: I've covered perhaps a third of Alaska now, at least of the part that is accessible by road, and I'm liking it better and better all the time. With most of the interior obscured by wildfire smoke, I'm missing out seeing much of the mountain scenery, just hazy glimpses now and then, but even so the near views of the trees and lakes and rivers are beautiful — and so very ‘northern' looking. Today I drove by Denali on the George A. Parks Highway (Anchorage to Fairbanks), passing several sign-posted ‘Denali Viewpoints', but could see not even a glimpse of the mountain. A lot of the fun in being here is the vastness and emptiness, and the smoke doesn't affect that so much. My detour to Valdez was a big success, it's another coastal town in a spectacular setting, and the road through the coastal mountains passes right by the edge of the impressive Worthington glacier. Since I like the coastal scenery so much, and am here by truck rather than boat which is the best way to see it, I thought I should choke down my dislike of cities and traffic and pass through Anchorage to the Kenai Peninsula to see as much as I could. I'd been thinking to not go there, figuring it would be more crowded. I went through Anchorage as fast as I could without stopping, and it wasn't so bad as I'd expected. As I came into the Kenai I could see it was even more spectacularly beautiful than I expected — however, after a day I turned around and ‘got the heck out of there'. So much traffic, so many tourist businesses and guide outfits, so many fee campgrounds and so few free places to camp alone, so many little informative signposts, the feeling of hustle and bustle and busyness. I camped 20 miles up a dead-end dirt road, and rather than the none or one or two vehicles I thought might come along that night, there were 50. In the interior I feel like I'm having a real adventure in a wild and primitive place just driving down the highway, in the Kenai I felt like I was one more tourist in line to ‘experience' what was so nicely organized for me. Hardly as bad as Disney, but compared to the nearly pristine interior, obnoxious. The next day I felt redeemed when I took a detour over Hatcher Pass in the big mountains north of Palmer, really beautiful and impressive, and except for a few people picking blueberries on a nice Saturday afternoon, deserted. There wasn't even any smoke. Farther up the road north toward Denali, I saw two big swans in a little lake right next to the highway, and I was able to put my spotting scope to good use. They were Trumpeter Swans, not rare but not very common either, and some people who live nearby told me that they have been nesting there for several years. There were no goslings (swanlings? cygnets?) evident, so either this year's crop was lost or they have already grown and headed out on their own. I shot a whole bunch of pictures and put a couple of the best into the next slideshow, and made another slideshow of the rest for anybody who's especially interested in birds. And today I turned east onto the unpaved Denali Highway, looking for milepost 124 where one of my bird books says there are usually Trumpeter Swans, and sure enough just after I passed the milepost there was a little lake with two nice white swans and some ducks. I'm camped right at the edge of the lake and can look out to the birds around 80 yards away, and in the morning light I hope to hike over closer and get some more pictures. Shortly after I stopped, three cars came along full of really serious European birders on a birding safari, everybody piled out with monster telescopes and camera lenses and tripods, and my wilderness was instantly converted into a scene from Audubon magazine. They spent an hour watching and photographing the birds, and I felt quite smug that I can spend the whole day here if I want. Last night I camped at a big clearing 15 miles up a dead-end dirt road, pretty much alone except for some ATVs running around with moose and caribou hunters, and while fixing breakfast was amazed to look up and see a motorized paraglider flying over the tree tops. Even more amazed when it landed in my clearing. Then I noticed its truck and trailer down at the other end of the clearing; I suppose when I heard it take off earlier I thought it was another ATV. I had an interesting time talking with the pilot — he has the ideal way to see the scenery, flying around just above the trees at 35 mph, out in the breeze sort of like on a motorcycle. His landing and takeoff roll is around 20 feet, the parachute acts like a drag ‘shute on landing, and he climbs at around 45 degrees on takeoff. He says they are so much safer than ‘normal' ultralights that it is even easy to get insurance coverage. He's flown it up in the Arctic, all over Alaska, on skis in the winter. Pretty intriguing. My plan next is to pass through Fairbanks, where I hope to send this email and upload the slideshows (if that doesn't work, I'll have to wait till I pass through Tok again in a week or so), and then drive the ‘Haul Road', the Dalton Highway, 830 miles of gravel round trip, to Deadhorse (at Prudhoe Bay, the northern end of the pipeline, on the Arctic Ocean). The Dalton is Alaska Route 11, the latest highway built, there aren't many roads here! The road was constructed for building the pipeline, and especially when it had lots of heavy truck traffic there were horror tales about huge trucks passing at 80 mph spraying gravel and breaking windshields and headlights. I think it is somewhat tamer now. I hope. It's a narrow two lanes crossing the tundra permafrost, elevated on a gravel base, with pullouts every so often, and ‘limited services' a couple of places along its 415 mile length. It passes through the Books Range, which is really wild and isolated even by Alaskan standards, and although I think the southern part will be smokey, there should still be some good scenery, and it's an experience which I think I'd regret missing out on. Deadhorse is at 70 degrees north, just a few miles north of where I spent most of my time in Norway, and far south of where Ben and I were sailing around in Spitsbergen at 80 degrees north, but in this part of the world (without the Gulf Stream) it is NORTH. If you look at a map of Alaska, the road really stands out. It's been down in the high 30s here at night, usually 50-70 during the day, very nice. But autumn starts here in August, many of the aspens and alders are turning bright yellow and the blueberry and fireweed leaves bright red, and the contrast against the green conifers is really nice. I think parts of the Yukon freeze sometime in September, which is only a few days away now. : By morning the swans had disappeared, but I did manage to get some pictures of the ‘ducks', which were really Green-winged Teals. And it was 32.2 degrees at dawn, winter's coming! The Denali Highway is turning out to be really great, with a variety of nice scenery close up (still can't see the surrounding mountains), and all sorts of little side roads and places to camp. It's 134 miles of good gravel road built in 1957, originally the only way to get to Denali Park before the paved Parks highway from Anchorage was built in 1972. There is very little traffic, just a few people like me and quite a few hunters, and it's nice to poke along at 30 mph rather than 65 on the paved highway. : This is super! I expected the Dalton would be interesting, but it's also very beautiful. Hundreds of miles of rolling hills and low mountains, covered with green spruce, yellow aspen, red blueberry and scrub birch underbrush. Really gorgeous. The autumn colors add a lot. There's no way photographs can show what it is like to be surrounded in all directions as far as you can imagine by such wild and beautiful country, no other road for hundreds of miles. And it's hard to get photographs from the best points of view, since you can't pull off onto the shoulder (not without risking tipping over) and stopping in the road on a hilltop is not a good idea, so I have resorted to shooting through the windshield a few times without stopping. There are lots of nice places to camp, too. Tomorrow I pass through the Brooks Range; Atigun Pass at 4700 feet is the highest highway pass in Alaska. Then down onto the tundra plain for a hundred miles to the Arctic Ocean. So far the road is very hilly and twisty, up and down, in and out, which helps make it interesting and beautiful. Much to my surprise, they have paved between mile 90 and mile 175 and they are going to pave the remainder; it's more practical for their maintenance, and keeps down the dust, but it takes away some of the mystique of the old Haul Road, and the potholes and frost heaves on the 3 year old paved part are even worse than any roughness on the dirt part. Traffic has been extremely light. There are occasionally huge trucks coming the other way, but if you pull over to the very edge of the road and stop, you are not very likely to get hit hard by thrown gravel. And I really got lucky: after an all night rain and early morning mist and ground fog, the first clear sunny day since June appeared and the smoke is only visible in a few places, so for the first time I am seeing some of the distant scenery in interior Alaska. There's even a nice sunset tonight, the first in several weeks. I almost skipped the Dalton, and it's turning out to be the best part! The fires this year are the worst since records have been kept, up to 6 million acres now. If I come back another year, perhaps it would make sense to arrive in mid-May ahead of any fires — just after the snow is out, but unfortunately also just in time for the worst of the mosquitoes, which I mostly missed this year. Yesterday I drove around a corner to find a cow moose browsing on the roadside. I stopped around 50 feet from her, and she clomped into the bushes and then turned back to see what I was going to do next, and then moved off into the woods. Today I similarly encountered two more cow moose, one with a calf. This all right on the highway, with dozens of hunters off roaming the boondocks on their ATVs looking for moose — although I think they can shoot only bulls. The cows I've seen haven't seemed especially alarmed, only slightly wary. I haven't seen a single bear in Alaska, and hardly any bear scat, in surroundings comparable to those in BC where I saw 4 bears and hundreds of scat. There are a huge number of bears here, but apparently they are a lot more wary than in BC. The pipeline is an interesting curiosity, and since it's usually in sight from the road, it's hard to ignore. I saw the southern end coming into Valdez, now I get to see the northern end. I managed to bypass Fairbanks entirely, detouring around on little back roads, so this will be sent from my favorite DSL station in Tok a few days from now as I am heading out of Alaska for the Yukon and Northwest Territories and eventually ‘the lower 48'. : On the second day in a row of beautiful sunshine and crystal clear air, with a dramatic dusting of new snow on the higher ground and the ‘fall colors' really beautiful, I continued north through the Brooks Range toward the Arctic Ocean. But the best laid plans ............... The top of Atigun Pass, which is very impressive, was beginning to look slippery from snow, and as I continued down the other side it started snowing hard with not much visibility, at 27 degrees. I wasn't happy contemplating driving another 150 miles in a snowstorm to the edge of the Arctic Ocean, especially without being able to see the scenery, and it felt like the worry factor was getting bigger than the fun factor. I decided I'd already done the best part of the Dalton, and very happily turned around back over the pass to the sunny and warmer side where I knew how nice it was. I found a lovely place to camp near the Dietrich River, and enjoyed a peaceable evening glad not to be in the nasty weather to the north. Maybe another year I'll go all the way, earlier in the year. After a few hours driving on the road wet from snow, the back of my truck was thickly coated with the calcium chloride they use as a road binder, just like some of the pictures I've seen in the guidebooks. Guess I'll have to get my annual car-wash. : Tok is the entrance/exit town in Alaska, near the Yukon border. I hope tomorrow morning to be able to send this email at the local ‘Internet Cafe', and to upload a slideshow for Alaska. When I was in Tok 3 weeks ago, visibility was around a mile, and I drove along mile after mile enjoying the isolation and the nice trees, knowing that there were big mountains somewhere around but never getting even a glimpse of them. Today made up for it! When I was 50 miles from Tok, I came around a corner and was really shocked at the view: huge white mountains all across the horizon ahead. Much of the Alaska Range, the major range of the southern interior and the only interior range containing glaciers, tops out at around 15,000 feet (around Denali it is over 20,000 feet), and since the range rises from a surrounding base of only 1,000-2,000 feet, they really loom hugely overhead. (Denali has a rise considerably greater than Everest). As I drove closer to the peaks, I was really excited to see how spectacular they were, and my first thought was ‘I gotta come back next year'. And I felt so thankful that I did not leave Alaska without ever seeing any of the interior mountains at all. The address for the slideshows is as before: http://www.firestardesign.com/johna. Click on 04AK.exe or 04SWANS.exe, and if using Internet Explorer you can either choose OPEN to view the show once, of choose SAVE TO DISK if you want to have it your hard disk for future re-viewing. Right-Click or Spacebar will advance to the next picture Left-Click will return to the previous picture Pause will pause the show Esc will end the show at any time The Aurora Borealis was really bright last night, pale streaky white all across the sky; I haven't seen it since Norway 6 years ago. It was 19 degrees this morning (-7 C), time to think about moving south. Onward to the Yukon and Northwest Territories. Regards, John Armitage