Tuesday July 24 thru Thursday July 26 Drive to Haines

Tuesday July 24 Drive to Haines

To get to Haines, it was going to be either 2 hard days to get there, or 3 easy day, so we chose 3 easy. Got up this morning and went for a run and after getting ready, we got out about 9:30. Our destination today was Tok Alaska, which was the first town we hit on our drive into Alaska.

The scenery on the drive along the Richardson Highway going north from Valdez was fantastic. We had gone thru it before, but it still was great. After 40 miles along this road, the road itself got pretty bad with construction places and the frost heaves. I mentioned this before, but these highways are built on perma-frost, where the ground up here is permanently frozen. This makes for roads that are hard to maintain. We are used to pot-holes in Indiana, but the problem here is the radical dips and hills that appear suddenly in the road. The highway dept. tries to mark these but they don't get them all as I believe they keep appearing as the weather gets warmer. There are some of these that we have to slow down to 20 mph to get thru.

After the Richardson Highway, we turned onto the Tok Cutoff Highway, which of course takes you to Tok. In Alaska, in addition to the highway number, they name their highways and in most cases they are referred to by their name, not the highway number. The Tok Cutoff Highway was by far the worse road that we have driven on, on this trip. The frost heaves were all along the path. There were places that we could only maintain 30 mph. The big part of the scenery along this part was the Wrangell Mountains off to the east. These mountains are not as tall as Denali, but just about as cool. Denali is 21k ft, the Wrangell Mountains are around 15k ft. Wrangell mountain is the tallest.

Arrived in Tok around 5:30 and stayed at the same campground (Tundra RV) that we did before. This is an older campground and was quite empty. We liked this place because there was so much room between campsites and tons of trees. On this time thru, we noticed that there were far fewer campers at all the campgrounds in the area.

Weather today was again, very clear and temps actually climbed near 80 degrees. This was the warmest we have been since getting close to the coast. We had to put shorts on, which is the first time in many weeks.

View along the Richardson Highway outside of Valdez

At a pull-off along the Richardson Highway - This must have been

a favorite spot for people to camp for the night, as they were stacked up

waiting to pull in.

Wrangell Mountains in the distance - This was part of Wrangell National

Park

Copper River

Wednesday July 25 Drive to Haines

Took it easy again this morning and went for a run before heading out around 9:00am. Our destination today was Haines Junction. To get to Haines, we have to get back into Canada, so we crossed the border into Canada about 90 miles from Haines. We are back on the Alaskan Highway today as well. This part of the trip, we are duplicating some of the highway that we took before. Travelling in Canada is fine except that the gas prices are much higher than in the states. We always fill up at our last stop before heading into Canada and try to last until we exit. However we still had to stop once at Haines Junction to get gas, before heading to Haines.

When we were passing the southern end of the Kluane lake, there was this huge dust storm that was blowing off the flats at the end of the lake. We had been seeing this for many miles, and when we got there, it was quite a cloud of sand and dust that we had to pass thru. This looked like a natural thing occurring (not a man-made event), as there were salt/sand flats at the end of the lake and the high winds off the mountains.

We stopped at a road side pull off tonight with a cool view of the Canada Kluane National Park, which is adjacent to the Wrangell National Park in the US. Very windy at this place, all thru the night.

Temps today were near 80 with very clear skies all day.

Camped along the road on the Richardson Highway

Thursday July 26 Drive to Haines (Arrived at Haines)

Woke up this morning with a great view of the mountains from our roadside camp. It was very windy all thru the night, but a pleasant night.

Drove onto Haines today. We only had a few hours left of the drive to Haines. What a great drive. The road was the best we have had in quite a while. The views were fantastic all along. It started off with the small mountain spruces, and then became high mountain tundra. We finished with heavy forests as we got down to sea level where Haines is. We did run into a big construction area right outside of Haines, which held us up for quite a while.

Campground is a back to back campground that is in town. Nice and clean place, but not much to brag about. RV Hitch-up is the name. Most of the sites are filled by people coming in for the Regional State Fair.

Haines is another tourist town, but quite a bit different than some of the other seaside towns that we have been visiting. In addition there is a regional state fair that just started today. We are going over there this evening. In town there was an old army fort from around the 1900 timeframe. It was sold to private groups right after WW2. There are a lot of the buildings still standing, but have been repurposed. We took a tour of this area, which wasn't much. I liked the old architecture, but since these were all private buildings, you couldn't go in or near.

We went to the Regional State Fair here at Haines this evening. It was located 1/2 mile from our campground, so we walked over there. Wasn't sure what to expect, having seen Indiana State Fairs and even county fairs in Indiana. This was much smaller than either. Since this was just the first night of the fair and it appears by the parking lot (not huge) that the crowds were about as big as they expected. The fair was located on a movie set that was put together for the filming of the movie White Fang. Apparently the movie guys gifted the set to the town, and now it is used for this kind of stuff. I never seen the movie, but will have to now, just to see what I recognize.

The fair was just a small town thing with lots of games for the kids, a food area, 3 venues for people singing, some small rides and some local crafts that people were selling. Their animal barn had 6 chickens and there was about 4 goats. Maybe more were coming. Probably 15 food booths and another 15 craft booths. They did have a small sign that said that marijuana was not allowed inside the fair. (Marijuana is legal in Alaska). We had ka-bobs at one of the booths. Very good. They had an "Alaska Got Talent" contest going on while we were eating. Some of the singers were pretty good, the bagpipe kids were tough to listen to (but so would adult version), and the few comedy acts were… But as the MC said, it does take a lot of guts to get up there and do anything.

Weather was good again today. Clear skies and high near 70.