9/16 – 9/18/20
9-16
Driving down the Denali park road this morning, I watched processions of clouds stream over the frosty mountains, backlit by the rising sun.
After a few appreciative pictures, I headed south to the old Denali Highway. Even by Alaskan standards, the road was in rough shape, with yawning potholes that forced me to weave drunkenly to spare my undercarriage. The landscape, however, was stunning. Tundra alternated with boreal forest, trees in full fall color, against a backdrop of cloud-capped peaks. Wilderness streams rushed past; waterfalls bounded down rocky slopes. I drove about 25 miles before turning, parking occasionally to admire the view. At one stop, I watched a rainbow leap into existence over the mountains. At another, a beaver gnawed a branch ten feet from where I stood. Of course, it wasn’t all serenity. September is moose and caribou season, and hunters were out in force, rattling by in their pickups and ATVs. I also had the bad timing to interrupt a road-grading operation, which pelted my much-abused Subaru with gravel.
After eating my bag lunch at a pullout with a panoramic view of the Alaska Range, I returned to the park to hike the Mount Healy trail. The first few miles consisted of an uneventful, if steep, climb to an overlook of the park entrance area. Even for this panorama-saturated corner of creation, the view was impressive: a patchwork of golden birches and emerald pines in the valley below, long lines of snowy peaks on either side. Dark clouds boiled over Denali.
The few other hikers on the trail stopped at the overlook. But since I had a couple hours to kill, I continued upward toward the summit of Mount Healy, following a ridge raked by gusty winds. As I climbed, the path underfoot vanished, and the ridge sprouted jagged spires of rock. The way became progressively more difficult until, a short distance below the summit, I realized that proceeding would involve scrambling though a boulder field. Not quite motivated enough to tackle that, I headed back down.
As I descended the ridge, leaning into the wind, I noticed a pile of bear droppings on the path, which had definitely not been there a half-hour before. Since the huge rock spires on the ridge prevented me from ever seeing more than fifty yards or so ahead, and sometimes cut visibility to a few feet, I shouted and sang, clicking my hiking sticks together whenever I approached a bend. I never saw the bear. But I know it was there.
9-17
I drove up to Fairbanks in a spitting drizzle, replenished my stock of canned soup and ramen, and promptly headed east along the Richardson Highway. After lunch in a deserted state park overlooking the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, I continued to Delta Junction, the official northern end of the Alaska Highway. As I passed through town, I noticed that the wind had become strong enough to kick up dust devils in gravel parking lots. The gusts were soon so intense that I had trouble staying in my lane. Trees by the roadside were bent almost double, and huge clouds of dust rolled along the dry beds of every river and stream. Stopping to take a picture of one of these dust storms, I was almost knocked off my feet by a gust that must have topped 70 mph.
As I approached the Alaska Range, huge raindrops began to explode against my windshield. Within moments, I was engulfed by a wall of water. Between my wiper blades, I could just make out the looming walls of mountain pass. Then the cliffs slumped into hills, the downpour slackened to a drizzle, and I found myself at the eastern end of the Denali Highway.
Like its western end, the easternmost stretch of the Denali Highway is a lonely wilderness road, used primarily by hunters. After twenty miles of scudding clouds and rolling tundra, I came to the campground I had selected for the evening, which turned out to be a wind-blasted and rain-spattered place populated by a few battered RVs. Seeing no reason to linger there, I continued down the highway.
The tundra, bleak beneath a turgid sea of clouds, suited the melancholy weather. I drove up the highway’s highest point, and took a short hike along a ridgeline. Within a mile, however, that relentless wind chased me back to my car.
Back at the campsite, the same wind enlivened dinner by blowing away every pot and dish not weighted down with a large rock. It also complicated other necessary chores. On opening the seat of the pit toilet, I discovered that, thanks to some quirk of the ventilation, a frigid breeze was fountaining from the vault. Using these facilities was a…withering experience.
9-18
As I drove back down the Denali Highway this morning, I could see a patch of clear sky along the southern horizon, where a line of snowy peaks gleamed. These were the Wrangell Mountains, the rugged heart of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. After stopping at what appeared to be the only gas station for 60 miles in any direction (where I watched a hunter pull up in an ATV with tank treads), I headed into the Park on the Nabesna Road. On the advice of a ranger who seemed faintly astonished to see a visitor, I headed toward the Caribou Creek trailhead.
There are only two roads into Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. Both are notoriously bad. The Nabesna Road – which I was now following – is a graphic illustration of what happens to a subarctic gravel highway when nobody bothers much about maintenance: the roadbed buckles, the culverts choke with frozen mud, and the surface dissolves into a galaxy of potholes. As I ducked and wove my way forward, the sun emerged. To the south, over a tundra sea, the Wrangell Mountains glistened.
As I ate my peanut butter sandwich at the trailhead, I fell into conversation with the owner of the only other car in the lot, a moose hunter just setting out into the woods. He seemed to be in no hurry to leave (packing last year’s moose out of the wilderness, he said, had almost killed him), and spent twenty minutes talking about life in the bush and his colorful cast of friends, most notably a guy who dragged his house off melting permafrost with a tractor and a dude who bowhunts grizzlies.
The trail, when I finally started up it, paralleled a rushing creek. Although the clouds had regrouped, the Wrangells remained visible, swelling splendidly as I climbed higher. At the trail’s end, following the ranger’s suggestion, I charged up a brushy ridge. At first, venturing from the beaten path was exhilarating: tundra moss sponged my boots, and a piney fragrance rose from the bruised branches of alders. After a few hundred feet of bushwacking, however, the novelty wore thin. I was sweating heavily by the time I crested the ridge. At my feet was the same view I had seen from the trail, but grander: a broad valley, rimmed with mountains and filled with the rumor of wind. Since I could also see a veil of rain approaching from the west, however, I hurried back down.
