Tuesday
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| Fairbanks Smoky Streets |
Woke with a scratchy throat and burning
eyes from thick, widespread smoke from forest fires. We drove down
to the visitor center in downtown Fairbanks. In addition to tons of
literature, they had a lot of interesting art and a great mini-museum
highlighting native cultures, gold rush days and the boom created
here when the Alaska Pipeline was being built.
The smoke is way too intense for us to
do anything outside, so decided to do housekeeping chores, including
grocery shopping and laundry. Went to a local Mexican restaurant and
spent the evening reading and playing cards.
Wednesday
Still smokey this morning and the
forecast calls for smoke until Thursday night. It isn't as bad as
yesterday, so we drove up to the University's botanical garden,
hoping to see some of the giant veggies that Alaska's long days of
sunshine produce. It was too early in the season for most things,
but they did have some cabbages and some pretty flowers.
The smoke is intensifying and we
decided to try and drive south on the Parks Highway toward Denali
where we are actually hoping to hit rain – rain is much better than
feeling like you've been up all night chain-smoking....dry mouth,
burning eyes, scratchy throat and headache.
The views from atop the summits of the
road would have been beautiful on a clear day, but we could just make
out huge valleys with wide, wandering rivers through the haze. We
stopped in a little village called Nenana that had been a bustling
port town for river barge traffic, but now it is pretty dilapidated.
We stopped at a small log cabin rustic church to view the hand-hewn pews and
beaded altar pieces.
This town is most famous for its
lottery for when the ice breaks up based on when a tripod with a flag
on top hits the water. This is serious business and the last payout
was over $300,000!!!!
We stopped for a campsite on the river
about an hour north of Denali. The smoke smell is still here, but
nowhere near as bad as Fairbanks. We sat out enjoying the river for
a while, dinner and played some cards.
Denali's weather forecast is for
clouds and rain for at least a week, so we will not commit to the
3-night minimum to get a campsite deep into the park. Mt. McKinley
is visible only 30% of the time and we were hoping to enjoy a few
days inside the park, increasing our chances to see The Mountain.
Weather forecasts can be wrong, but when I spoke to the campground
reservations folks, they said it has been raining off and on and
cloudy for a month and it is expected to continue for another month.
Denali is so huge that if it does come “out” as the locals say,
we will be able to see it from anywhere in the vicinity, so we will
spend the day here and continue south.
Our drive on the Parks Highway (named after a former governor, not for Denali National Park) runs north/south between Fairbanks and Anchorage with Denali National Park about halfway between. When the weather is clear, this highway affords multiple opportunities to see The Mountain, but it was overcast with some storm clouds, so we saw very little. Mt. McKinley is so big that it makes its own weather and will often be covered in clouds even though everything else is clear and sunny.
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| Nenana River Canyon |
The roiling clouds made some interesting photos as we drove through Nenana River Canyon and 15 miles into Denali Park on the only section of the road private vehicles are allowed.
We spotted a couple of moose (mice?), but road was too narrow to stop for photos. We did get a chance to get a pic of a caribou with majestic antlers. He was pretty far away, so even my new telephoto lens couldn't get a close-up.
It started raining, so we cancelled our planned Denali hikes and headed an hour south to a campground for the night.
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