Thursday, September 01, 2005
08/28/05 Sunday - Valdez to Tok
08/28/05 Sunday
Today we traveled from Valdez to Tok. Our travel partners were Norbert and Helen Boehm. They are from New York. They have a couple traveling with them named John and Peggy, I don’t even know their last name. We led for the first half of the trip and then we asked Norbert to lead after we stopped and ate. John was a good navigator and kept us informed what was coming next according to Mile Post.
We returned over Hwy 4, which we had traveled to get to Valdez from Glennalleln. We stopped again at Bridal Veil Falls and Mary took some more pictures. About three miles before we got to the intersection of the highways in Glennallen we came to a pullout with a good view of the Wrangell Mountains. These mountains were not even visible when we passed through this area on our way to Valdez, because of the clouds and fog. We went up on the bluff and saw the mountains in the distance. There were four mountains visible that were all taller than 12,000 feet; Mount Stanford is 16,237, Mount Drumm is 12,010, Mount Wrangell is 14,163 and Mount Blackburn is 16,390. We passed through Glennallen and turned toward Tok on Alaska Hwy 1 and we ran alongside this mountain range for about a hundred miles. They are huge and snow covered, and beautiful. The range is a part of the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, which is the second largest National Park in North America. This park along with Kluane National Park in Canada has been designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations. We live in an impressive country. You can’t realize the scope of it beauty, every day I see something that I think is the prettiest thing I have ever seen.
The road is not a thing of beauty. We went over a very rough road. There were patches of construction where the pavement was gone and it was loose gravel. People just will not slow down in these areas and they scatter rocks and gravel everywhere. We met a lady in a passenger car and she must have been going 70 MPH. A big rock flew up and hit the windshield in our Motor Home. It hit right at the bottom under the windshield wiper and it cracked the glass all the way to the top. We will have to have a new windshield.
Almost as bad were what they call ground swells. I guess the earth is pushed up by the permafrost and caused big humps in the road. They are not like potholes, because most of the time the payment is not broken, but it is more like jumping a curb with no sidewalk behind it. It moves stuff around in the cabinets if you hit those things going too fast,
Tonight is our last night in Alaska. We cross back over into the Yukon Territory tomorrow. We are back on the Alaskan Highway, which we started out on. When we came north we took the Klondike Loop just north of Whitehorse and went to Dawson City, on up over the Top of the World Highway and into Tok What we are doing now is going south on the strip of the Alcan which we missed because we took the Klondike
Loop.
Today we traveled from Valdez to Tok. Our travel partners were Norbert and Helen Boehm. They are from New York. They have a couple traveling with them named John and Peggy, I don’t even know their last name. We led for the first half of the trip and then we asked Norbert to lead after we stopped and ate. John was a good navigator and kept us informed what was coming next according to Mile Post.
We returned over Hwy 4, which we had traveled to get to Valdez from Glennalleln. We stopped again at Bridal Veil Falls and Mary took some more pictures. About three miles before we got to the intersection of the highways in Glennallen we came to a pullout with a good view of the Wrangell Mountains. These mountains were not even visible when we passed through this area on our way to Valdez, because of the clouds and fog. We went up on the bluff and saw the mountains in the distance. There were four mountains visible that were all taller than 12,000 feet; Mount Stanford is 16,237, Mount Drumm is 12,010, Mount Wrangell is 14,163 and Mount Blackburn is 16,390. We passed through Glennallen and turned toward Tok on Alaska Hwy 1 and we ran alongside this mountain range for about a hundred miles. They are huge and snow covered, and beautiful. The range is a part of the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, which is the second largest National Park in North America. This park along with Kluane National Park in Canada has been designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations. We live in an impressive country. You can’t realize the scope of it beauty, every day I see something that I think is the prettiest thing I have ever seen.
The road is not a thing of beauty. We went over a very rough road. There were patches of construction where the pavement was gone and it was loose gravel. People just will not slow down in these areas and they scatter rocks and gravel everywhere. We met a lady in a passenger car and she must have been going 70 MPH. A big rock flew up and hit the windshield in our Motor Home. It hit right at the bottom under the windshield wiper and it cracked the glass all the way to the top. We will have to have a new windshield.
Almost as bad were what they call ground swells. I guess the earth is pushed up by the permafrost and caused big humps in the road. They are not like potholes, because most of the time the payment is not broken, but it is more like jumping a curb with no sidewalk behind it. It moves stuff around in the cabinets if you hit those things going too fast,Tonight is our last night in Alaska. We cross back over into the Yukon Territory tomorrow. We are back on the Alaskan Highway, which we started out on. When we came north we took the Klondike Loop just north of Whitehorse and went to Dawson City, on up over the Top of the World Highway and into Tok What we are doing now is going south on the strip of the Alcan which we missed because we took the Klondike
Loop.
