  Skagway
to Anchorage is a journey of about 830 miles by road and requires us to
travel through Canada to get there. We travel from Skagway on Highway 2,
climbing up the road seen from train the previous day, through US customs
and then to summit at 3292 ft. A long downhill to the Canadian customs
at Fraser BC. There are high mountains and large lakes with fairly level
ground in between, but few trees.
 At
emerald lake disaster struck, the bus broke down; the accelerator was at
maximum all the time. This was found to be due to a broken spring, which
was quickly quickly fixed.
We travelled on to Robinson where a quick toilet stop made.  The
WPYR railroad here is overgrown & not used. Down to join Highway 1,
the ALCAN (Alaska-Canada Highway) east of Whitehorse. The Alcan is crossed
the WPYR at a point near Whitehorse, where it is very overgrown although
there are Railroad Crossing signs on the road.
From Whitehorse we travelled on to Haines Junction where we stopped at a visitor centre for toilets. An earthquake recorder here shows 1-2 tremors a day, mostly unfelt, but with one that could be felt about a week ago. Movements of the Pacific Plate sliding under the North American Plate cause slippage in a local fault. From Haines Junction the road gets worse, with many sections of road work’s (new road building) We are diverted off the road many times on to parallel dirt roads, lots of dust & bumps. The road works are about every 100 miles for up to 10 miles a time.  The
road is generally straight, going around large lakes, up 50 miles long.
The scenery,once interesting soon becomes boring, mile after mile of forest
to distant mountains. The ground is very sandy & dusty, with the appearance
of old mine dumps with trees on. The rocks tend to be light coloured sandstones.
After a rest stop at Destruction Bay, a small village on the side of a very long lake, the road gets worse, very bumpy, undulating tarmac with gravel sections. Many of the kids are sick (uncle I need vomit!) We finnaly arrived at Beaver Creek at 5.00pm, some 390 miles and over 8 hours (6.00pm local time – different time zone, we keep to Alaska Time as we will re-cross the border early tomorrow). We were booked in at a local hotel, it was expensive, but OK - we didn't have any choice, there weren't any host families to stay with.   Beaver
Creek (pop 140) is just a stopping point on the ALCAN, there are a couple
of hotels, a few shops and a garage.
The following morning we departed at 6.00am, passed through US customs at 6.30am back into Alaska. Breakfast was served on the bus (cereal bar & banana & water). The landscape is misty and heavily forested as far as the eye can see with smallish conifers 10-20 feet high & no more them 3 feet across, strange tall thin trees, obviously not managed, some dead, some fallen, some deformed by weird overgrowths at the top. The healthy looking ones are White Spruce and the dark diesesed looking ones are Black Spruce. Distant mountains can be seen to the north and south. We have break stops at Tok and Glennallen. After Glennallen we enter the mountains, high with snow covered tops. We are delayed once again at road works, road construction again, single file traffic up to 10 miles with a half hour plus wait to proceed.  We
passed long glacier on our leftand followed it until it ended, becoming
a wide river which we followed for many miles, the river sometimes 300
– 400m wide, full of glacial silt.
A stop was made at  Palmer before
arriving at Anchorage City Church at 4.40pm. This church is not in the
city; rather it’s a church for the city. Todays journey was 440 miles and
nearly 11 hours duration.
The long daylight hours are noticeable here; I was working on the laptop at my host family's kitchen table in the evening and I looked outside and saw that the light was fading. "Hmm... about 10.00pm", I thought – not so its 12.30am. It never gets fully dark here, sun sets about midnight and rises at 3.00am – eye shades for sleeping are a must! |