Monday 7-23
Today we left the Admiral perched on its hilltop aerie and took the Cheap Jeep to the end of the dirt & gravel Nabesna Road, which runs 45 miles east into the Wrangell/St. Elias National Park and Reserve. Yesterday I mentioned that this park is huge. To give you some perspective, this place is 6 times the size of Yellowstone. It’s huge AND very much undeveloped. Besides the Nabesna, the only other road is the 60 mile long, dirt & gravel McCarthy (we’ll drive that tomorrow). Wrangell has a total of 105 miles of very unpaved roads—Yellowstone has 281 miles of manicured tarmac (unpaved roads might damage your Lexus).
The views driving into Wrangell are spectacular. This park has 9 of the 16 tallest peaks in the U.S., so it’s well appointed; and today the mountains were painted against a very dramatic sky, so it was as good as it gets. One “oooo”, “ahhh” to the next, and we had some exciting moments fording the several streams that hyphenate the roadway. The largest of these had a steep rock bank on either side and was 18” or more deep. I was nervous about this stream because of the size of the rocks—after all, the Cheap Jeep has the smallest available wheels and least ground clearance. Nancy was VERY nervous! A challenging test…successfully met by the CJ.
At the end of the road (45 bone jarring miles from nowhere) is a small enclave of human inhabitants—maybe 6 families, half of which had “Stanley” on their mailboxes—and, surprisingly, an airfield with 3 or 4 planes. We’ve seen lots of homes with private airstrips and small planes—understandable, but still remarkable. We can understand the convenience of a personal plane when you live in a place called “nowhere”, but how do all of these people afford them? The mailboxes presented a mild conundrum. Mailboxes suggest a mailman who must ride this road regularly to deliver mail—45 miles of unpavement, fording countless streams (some of which swell to major rivers), and plowing through what must be huge mounds of snow in the winter. We learned later that there is such a mailman (in fact he passed us on the road) and that he delivers mail to the Stanleys, et al., three times a week. Now THAT’S getting service from the government (did you ever notice that RFD and FDR have the same letters?).
On the way back we re-crossed the “stream of death” (eerie music here please) and stopped at the Sportsman’s Paradise Lodge for some refreshments. In a testimony to the reach of the federal government and the ADA, the lodge has both stairs and a wheelchair ramp—despite the fact that there’s no sidewalk and you need 4-wheel drive to get to the lodge. The exterior of this place is right out of Bret Harte. The interior is early Bangladesh with a heavy emphasis on unlit promotional beer signs. Inside we found a single customer (an Indian lady nursing a beer and watching the western “Big Valley” on a Sylvania TV), two guys who reminded me of dumb & dumber working on the gas space heater (I expected a punctuating explosion at any time), one of the proprietors (the distaff half of Don & Judy), and the largest collection of taxidermy we’d seen in a long time. There was a stuffed version of pretty much every critter that lives in Alaska; bears, moose, deer, elk, caribou, a wolf, coyote, skunk, weasel, ermine, marmot, wolverine, lynx, fox, and various birds, amphibians, and insects (kidding about the insects). Each of these was covered in thick dust so that regardless of their original color and markings they were uniformly the color of dirt. In fact I briefly mistook the marmot for Don (or maybe it WAS Don, we never saw him in person). Plus, there was a pair of Dall sheep framing a vintage Budweiser sign. The sheep, and only the sheep, were covered with clear plastic garbage bags. We asked Judy (who, despite running a bar, was not your highly social type) why the sheep were covered in plastic. Without a pause, she said, “To keep ‘em clean and white”. We’ve unanimously agreed to anoint Judy with our first annual “Swiffer” Award.
Despite the remoteness of the Nabesna Road, we saw only small animals today; a few hares and red squirrels. In this wilderness there must be large animals, and we were frustrated by their uncooperative nature. At one point I rolled down my window and shouted an admonition to these hiding creatures, “COME OUT OR WE WILL TURN THIS AREA INTO A SUBDIVISION”! They remained in hiding.
I fished briefly and unsuccessfully in a creek with promising waters. Nancy was successful in identifying a new bird, the Common Goldeneye.
In the early evening we got back to the RV and continued south with the goal of positioning ourselves at the beginning of the McCarthy/Kennecott Road for our second foray into the park. We were on the road for just a few moments when we spotted a moose head in a lake off to the east. We thought briefly that Judy might be laundering part of the taxidermy collection, but quickly realized this was an actual moose, swimming across the lake. When he reached shallow enough water, he waded ashore and then galloped into the woods. With their long legs, galloping moose are an interesting study in kinetics.
Heading south, the views became increasingly dramatic. Clouds were still churning in the sky and two of the dominant peaks in this section of the park (Sanford and Drum Mountains—16,000 and 12,000 feet) were on our left. These are volcanic mountains, so they rise abruptly and majestically from the valley floor. The flowing clouds opened periodically to reveal some, but never all, of these snow-covered, towering giants.
As the funky midnight dusk began to gather, we pulled off at Pippin Lake to spend the night, and, while we were getting organized, the hydraulic pump that operates the leveling jacks locked up. Ultimately I disconnected the pump, but we had some kind of electrical problem that was interfering with our 12 volt power, so we decided to head on down the road to an RV park where we could hook up to 110v power. We landed at the Tonsina River Lodge RV Park. More about the Tonsina tomorrow, but tonight 110 was not the solution, so we needed to call the 24-hour service line at Holiday Rambler (maker of the mighty Admiral). The problem was we had a VERY weak cell signal that only worked in a small spot between two pot holes in front of the office—100 yards or so from where the Admiral was parked. So Nancy manned the phone (so to speak), and I shuttled back and forth between the technician she was entertaining and the RV to test his recommendations. Finally got everything working, except the leveling jacks (those are a luxury--not a necessity) and got to bed in the early morning.
Long, but spectacular day.
