After a little over a week we were finally back on the road heading towards the Alcan border. We camped one night in another Yukon government campground in Snag Junction. We arrived late and left early the next day. On the way to the border we stopped at the “Welcome to Alaska” sign and took a picture. We don’t normally take those pictures but hey, we freaking DROVE all the way to Alaska.
The border crossing went smoothly. The officer was very friendly, only asked a few typical questions and sent us on our way without inspection. The road has gotten very rough before and after the crossing. There are lots of frost heaves and potholes. We have to drive slowly to avoid more problems. But that’s fine because even though the road isn’t great the scenery is gorgeous! After leaving Whitehorse we have seen 3 trucks pulled over changing tires.
Driving along the Tok Cutoff we camped at our first pullout. The highway noise wasn’t too bad as in the evening a car will pass here and there. The scenery was great looking out the window at the mountains. It was here that I randomly decided we would take a side trip to Valdez. Some of you may have heard of Valdez from the infamous Exxon oil spill in 1989. I decided to take the trip because the Milepost said the Richardson highway was beautiful and with the Fourth of July around the corner I figured we would try and avoid the crowd and go to Valdez instead of heading towards the popular Kenai peninsula.
On the day we were heading for Valdez the weather was awful. It was cloudy so we couldn’t even see the gorgeous mountains I read about. We did get to see the Alaskan pipeline in the distance which was cool. When we got to the top of the highway a cloud came through and totally occluded the visibility of the road. We could only see about 15 feet ahead of us. We pulled over to wait for it to pass. After about 10 minutes and watching cars haul butt past us we decided that we should keep going. After like 3 minutes we descended and were out of the cloud and everything was all good. We pass by a couple of waterfalls along the road.
We camped at Bear Paw RV park as we needed to do our weekly laundry and showers (haha we are gross hippies). It was $45 a night! But the showers were great and the laundry machines were the best I’ve ever used in my 3 years of traveling. The machines use coins which are $3 a piece and each machine takes one coin. The guy working said one dryer holds 2 loads. I though he was full of crap. The dryers were huge and looked like they came off the Enterprise. But man he was right, they worked awesome.
Enough about laundry, our campsite was great. Yet it was $45 a night but you get what you pay for. The day we arrived was so cloudy and gloomy but the next day the sun burned the clouds away and we could see that we were literally surrounded by snow capped mountains. We could walk to the harbor, walk to get food (which we didn’t do a lot of because the prices were exorbitant,$15 for a hamburger, $30 for pizza). The color of the water was a very pretty cool blue.
Tim’s wound is still healing so we couldn’t do any long hiking but we did walk around the city quite a bit. There is a nice park we walked to and walking the docks is always nice. They have some serious fishing boats here! We had to leave on July 3rd but we have plans for the fourth. See how we celebrated the nation’s birthday on the next article.
