We rewarded ourselves with a big fry up breakfast at
Buckshot Betty’s, and it was YUMMY !!
As we drove out of Betty’s, we watched a little ground
squirrel play chicken on the main road – He must have tried to get across two
or three times, scurrying back each time and narrowly missing car tyres – He
eventually gave up !!
Not 5 minutes up the road we left Canada, with no one
paying any attention to us at the border, and then drove for about 30 minutes
through no man’s land before we came to the US Customs at Tok. The guy kept
asking us where we had entered the US, and we couldn’t work out why he kept
asking why our border stamp said Ketchikan when we had never got off the ferry
there. Anyway, after about 5 minutes he gave up and let us go, and then just up
the road, we remembered that the customs before we got on the ferry at Prince
Rupert had officially been the Ketchikan Customs, because Price Rupert is still
Canada !! You would think a US Customs
guy would know this, but…………….
The sleet slowly cleared until by about 11.30 am the
beautiful mountain range of the Wrangell St Elias National Park began to appear
on our left, to the west. In the earlier
low cloud we had not seen any of the similar mountains of the Kluane Range. Driving along, the road was really in bad
condition due to frost and ice damage – Big rigs and motorhomes were down to
about 30 mph, but in Troopie we were able to keep going a our regular speed of
about 100 kph, just weaving around the worst bits.
We reached Tok,(originally named after Tokyo, but abbreviated
to Tok during the war), got grocery supplies, filled up with diesel, had a
coffee is a great little coffee cabin called Beaver Fever !!, and then went to
the visitor’s centre. (We had managed to
get all the way through Canada withut filling up with diesel – Their fuel is
more expensive than the US. One
advantage of having 180 litre tanks for fuel !!) The lady in the visitor’s centre was MOST
helpful, dialling up the latest weather forecasts for us. In Alaska you go where the weather is good, and
it turned out that the weather in Anchorage
was best, with rain in Fairbanks, so we headed to Anchorage.
Not far down the road we had a caribou run across the
road not far in front of us, and not long after that, another moose, although
he was heading into the bush as soon as he heard us coming.
While the weather was so good, we decided to take a
detour into the Wrangell St Elias Nat Park for the night – This park is
enormous, the biggest in the US, 4 times the size of Yellowstone, and bigger
than many countries, including Switzerland !
So at Slana we turned off towards Nabesna, checked with the Ranger about camping and
fires etc, as well as any reports on wild life, and then drove 25 miles into
the park on a dirt road, with increasingly beautiful views of the Mentasta
mountains to our north, and the Wrangell mountains, and 16000 ft Mt Sanford to
the south. We eventually came
across this fantastic little Nat Parks camp site
with no one around, so we gathered firewood for a fire to keep us warm in the
cold temps, had a great pork cutlet (with Apple “Jelly” obtained from the
ferries !!), and a glass of wine for supper around the fire. We were joined by some birds that wanted all our nuts - Some kind of Jay, apparently, but commonly called the camp site thief !! We were expecting bear and moose because we
were so remote, so had to make sure everything was cleaned up and put away
(rubbish bag safely under Janet’s downstairs bed in case Mr Bear came visiting
!) and being so cold (about 2 deg C) as soon as we ran out of firewood, we
turned in and climbed into our toasty warm sleeping bags.
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