The docks of the boondocks

Ktsch!



My foot sunk, and there was snow in my shoe -- again.

I should know that even on May 28 this can happen.



I was halfway up Worthington Glacier on the north side of the Chugach Mountains, and about five minutes earlier, James and I realized that getting up was the easy part. We skidded, crawled and carefully stepped down the slope that provided three footholds: ice, loose rocks or both.

Hey, we weren't going to come this far if we didn't mean to have a little fun, right?

Two days earlier, James and I loaded up his Subaru -- the Jetta's gone, sniffle -- and made wake.



The destination: Valdez, with some detours.

You see, James has this goal to drive all of Alaska's major roadways. There's not that many, so it's pretty feasible. Instead of taking the "quick" way down, a paltry 362 miles down the Richardson Highway, we were going west first to take the entire Denali Highway and then head back on the Rich, thus killing two highways with one trip.

The Denali Highway doesn't need to exist, but I'm glad it does. There's a quicker way to cut from east to the west through Glennallen and there aren't any towns along the Denali Highway, so there's no commercial or governmental reason for it.

Once a trail that connected mines and their surrounding communities to the rest of the world, the road seems to have no other purpose than to get hunters, fishers and sightseers to the Alaska Range.

The choice to take the long way to Valdez was apparently the right one. It was the first time I'd ever been through the Tri-Valley area on a clear day.



More luck arrived in Cantwell as we found a Fairbanks-based racer who was brining his car home. I was taking a picture of his ride when I hear from behind me "Want to get one with you in it?"



Yes, yes I do.



Then it was off to the mostly gravel Denali Highway, 136 miles of slow going that you wouldn't want to blow through anyway.








We found a cool lodge along the way that just opened. The young man that was taking care of the place invited us in for coffee and we took in the view.




There was a more commercial establishment along the McClaren River. We didn't stop in, but we said hi to the bear outside.



Then came McClaren Summit, the second highest highway pass in Alaska. (We'd already been through the highest, Atigun Pass, on our way to Deadhorse.) It was about 4,000 feet up.





The road was surrounded by glacial features like kettle lakes and expansive riverbeds with just a trickle of a stream flowing through it. The most apparent glacial impressions on the ground were eskers, mounds of dirt and silt left behind when glaciers melt.



The road even swerved atop an esker for a stretch.



Then it was down the Rich to Valdez through Thompson Pass, which is famous for being so hard to keep clear during snowy months. It wasn't as tough a ride as I had expected, even at night.

Welcome to Valdez, where the sky isn't the limit because it doesn't exist.





Valdez -- in all its foggy, rainy splendor -- is a charming little port city that has, in true Alaska fashion, boomed and busted several times over. This is apparent to any visitor because the history of the town can be boiled down to three main events.

1) The creation of a road to Fairbanks. It took a long time to find a suitable route out of the embrace of the Chugach Range. Lots of folks died before Valdez could become a useful port city.

2) The earthquake of 1964. Basically, the town got wiped out and moved to a safer spot on the Port Valdez shores.

3)The Exxon-Valdez oil spill. The pipeline brought a boom to the city, then the tanker spill brought a cleanup effort that shot the city's population to about 10,000.

The sleepy fishing community is now about 5,000 people strong, has no stoplights and, even without crosswalks, I never had to yield to traffic when crossing the street. The only time Valdez gets packed is when the cruise ships drop off a batch of tourists for a few hours.

These things were discussed at length by our guide on a glacier cruise. I was half listening, half checking out all the animals like humpback whales ...



sea lions ...



puffin ...



and bald eagles.



There were some interesting ice floes and otters that I can't show you because my camera battery died. I was saving my last shot for the Columbia Glacier. Unfortunately, this is as close as we could get to it:



After hardly eating on the seven-hour cruise, James and I dove into a deep-dish pizza that carried an entire slaughterhouse of meat. We could only muster two slices apiece, and anyone who knows how I eat can attest that's an alarmingly low number of slices.

We washed the pizza down with some beers at the Landshark -- OK, so we pre-washed the pizza down with a few beers, too -- and crashed at the hotel.

On our way back, we got to see Keystone Canyon in the daylight.



There were some cool waterfalls with generic names like "Bridal Veil Falls" and "Horsetail Falls" because, well, guess what they looked like?



Then came Worthington Glacier. There's a gravel path that starts alongside the viewing area and takes you to the ice on a narrow hump of rocks and silt. When that ended, we kept going.




There was crevice that we couldn't see the bottom of. James dropped a pebble in, and we didn't hear it hit anything.



And well, you know how that ended. The hike kind of drained us, and we cruised through an unexpectedly scenic Richardson to Delta Junction. Though we did stop to check out probably the most fertile-looking valley I'd ever laid eyes upon.




All in all, a win.

I'm just glad to be home, where the speed limits are in multiples of five.