The Cassiar Highway is a wilderness road that runs from Watson Lake in the Yukon Territory south through the western part of British Columbia, and terminates at the Yellowhead Highway, a major east/west highway running from the seaport of Prince Rupert to Winnipeg, Manitoba. The Cassiar takes you through 450 miles of rugged mountains, lakes, rivers and streams, passing through some of the most beautiful scenery on the planet. The road is paved most of the way, although much of the pavement is in poor condition, and 50 or 60 miles was gravel. The map shows a couple of small towns [View Full Entry]

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At the northern end of the inside passage taken by cruise ships and the Alaska Marine Highway System (ferries) is a narrow fiord. On the west side of the fiord sits the town of Haines, and on the east side lays Skagway. These towns originated in the late 19th century as jumping-off places for those adventurous souls seeking their fortune in the numerous gold stampedes. From Skagway they made the arduous climb over the White Pass into the Yukon Territory and the Klondike Gold fields. From Haines the trail led to the Alaskan mining areas of Fairbanks and beyond. These [View Full Entry]

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Fairbanks is the northernmost population center in Alaska, with about 30,000 residents, and after 8,500 miles, it is where we will make the turn and begin our trip back home. It is a real frontier town with a colorful history of boom and bust cycles. It was founded in 1901 by Captain E. T. Burnette as a trading post. The site was selected because it was here that the water became too shallow for the riverboat to go any further. The next year gold was discovered nearby and the first boom was off and running. The latest boom was the construction [View Full Entry]

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At 6 million plus acres, Denali National Park is huge -- bigger than the state of Massachusetts, and the terrain is magnificent, with enormous mountains, big rivers and many lakes. There is only one road, which extends about 75 miles into the park. Except for a few miles near the park entrance the road is gravel, and personal vehicles are only allowed on the first 14 or 15 miles. The public can only travel the rest of the road on a limited number of excursion busses. This leaves a whole lot of wilderness for the animals to roam in their natural [View Full Entry]

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Homer is another of those beautiful coastal towns surrounded by glaciers and rugged mountains cliffs dropping into the sea. It lies on the southwest corner of the Kenai Peninsula at the mouth of Kachemak Bay. Its most prominent geographical feature is the Homer Spit, a stretch of sand, barely ¼ mile wide, that extends 5 miles out into the water, separating Kachemak Bay from Cook Inlet. “The Spit” is where all the action is. It is lined with restaurants, bars, RV campgrounds, fishing and tour boat charters, float plane charters and, of course, the inevitable souvenir shops, wher [View Full Entry]

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Seward is a fishing village located in the northwest corner of Resurrection Bay, an arm of the Pacific Ocean. It was established in 1793 by the Russians as a shipbuilding site, but came into its own as a port after Alaska was purchased by the US government (Remember "Seward's Folly" from high school?). When gold was found in northern Alaska, since shipping access to the mining areas on the Bering Sea coast were shut down by ice from October to June, a winter overland supply route became essential. This was accomplished by a 938 mile dogsled route from Seward to Nome, [View Full Entry]

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After leaving Turnagain Arm, we stayed two nights in the Williwaw Campground in the Chugach National Forest. It is a beautiful campground at the foot of a glacier, and has nice level paved sites, but no water or electrical hookups. We had just set up when we heard someone nearby banging pans and blowing a car horn. Turns out there was a black bear in a campsite about 100 yards from us. He created a lot of excitement, and the camp host said he comes around often, but runs away at the sight of humans. A little later we decided we [View Full Entry]

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About 30 miles before we reached Anchorage things began to change rapidly. Instead of country roads and trading posts we began to see expressways, shopping centers and subdivisions. Anchorage is a modern city of about 300,000 people and looks less like the last frontier and more like a city in the lower 48. We heard the joke here is that Anchorage is a great place to live -- you are in a modern city with lots of things to do, yet you are only 30 minutes from Alaska. Anchorage sits at the top of Cook Inlet and, like most of Alaska, [View Full Entry]

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Valdez sits in a narrow valley surrounded by rugged coastal mountains at the end of an arm of Prince William Sound. It was founded in the 1890’s and prospered as a landing spot and outfitter for gold prospectors heading to Fairbanks and the Klondike gold fields. Today it is a thriving port, commercial and sports fishing center, and the southern terminus of the Alaska Pipeline. It is a beautiful place, surrounded by snow-covered mountains with sheer cliffs dropping straight into the sea, but Valdez is best known for two catastrophic events. At 5:36PM on March 28, 1964 (Good Friday) [View Full Entry]

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All vehicle traffic into Alaska must go through Tok (rhymes with broke), the first town you come to on the Alaska Highway. Here we turned south, and soon the road improved and we saw our second moose. We overnighted in Glenallen, a tiny crossroads town about 100 miles or so from Valdez. We were very surprised to find we had cell phone service and could access the internet on the Verizon Air Card. That's better than we sometimes get in Fernandina Beach. As we neared Valdez we came upon our first glacier, Worthington Glacier. There was an observation area and parking [View Full Entry]

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