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Published: August 16th 2021
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Geese in the roadDay 6
296 miles
After cooking our own “hotel-delivered” breakfast again this morning, we packed up and headed out early for a long day on the road. Less than 2 blocks from the hotel we met a gaggle of geese sauntering across the road. Apparently, the wildlife around Anchorage like using the roads instead of the woods so much that, on the way out of Anchorage, we saw a “Moose Crash” sign on the main highway with a counter on it and luckily no moose have been hit since July 1
st. The landscape was strange – it was either totally flat or straight up mountains (and we mean straight, snow-capped, jagged mountains) – there were no in-between rolling hills. There are 4 main roads in Alaska that are considered interstates, but they’re certainly not the same as in the lower 48 (see pictures below). It was a nice day with blue skies and we were surrounded by lakes, glaciers, forests, and taiga all along the route. At one of the small crystal-clear, glassy lakes, Pam finally got to put her feet in the water and got her fix for this trip! Brr…she said it was
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Volcano - not! cold. Susan said the lake was “bucolic” but had to teach Pam and Claire the word since it wasn’t in their vocabulary (always the teacher). The Morgan Academy is apparently on a field trip!
We saw the large Matanuska Glacier from several angles. It was interesting how it came down through the valley and even split off near us. After that we went by Sheep Mountain and we think we saw tiny “sheep” dots at the top of the high, high mountain, but they were up so high that we couldn’t zoom in that much to make a picture.
Soon thereafter we made it to the “Hub of Alaska” – Glennallen – Really???? Oh, it was humming at the main crossroads. Every RV and car for hundreds of miles had to stop there for gas since nothing else is available ANYWHERE!!!! The problem, you may ask?? There was literally nothing else other than the gas station and the visitors center in the town and we all agreed that none of us would want to join the 483 people who call that home. The man at the visitors center was really nice and told us
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River along the route that there was “Significant Road Construction” between Glennallen and Paxton on the “interstate” to Delta Junction and that we might be delayed a little while. We were not surprised when we got stopped for road construction along the way and the man in the RV in front of us said it’ll be a 20 min wait. About 20 mins later, the pilot car came as expected. We’re used to following behind pilot cars going up the mountain through road construction, but this is not what we had in mind. We followed the pilot car for 20 miles on what used to be road but was now a combination of dirt, gravel, mud holes, clouds of dust and road equipment obstacles. Oh, did we mention, there was an additional 10 min stop. What should have taken us 20 mins, took us an hour and a half. Boy, were we glad to see the pavement again! Our joy didn’t last long because 10 miles down the road we had more road construction and it was even worse than before: no pilot car, a quarry RIGHT on the shoulder of the “road”, gravel so thick in some places it was like driving through
deep sand (Claire said it was like driving on the north end of the beach), and parts of it reminded us of the sled launches we used to make when we were little girls. This lasted for about 10 miles. Why in the world would you work on two HUGE spans of road at one time without paving any part of it? We wouldn’t call this “Significant Road Construction”, this was more like “Extreme Road Construction”. When we finally got out of the construction zone, we were back into the beautiful, “bucolic” areas and we took pictures of the mountains and several more glaciers. One of the cool things we did was actually touch the Trans-Alaska Pipeline along the way to our stop for the night at the Black Rapids Lodge. Can you imagine that we were able to just go up and touch the main pipeline?? There wasn’t any security or anything. Only in Alaska …
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