best damn salmon I have ever had in my ENTIRE LIFE. Over risotto, with a melon chutney, no less. There aren't a whole lot of services along the Dalton (by 'not a whole lot' I mean 'you poor, poor fool, you thought you'd find a place to stop and buy things?') so that truck stop gets a lot of business from truckers and tourists alike.

This is the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the only reason there's this bloody road in the first place. Eight hundred miles of pipeline pumping oil at such high pressure that the last dumb sod to successfully pierce the pipe (it involved emptying a full clip of armour-piercing bullets into the pipe) released a spray of oil that cut down the trees behind him. It is AMAZINGLY hard to damage this pipeline; they built it to withstand lots of pressure from inside and out, to shrug off bullets (lots of hunters in AK), and to withstand earthquakes. You can't quite make it out here but the pipe rests on little carts that slide from pillar to pillar if the ground shakes. And those antennae things on the support pylons? Cooling fins. The pylons are sunk in ground that's supposed to stay frozen all year 'round, but metal conducts heat, and that melts the permafrost. They have to use ammonia compounds to keep the ground frozen, along with those fins.

Ooooo, bridge! This is the Yukon River Bridge, the only one in the United States to cross the River. Since we're talking about a river that's 1980 miles long, the fact that there's only this bridge in the States (and only one bridge in Canada that crosses it, either) should give you an idea how important the bridge is. Did I mention the Pipeline runs along the bridge? Yeah. According to our tour guide, if you stop on the bridge at any point you'll get a VERY fast visit from unhappy men with firearms, and if you stray too near to the side of the bridge with the pipeline on it (whether on foot or in a vehicle), you'll get yelled at by the loudest PA system in the state- and then the men with the guns will come to convince you to move away. It's not a good idea to fool with the Yukon River Bridge. Neither Alyeska Corporation nor the US Federal Government will like you if you try.

The bridge, by the way, is just under half a mile long. It's at mile marker 56 on the Dalton.

Oh, right, the actual river. Um. Didn't want to use my panoramic here as I was saving that for Denali. So, er, here's me in front of a big bloody river.

It's very easy to get bored on long transportation rides, at least if you're me. On the flight up to Alaska I finished knitting a mitten for a friend and still had several hours to go, so I started on a hat. That was on 1 September. By the time we reached the Arctic Circle on 4 September, around noon, I'd finished the hat.

How better to test knitwear than to proudly announce that it kept you warm in the Alaskan arctic?

Yep. The tour company driver actually threw down a mat with a dotted line on it once he checked to make sure he was aligned with the Circle proper. (For the record, the Arctic Circle is the furthest south point on the face of the planet where the Sun does not rise at winter solstice and does not set at summer solstice. It's the imaginary line at 66 1/2°N latitude. Most of Alaska does, in fact, have daylight in winter and night in summer. Just not much.) That's me on the left, in the hat I finished, along with mittens I knitted in August specifically to wear in Alaska. Also a pair of knitted socks but you can't see those.

Right, yes, pathetic needle geek, moving on...

The famous Molson's Rant includes the line "I don't know Jimmy, Sally, or Suzy from Canada, although I'm certain they're really, really nice." This was, as far as I can tell, a slap at Americans who assume all Canadians are clustered together along the border for warmth and therefore all know each other.

On this trip, I wore a baseball cap I bought on eBay; it's a licensed Royal Canadian Mounted Police item, and says 'RCMP-GRC - POLICE' across the front. At some point I fell to talking with a pair of older people (well, older than me, anyway) who seemed like quite nice folks capable of interesting conversation. Somewhere along the way the topic of where they lived came up, and I immediately apologised for wearing the hat. Why, you ask? Well, here's a photo of the couple in question.

They are Jim and Jane.

From Canada.

Really. Well, okay, somewhere in Ontario, I think near London, but still.

I kept meeting Canadians in Alaska, and I am not talking about Yukoners or visitors from BC, either. People from Toronto. People from Brampton. People from Quebec (Anglophones, thankfully- I don't speak French yet). They were all over the place, and many if not most had DRIVEN from BC. What really boggled me was that, even without the hat, I kept getting mistaken for one- not just by the Canadians, either, sometimes by people who were visiting from Japan. Very strange. But not as strange as meeting Jim, from Canada.

Anyway, we spent some time in the rest area with that official marker sign up there. We had cake. It was good. I took a picture of the 'no shooting under penalty of law' sign dented with bullet impacts, but it didn't develop well (stupid flash). I did get one other photograph that scanned nicely. Behold: Arctic Circle mushrooms. These were growing among the rocks just at the edge of the rest area. So were low-bush blueberries, but those didn't scan as well. They were tasty, though. A bit tart for my tastes, but not bad.

Mmm, wild parking lot food.

No one tried to eat the mushrooms.

On the way back we pulled over and stopped at a patch of tundra near a formation called Finger Rock. I tried to get a photograph of this formation, but it was too far in the distance to show up in the picture to the right, and our tour guide said it was much farther away than it looked. Content yourself with the knowledge that it is a bunch of rocks that looks not unlike a pointing hand, and that bush pilots in pre-instrument days used it as a marker because it points straight back towards Fairbanks.

This is what silence looks like.

When we got out of the motorcoach I noticed something: I couldn't hear any sounds made by humans, other than my companions' feet and voices. There were no planes within hearing range, and no cars or trucks on the Dalton. There weren't animals actively making noise anywhere nearby, either. All that could be heard, when the other humans went quiet, was the wind; and that died down after a bit. I stood, and I listened, and I heard.

I don't think you can find true silence- not noise damped out of existence, silence- anywhere else in the United States.

(Side note: I have a much larger, more detailed copy of this image for use as wallpaper. Let me know if you'd like a copy and I'll see what I can do.)

Among the rocks in the place of silence. To give you a sense of scale about the rocks, look really closely. See that blue and pinkish speck between the round rock and the upstanding rock? That's me. I'm 175 cm tall.

Everything in Alaska is big. Texas has NOTHIN' on these guys.

Eventually, of course, we headed back. This photograph is of one of the hills along the Dalton that make me wonder how much they had to pay the truckers to drive that road at all. Remember, it's unpaved. And it's in Alaska. And they don't stop pumping oil just because it's winter, oh no. So that means trucks have to deal with this patch all year round.

Do not mess with the Dalton. It will eat you alive.

That having been said, I gt two pictures of road signs from the Dalton. Wish I had one of the sign that said 'headlights on next 459 miles' but I couldn't get the camera out in time.

This is a sign from a section of the Dalton Highway that lay next to an airstrip. During the days when the Pipeline was being built, supplies had to be flown up to Prudhoe Bay, as the North Slope Haul Road wasn't done yet. The airstrip was a ways back from the road, but there were occasionally planes with wingspans so large their wings would protrude out over the road. Hence the need to close down the area when a plane came through. I doubt you'll see that in too many other places.

Dunno whether this is the creek's official name on the maps, or if it's just a creek that the Highway crosses that was never named, or what. But hey, No Name Creek. It's funny. I wish I'd got a photograph of Dry Creek (it's in the Denali area) to match.

Eventually we got back to Fairbanks somewhere around 11:30 PM. I got into the hostel and found a Japanese man sleeping in my bed. Couldn't find a spare bed anywhere, though I had a reservation, so I tried to sleep on the small sofa (the full size one had a sleeping German woman on it). When the hostel owner came in around four AM and saw me failing to sleep- it was a really small sofa- she placed me in the private room with the big cushy bed at no extra charge for the night. Lesson learned: when you leave a hostel for the day, if there is any chance at all your return will fall after 'lights out' (usually around 10 PM), pile as much of your stuff as you can on your bed. I did this the rest of the time I was in Billie's, and there were no further mishaps. It worked out okay, and that's the important thing.

More photos on the next page, which features my visit to Mary Shields' Alaskan Tails of the Trail. Dogs! Lots of dogs!