Alaska: the last frontier. These are the voyages of the kinship Ehmann. Its 11-year mission: to explore strange new US states; to seek out new life and old civilizations; to boldly go where nomads have gone before!
Alaska is big. If overlaid on the lower 48 with its eastern border aligned with Chicago, its panhandle reaches Savannah on the Atlantic Ocean and the Aleutian Islands stretch across the country to San Diego on the Pacific.
Alaska is rugged. Snowy mountains and plains of frozen tundra dominate the topography.
And Alaska has a lot of National Park sites, 23 at current count (in yellow on the map above), although some of these are doubled-up as National Parks and National Preserves. Of the 8 National Parks, 3 are accessible by car and the other 5 require planes and/or boats. For this trip I set my goal for the 8 National Parks, but only 4 of which we would visit as a family.
The day of my arrival in Fairbanks, the National Weather Service issued its first ever heat advisory for Alaska
Driving out of the airport, I found it strange that Alaska Route 2 South leads to the North Pole. But I like the Big Dipper on the signs. Fun fact: Alaska only has 12 numbered state highways.
On June 15th, Fairbanks, at 64.8 degrees north latitude, received about 22 hours of daylight and was a land of midnight sun
My flightseeing tour to the Arctic was a day trip but the outfitter required a 2-day travel window to allow for the weather. Smoke from forest fires cancelled the 1st day option, and so I had a bonus day in hot Fairbanks. This arch of moose antlers is the entrance to their riverside recreation trail.
Fairbanks is as far north as you can go in Alaska in a rental car. For trucks and off-road vehicles, there is a route north, the Dalton Highway, that crosses the Arctic Circle and ends at the oilfields of Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean.
South from Fairbanks the Alaska railroad runs through the gateway to Denali, then Anchorage, then the ports at Seward and Whittier where the cruise ships dock. About 90% of the people we encountered were cruisers, and strangely many of them were from Pennsylvania.
At the air-conditioned Alaska Public Lands Information Center, I picked up brochures for all of the park sites.
At the University of Alaska Fairbanks I visited The Museum of the North. The UAF mascot is the Inupiaq word for polar bear, Nanook. The Nanooks are certainly a better mascot than the "Big Green" of Dartmouth, and I think we know who would come out on top if Nanook faced off in a brawl against Keggy the Keg.
Recently Heather and I were stymied by a New York Times Spelling Bee puzzle whose pangram was the word potlatch. Now I know that it is not a kitchen device, but a ceremony of Indigenous people. And maybe it is related to the American tradition of a potluck.
There's an uncapitalized word that you'll never see again - amphiberingian - and I'd wager even the geekiest Scrabble geeks have never used it. Coming up later, a four-letter word that you've never heard of.
Wait, in addition to the Bible Belt, there's a Bison Belt? Yes and apparently over in Eurasia the bison were also hunted nearly to extinction in the 1800s and now their subspecies exists only in small pockets that were reintroduced from captivity.
Speaking of Pleistocene megafauna, this tableau depicts all the large animals found in the fossil record of Alaska, including the wooly mammoth, its smaller cousin the mastodon, the short-faced bear, the dire wolf, the American lion, the American camel, and the saber-toothed tiger.
Rewinding the geologic clock, you can't read it in the legends, but the formation of Alaska can be summarized as small terranes smashing in from the west and then getting further crushed from more land masses riding up from the south. It's no wonder the coastline is ringed with mountains and volcanoes.
Now this is a throne worthy of the Wardens of the North
and these dolls are made entirely out of animal parts
Enough history lessons! To access Gates of the Arctic and Kobuk Valley several companies offer flightseeing tours in small bush planes. I chose Golden Eagle Outfitters and this is their 4-seater Cessna, which I shared with a couple from Seattle chasing the 63 National Parks.
Flying low out of Fairbanks on our way north, we passed the mighty Yukon River and its wide empty valley
Thunderstorms the day before ignited forest fires in the Brooks Range foothills. By the time of our return flight in the afternoon, these fires had significantly clouded the air
Gates of the Arctic is mostly mountains of the Brooks Range. This is the tallest peak, Mt. Igikpak, and at 8,276 it is more than 10,000 feet lower than Denali, but no less forbidding. Our pilot said that once he dropped off a crew of guys who planned to summit Igikpak as part of their plans to climb the highest peak in every National Park. Now that is cray-cray.
Where do you land a plane in a park full of mountains? In a river valley? No, in a river! Check out the video at the end.
Here we are, at 67.3 degrees north, above the Arctic Circle in Gates of the Arctic. However, being surrounded by an uncrossable rushing river, my gate to the Arctic was closed. After touchdown, the pilot admitted that this was his first landing of the year on this gravel bar in the middle of the Ambler River. Then he proceeded to pace off the distance of the "runway" to ensure that there was enough length to take off. And there was.
Next stop, Kobuk Valley, which although contiguous with Gates, is completely different with several large fields of sand dunes - sorry, Great Sand Dunes.
Here's the visitor center
Snow on the beach, weird but f-ing beautiful
After 30 min wandering the dunes, we hopped in the Cessna for the 150-min flight back to Fairbanks. Then I took a flight to Anchorage and crashed in the hotel to prepare for my next adventure: Katmai.
Katmai is more popular than the Arctic Parks and I flew with Katmai Air in a 12-seater fixed-wing plane. Sensing my growing co-piloting skills, they positioned me up front for our flight to King Salmon
More gorgeous scenery ensued. Mt. Douglas on the coastal border of Katmai NP has an active caldera at its summit.
From King Salmon we board a floatplane, an ever-reliable 1960s-era DeHavilland Otter, for the quick hop to Neknak Lake
Katmai has a lodge and visitor center at Brooks Camp
Before venturing out, all visitors are required to attend Bear School, a 15-minute training on how to behave safely around coastal brown bears. This came in handy later in my travels.
About 20 of us arrived at Brooks Camp with hopes of seeing bears. Bear activity is completely dependent on the salmon running upstream, which doesn't get going until July. For safety in numbers on the trails, I paired up with a couple from Alabama, who instead of heading to lunch with everyone else, decided to hike out to the falls viewing platform.
This is the famous Brooks Falls. NPS allows a live webstream, which if you pull it up in the summer, almost always has bears. Later in the year the park posts a "Fat Bear" competition where voters select their favorite fat boys en route to an October crowning on Fat Bear Tuesday.
Then a bear hopped in the river! Check out the videos as it snorkeled around attempting to land a salmon. This ended up being the only bear of the day at the Falls.
Like my yard at home, bunnies (actually snowshoe hares) were everywhere around Katmai, but we felt lucky to see the main attraction.
After returning to Anchorage, I flew to Sitka in the panhandle. Sitka commemorates the Tlingit peoples and the Russian settlements in Alaska. Drawn by the trade of sea otter pelts, Russians settled in Alaska in the 1700s and eventually chose Sitka as the administrative center for their far-flung outposts in North America. See that they even had a farm in Northern California!
The Russian bishop's house is one of only a handful of remaining Russian-era buildings
The Tlingit people believed that people were born into 1 of 2 moieties, eagle or raven, and for marriage one had to find a partner of the opposite moiety.
Which one are you?
From Sitka I flew to Juneau to reunite with the family, and after touring with them for a week, on my last day I dumped them to fly from Anchorage to Port Alsworth, the gateway to Lake Clark NP.
Port Alsworth is a strange place. On one side of town the Alsworth family run a fishing lodge and fly Lake Clark visitors like me into their private airstrip. On the other side of town, a Christian charity called Samaritan's Purse owns another runway with big planes and hangars. They have a large complex of buildings and were bulldozing the forests to create what looks like an entire new town. Adjacent to the Samaritan dining hall sits the Lake Clark VC.
Entering the actual park requires a hike, and there is only one trail to take
I was hiking on my own, but the good people at the Alsworth lodge loaned me bear spray
At Tanalian Falls I was reminded of the gold mining shows on Discovery. On Gold Rush - Whitewater they would always say that at the bottom of the waterfall could be a plunge pool that contains life-changing amounts of gold!
On the trail back, I rounded a bend and found 2 bears just ahead of me! Remembering my lessons from Bear School, I did not run. First I pulled the safety off of the bear spray and took aim. Next I tried to assess if these were cubs without mama bear - bad - or something else. Then one rose up on its hind legs and sniffed at me. If they were to charge, it would likely be a feint, in which case I was to stand my ground and "look big". Or they could decide that this smelly human was not worth molesting and run off, which is what happened. And then I pulled out my phone to document the sighting. But do you know what's scarier than encountering 2 bears on the trail? Watching them bound ahead and then having to march forward not knowing if they are right there in the underbrush waiting for you. When I reached the Alsworth camp I decided I'd had enough fun for one day and read "Into the Wild" for the rest of the afternoon. Then it was back to Anchorage and onto our red eye flight home to Lexington.
With the 15 NPS sites in Alaska on this trip, my personal tally has reached 408 of the 433 total. With 8 Alaska National Parks in the rearview mirror, only 2 more of the 63 remain. One is in American Samoa, and I am at peace never reaching that one. The other is out west in a state that we've visited 4 times as a family, but the mountains got in the way of an easy side trip to visit it. I have plans later in the summer to rectify that situation and take one last road trip to the Parks.
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