Denali Day 2

The first 15 miles of the park are paved and are accessible in private vehicles. After that you need to get a bus ticket to get further into the park. There is only one road into a park about the size of the state of Massachusetts. There are two types of buses going into the park and they each have various stopping and turn around points. We elected to take the non-narrated bus to the Eielson Visitor center at mile 66 on the park road, which is about a four hour trip each way. Even though it wasn't actually a tour bus, our driver, Anna, was super informative and talked a bit about the different animals and answered questions people had throughout the trip. 

 

You can choose to get on and off the bus whenever you want if you want to hike around for a bit in the middle of the wilderness. In order to get back on, you just need to flag down any other bus going in the right direction. We didn’t end up doing that this time but we want to come back sometime and do a multi-day back country backpacking trip. We’ll just need to come back without the kids. The scenery was absolutely stunning the whole time. 

 

 

The buses are a great way to see wildlife. Everyone on the bus is supposed to call out if you see anything worth stopping for and the driver will stop. And boy did we see wildlife! 

We saw two groups of moose: 

  

Moose are the biggest animal in Denali, with an adult bull moose weighing up to 1,600 pounds. Moose eat mostly willow and survive the winter by slowing down their metabolism to a crawl. Willow are much shorter here and quite easily accessible to the moose. 

We saw 15 different bears! Several alone, but several mothers with their cubs: 

The coolest bear encounter we had was the last one. As we were leaving one of the rest stops there was a mother bear and her cub hanging out right next to the bridge that we were driving over. They were incredibly close to the bus so we got a really great view. 

Grizzly bears are pretty amazing because they will just about anything from berries and roots to moose. The key to meeting a grizzly bear in the park is not to run! Running will kick in their predator instincts for a chase. Instead, hold your ground. Most of the time that a wild bear charges, it is bluffing to size you up, and if you run, it will run you down.

We saw quite a few caribou on our trip. Including several with some really big racks. 

   

Both male and female caribou have antlers and they loose them every winter. The males generally loose them after they finish fighting for the females in the fall, but the pregnant female will keep them all winter until her calves are born. She will use her antlers to fend off the males who might try to take the her food from them. Caribou eat a lichen almost exclusively and they are big enough that they need about two garbage backs worth of the that lichen every day in the spring, summer, and fall. 

When the new antlers are coming in they are covered in a furry skin called velvet while they harden. We were lucky enough to be here in the season that they shed their velvet and got to see one caribou as the velvet was shedding. 

We also saw a few packs of Dall Sheep. These guys were always far away, up on a hillside, so it was hard to get a great picture. 

 

Dall sheep are actually the reason Denali National Park exists. The sheep are a nice white color and stand out amazingly well against the rocks in the summer. Overhunting of these sheep lead people to petition Washington D.C. to protect the wildlife of the area, which led to the initial declaration of the park as a protected area. 

Possibly our most exciting animal sighting was a lynx. On our way back she ran across the road right in front of the bus. Usually lynx and skittish and stay away from the road but this one was curious and stood in the bushes next to the road checking us out for quite a while. We didn’t get very good pictures of her, just enough to prove we saw her. 

 

Kathleen also saw two foxes but was two slow calling them out for the driver to stop. He was already driving on for a bear spotting ahead so we’re not sure that he would have stopped anyway. The two foxes were in a stream bed and only about 40 feet away from the bus but there were only visible for about 5 seconds because of the way the banks hid them in either direction. 

Eielson is know for its great views of the mountain itself, however the weather around the mountain is really hard to predict. Unfortunately we didn’t get a great view, but the landscape was amazing none the less. 

 

Including the time we spent at the Eielson visitor center we were gone for about 10 hours and were exhausted from all of the excitement. But it was a very very successful day. Well worth the cost of the bus. Needless to say, Aiden was super excited to have us back after a long day alone with Declan.

Denali, Days 0 and 1

We drove down towards Denali National Park after leaving Fairbanks. The drive down was amazing. Alaska has some massive mountain ranges but it is surprisingly flat in-between in many places. If you get up onto even a small ridge you can often for many miles giving some stunning views. 

We arrived at the park fairly late on Sunday night, so not much was open to explore. All of the RV accessible campsites were full through at least Wednesday so we ended up leaving the park and staying at a pull out about 2 miles North of the park entrance. 

On Monday morning we headed back into the park. We wanted to go on a quick ranger lead hike that left from the visitor center. It was about 2 hours and was a pleasant stroll. 

 

They also have day long “Discovery Hikes” that are off trail backcountry hikes that rangers lead that are more strenuous. We didn’t end up taking one of those this time, but it sounds like a lot of fun and is on our list if we ever come back. The main bummer of hiking in National Parks this trip is that Aiden isn’t allowed on most trails. She is allowed on a bike path right next to the road, and the road, but that is it. Instead of doing a backcountry hike we did take a bus into the park (also without Aiden), for more information on that check out the Day 2 post. 

After the ranger walk we went back to the camper for lunch and then checked out the visitor center. Denali has a really nice visitor center with a ton of information. We spent several hours in there. 

The other activity that we did on Monday was the sled dog demonstration. Denali is the only national park that has a working sled dog team. They are used to patrol the park in the winter time. At one point they tried switching the dogs out for tractors and snow machines but they kept breaking down in the 20 below and colder climate. 

We started by getting to walk around and look at all of the dogs. There were several dogs that we were able to get up close and meet. 

 

They have one puppy, Jewel, who recently joined the pack from another Kennel in the area. She was adorable. 

There were also two rooms with more information about the dogs, their history and their role in the park. We learned a lot. 

Three times a day they do a sled demo in which a ranger talks about the dogs for a little bit and then they harness up four dogs and attach them to the summer sled. It was pretty fun to see how excited the dogs all get to get the chance to get out and pull the sled. The ones that didn’t get picked seemed so jealous of the ones who did. 

After the dog demonstration we had a casual evening hanging out near the mercantile at one of the campgrounds. We did a load of laundry, used their internet and started to make a dent in our thank you notes. We were super excited to get deeper into the park on Tuesday. 

Chena Hot Springs

We headed out toward Prudhoe bay Friday night but we weren’t fully committed to making it all the way up there. We had heard very mixed reviews about wether the trip was actually worthwhile, and there was reports of snow on the pass. Unfortunately as we started out the highway in that direction, the RV started to making a strange new noise. When pushing down past a certain point on the throttle, it sounded like the engine was over-revving, or that there was a lot of air rushing around. It was most notable when the engine shifted down a gear to try to pick up speed. The noise was strangely inconsistent and even went away entirely from time to time. We didn't want to risk being on the Dalton highway with this issue but we really didn’t want to go back to our Walmart in Fairbanks, so we decided to head up the Chena Hot Springs, only 50 miles from Fairbanks. 

One of our websites said that there was a free campsite up the road to the hotsprings but it must have been out of date. So we ended up driving all the way to the end of the road at the hotsprings and decided to splurge and pay for camping for the first time on our trip. It was $20 for a dry camp spot, which seemed like a lot but it was a nice place and we knew we wanted to spend the next day exploring the hot springs. 

The hot springs sell a day pass for $15 a person that lets you come and go as many times as you want. They also have showers :) We were going to get up at 6:45 to get in right when they opened but ended up staying in bed until 7:45. We were still some of the first people in pool and it was great. 

There is an indoor pool and two hot tubs that were basically shallow, hotel pool quality. Not great. But outside there was another hot tub we didn’t even look at, and a giant rock pool fed by the hot spring. It was mostly about 4-5 feet deep and fairly large. In one place there was a nice rain machine that sprinkled your upper body with cold water. In one corner there was a powerful jet of warm water that gave a great back massage. We stayed in for a couple a couple of hours before taking off to explore for the day. 

Chena had a million things to do, 95% of which you had to pay for. But there were mountain bike rentals, horse back riding, flight seeing, an ice museum, dog cart/sled rides (depending on the season), a so much more. We elected to not spend any more money and check out one of the many hiking trails. Kathleen will probably end up posting another post about all the plants on the hike because she was hard core geeking out. But it was a beautiful hike. A little muddy at times though… 

 

After our hike we really wanted to check out the dog kennels. They have tours of the kennels for $20 but there is also a visitor center so we were just going to go down and look around. It was cool, but the worker kinda ignored us, which felt a little weird. We both had a lot of questions and the visitor center really wasn’t set up to just be able to look around ourselves. But we did get to see the dogs and were surprised yet again by the wide variety.

There were signs posted all around the resort to ask about Aspen, the 10 year old sled dog who was looking for a new home. We were sorely tempted… We found him sitting on his dog house down at the kennels and were hoping that someone around the kennels would come talk to us about him but no one did. He looked like a sweet old guy, but it is probably better for Declan that we didn’t introduce another member into our family trip. Yet. 

After looking at the dogs we went back into the hot springs. Pounding down water the whole time. It was nice to get to shower off the mud and sweat from the hike and the hot water felt great on our tired bodies. 

We didn’t stay as long the second time because we got hungry and wanted to save our energy to come back one last time as it was finally getting dark, so we made dinner and took a nap. The hot springs are open until 11:45pm year round. We hadn’t actually seen darkness yet in Alaska because we are usually head to bed at around 10 and even though the sun has set it is far from dark. But we went back to the hot springs around 10 last night and enjoyed watching it get slowly darker. The hot springs were really nice as the air temperature outside started to plummet. There was tons of steam rising off of the pool and there were fun color changing lights shining into the steam for a party vibe. Even though it was the most crowded at night, it was also the most fun. We both agree that we want to try to come back to the hot springs when we come up to volunteer at the Yukon Quest in November. 

We treated yesterday as a sort of Honeymoon day, allowing ourselves to splurge on hot spring time, not thinking about driving or the weird noise that our RV is making (too much) and just being, which really is the hope of the trip. It was really really nice. We even opened the “Honeymoon” card from Kathleen’s Aunt Julie, thanks for your words of wisdom Aunt Julie. 

Now we are back at the Subway in our Walmart in Fairbanks using the internet. None of the car places are open again today because it’s Sunday and some googling leads us to believe that we have a vacuum hose issue which shouldn’t be too severe. On the drive back it acted up at first but stopped after the first 10 miles. We're thinking it may be worse when wet? We’re going to head down to Denali now and then hopefully get the RV looked at down in Anchorage. 

Fairbanks

We arrived in Fairbanks on Tuesday afternoon. After our tire incident (see the travel update post) we learned that we needed a new innie for the drivers side as well, and it was getting to be about time for an oil change as well. So we had a couple of “chores” to do while we were here, but we were also pretty excited to see Fairbanks. 

We started by looking for a place to stay, we were thinking we would be willing to actually pay for a camp site in order to get showers and maybe some good wifi, but we really couldn’t find anywhere that was a reasonable price. But while exploring we came across a place called Pioneer Park. It was by far the weirdest place that either of us had ever been. 

It had the vibe of a run down amusement park. But it’s just a city park? It’s not very big but you can pay $2 to take a ride on a little train twice around the park while someone tells you about it. There was a carousel, complete with carousel music, that was going around and around with no one on it. Maybe it was just because of the time? Or season? Unclear. It did have some pretty cool things though. It has some old cabins moved in from around town that housed little museums and shops. They also had the train car that Warren Harding rode to Alaska when he was the first sitting president to visit the territory. The only place at the park that had a substantial number of people was the Salmon Bake which is an all you can eat dinner for $36 per person that they bus tourists into from the cruise lines. It smelled really good, but we decided that wasn’t for us. (We bought sausages, instant potatoes and lettuce for a salad at Fred Myer instead and had an awesome meal for ~$4.50 each). 

Because we couldn’t find anywhere that seemed worth it to stay we ended up spending our first night of the trip in the Walmart parking lot. Our need for a shower was getting real though,  and Walmart is not an appropriate place for a bucket bath, so we figured out that we could get showers at the local laundromat for $4.50. They felt amazing! 

In full Kathleen Fashion, Kathleen decided to wear as much duck gear as possible knowing that women’s basketball player Ruthy Hebard is from Fairbanks. Kathleen (was mostly kidding) hoping to finding someone who knew Ruthy. Honestly, generally Kathleen wears plenty of duck gear while traveling because you just never know who you might meet. Also we don’t have that many clothing options. However, the plan worked! Kathleen had to walk out of the laundromat to go get her towel before taking a shower, and met Karen. Somehow, between the duck stickers on the RV (including tire cover), the duck basketball shorts, duck sweatshirt and duck bag Karen identified that we were from Oregon. She said that she also follows Oregon women’s basketball and got her picture taken with Sabrina when they played up here last year. She also said she really wants to make the trip to Eugene to watch a home game. So we chatted for a bit about that and ended up exchanging emails and becoming Facebook friends. She has also given us a lot of Fairbanks recommendations, so we hope we can be half as useful if she makes it down to Eugene. 

With showers taken care of, we went to get coffee/breakfast at Alaskan Coffee Company. They had great coffee and a cute atmosphere but give you a strange one hour internet code. So we didn’t end up staying their as long as we had wanted to to work on our computer things. I guess that’s their purpose with the internet codes. 

Ready to start our day we headed to Jiffy Lube to get the oil change taken care of. Everyone here is so friendly and we had great discussions with three groups of people in the waiting room. In order to have work done on the RV we have to get the kids out so we also looks strange sitting in the lobby of places with our dog on one leash and our cat on another. We always bring Declan’s backpack in but he’d rather be out and exploring on his leash, although he gets a bit nervous in all of these establishments. 

It turned out that by waiting at this Jiffy Lube we were in the right place at the right time. The O’Rielly auto parts next door was having a customer appreciation day BBQ with free burgers, hot dogs, chili, chips and soda. It was great. 

Our next order of business, getting a new tire, turned into more of an ordeal that we had hoped… the first tire place we went to didn’t have the correct sized tire and sent us across town to another place. That place was checking our trend and realized that several of our tires had some strange wear, and we had already thought we wanted to get our alignment checked. After further inspection the front axle, there was a lot of movement on the tire rod where the pitman arm and idler arm connect to the center rod of the steering assembly. We were worried we’d have to replace both the pitman and idler arms, which would cost us around $800. We were hesitant to do this at first but after inspecting the tire wear on the front tires, which are no more than 2 years old, we thought it would be best to do the fix the next day. 

With another appointment made for Thursday we went off to see more of downtown Fairbanks. There is a really great visitor center called the Morris Thompson Cultural & Visitors Center. It’s basically a museum with several exhibits about the area and a theatre playing various videos on the hour. We watched a really neat video about polar bears in northern Alaska. They also have a super cool Antler Arch.

Thursdays tire appointment revealed that the part that they had thought was the problem wasn’t the problem. Good news- it wasn’t actually the pitman and idler arm, but the center rod that has the joints. This means we were looking at a $250 bill instead of one over $800. Bad news - the nearest part was in Anchorage and needed to be shipped in. So after spending two more hours at the tire place we had to make yet an other appointment to come back Friday. 

After leaving the tire place with another day to spend exploring Fairbanks we went to Creamer’s Dairy wild water fowl refuge. There were some great hikes around there and we got see a ton of cranes, ducks and geese. 

 

The other thing we knew we wanted to do before leaving Fairbanks was to check out the head quarters of the Yukon Quest. The Yukon Quest is similar to the Iditarod, a 1,000 mile dog sled race. This one alternates the start and finish between Fairbanks, Alaska and White Horse, Yukon Territory. We had heard from some people working at Pioneer Park that there were possibly some volunteer opportunities so we went to check out the head quarters. They had lots of information about the race, as well as a junior musher with two of her dogs to answer any questions. It was really cool and we are so down to come back up in February to volunteer at the race. 

A couple of things surprised me about the sled dogs. The first was how small they are - they are all between 35 and 60 pounds, averaging about 45 pounds. However they each eat the equivalent of 75 big macs worth of calories everyday during the race. I was also expecting them to look more like huskies but they are much more mixed and bred for specific qualities from a variety of breeds. 

With a lot more time to kill and out of ideas of things to do in the area we went to Lavelle’s tap house to get some computer work down. Because it was almost empty there in the early afternoon the had no problem with us hanging out on the patio using their internet. Which was the best internet that we have had yet. They also had a ton on tap including two of our favorite cider’s and several Oregon beers. But we elected to try local things that we hadn’t had before. 

As much as we didn’t want to go back to Walmart for the third straight night, we couldn’t come up with a better idea. 

For our Friday appointment at Alyeska tires we had to wait for them to call us and tell us they had received the part. We thought about going back to Alaskan Coffee Roasters but we needed a charge and they were very expensive, so we decided to try somewhere else. Andreas found another cafe called McCafferty's, A Coffee House, Etc. Kathleen got the best Chai she had ever had and we both had bagels for about half the price of the day before. The atmosphere was cute and we didn’t feel rushed out. They didn’t have wifi, but we sat and did crosswords. It was exactly what we needed. And it was good that we had picked it because it took Alyeska longer than we thought to call us. 

But we did eventually get the part replaced and are finally ready to leave Fairbanks. We’re planning on heading North towards Prudhoe bay. We’ve heard they might be expecting snow on the pass soon so we probably won’t go all the way but we wanted to see a little bit of what’s up there. 

This turned into a massively long post. Lots of people told us we needed to blog but we’re not really sure what that is supposed to look like. If you have comments and suggestions PLEASE let us know. We constantly feel like we’re oversharing and that no one other than our parents would want to read these posts. We’re definitely hoping that our writing gets better and that posting gets easier over the year but if you have suggestions they are very welcome. 

Travel Update 2

After flushing our water in New Hazelton on Friday, we eventually got back on our way. We drove until it got late and we eventually settled at a pullout on Eddontenajon Lake, just south of Iskut, BC. It was a gorgeous still lake. We met a couple there from Belgium who had been traveling for eight months, through Mexico, Guatemala, and now Canada. It was a really peaceful place to stay for the night.

We drove 317 miles that day.


On Saturday we stopped for breakfast at a Cafe in Iskut, but the cafe wasn't actually open. Just the convince store which we thought was the cafe. It was confusing. They didn’t know the password for the WiFi that was advertised on the side of the building, which was half of why we stopped but at that point we were committed. We also got a kick out of the fact that the convenience store was playing a country radio station from Spokane, WA over the internet.


As we continued, we were excited to make the transition from Highway 37 to the Alaskan Highway. Unfortunately, about 10 km from the junction, we heard a pop and pulled over. We had blown our first tire! The outside tire on the rear driver side was completely worn down and had split. We decided we could make it to the junction on the bad tire. When we got there we ended up just give GoodSam roadside a call. We had a jack and a spare but we didn't really trust our jack and weren't sure about how to jack up the back of the RV. They found someone in Watson Lake, YT for us to come out and put on our spare, which was nice because shortly after we got there it started raining. We got our tire changed out and followed the guy into Watson Lake for a new spare. On the drive to Watson Lake, the rain started turning to snow and we were thankful for the luck involved in where we blew the tire. Any further out and we may have needed to hitchhike our way to the closest payphone. We spent some time putzing around Watson Lake, which was a cute little town with one main street, trying to figure out why the tire blew and wondering about whether we’re causing uneven tire wear because of our load, or if we needed another tire to replace the one next to the one that blew out. Those two are the oldest tires we have from the receipts we received from Darlegne when we bought the vehicle. We decided to drive a little further to Moreley Lake, BC — the road dips back into BC for a bit going west. There we had to share a camp spot with a couple in a van who also had a dog that Aiden didn’t really get along with, so we did not get much of a chance to talk with them. We tallied 363 miles, including a 21 km detour each way to Watson Lake.


On Sunday, we set out to make Whitehorse, which we did pretty easily. Whitehorse is the capital of Yukon, with a population of about 25,000 people. It’s pretty clearly run on tourism and the RV parks have a pretty heavy influence on the politics there. Everywhere in town had a no camping or overnight parking sign. Even the Walmart enforced this no camping policy. The town itself was quite cute though. It’s right along the Yukon River and had a cute downtown area that reminded us a lot of Bend, OR. We ate at a bar called the Dirty Northern and were happy for some meaty burgers after a week of pasta or beans and rice. If it weren’t for the blistery winds, we may have payed up for a campground too, but we decided to push on. We bought a new jack in town and we wanted to replace the other tire that was getting low on tread the people in Watson Lake thought we would be fine until Fairbanks and all of the tire places were closed since it was Sunday. We settled at a pullout along the Alaskan Highway next to Marshall Creek. The long stop in Whitehorse means we only drive 227 miles.

Monday morning, as we were eating breakfast and getting ready for the day, an older gentleman, John, and his grandson showed up at the creek to try their luck at fishing the creek. Turns out John has a son who lives in Eugene, so we shared a short chat before they decided to try another fishing spot up the creek. He offered us a cup of coffee if we decided to come back that way and stop by their house just around the corner from where we stayed. Hopefully we'll get a chance to take him up on it. We headed out shortly after they did and made it to Haines Junction before our first stop. There we saw signs for the Village Bakery, which seemed like a quaint place to stop and have a bite to eat. We stopped and worked on the blog for a little bit before continuing on to Alaska! It was an adorable shop but unfortunately their internet was really poor.

We made the border in the early evening and got to add a new sticker to the RV map! At the border, we did unfortunately lose 5 oranges that we had bought at a Walmart along the road, but we did get a dog treat from the border guard, so Aiden came out on top on that one.

We drove a little bit further before stopping at the Tetlin National Wildlife Reserve campground for the night. It was another very peaceful and free site that had about 6 sites, a lake and a photography blind. It was a very peaceful night and a lovely morning walking to the blind and just watching the wildlife for about 20 minutes.

On Tuesday we woke up and drove another 277 miles to Fairbanks, which deserves a whole post of its own.