Alaska/Yukon Highlights

Dall sheep on the park road in Denali

The Seaview Cafe and Bar in downtown Hope, Alaska. I camped across the street as usual. Later that night the deck caved in while a band was jamming out.

This is a video of me drinking my second Sourtoe Cocktail, a Dawson City institution from way back. A mummified human toe is placed in a glass of liquor and downed, with the stipulation that the toe touch the drinker's lips. . . although some take it a step farther.

Night settles on the Maclaren River Lodge, Denali Highway

Coming in for a landing on the Ruth Glacier, Mt McKinley

Toklat River, Alaska Range

Parking lot cornhole with Tim in Girdwood

The Dempster Highway

The Dempster Highway snakes into the Northwest Territories

Leaving Dawson City, I had no idea what I was in for. . .

The Dempster Highway is a 457-mile dirt road linking the arctic hamlet of Inuvik with the rest of Canada. A gravel berm rolling across hundreds of miles of taiga and tundra, across the Arctic Circle, across mountain ranges, interrupted only by the ferry crossings on the Peel and Mackenzie Rivers. Through the Yukon and into the Northwest Territories. On and on and on.

This is a road trip in the most elemental sense: the road itself is the journey. Simply driving 900 miles of rough gravel through absolute wilderness is a mental exercise. On one morning, entering the Richardson Mountains, the landscape was primeval to the point of exciting mirages of mammoth herds grazing the tundra. The Dempster actually traverses areas untouched by the last ice age, untouched since we walked across from Asia. Back then it was called Beringia, but the landscapes do create a weird, dawn-of-time atmosphere.

Driving the Dempster was a good time. Flying along on top of a 8-foot-thick roadbed, I felt like a train driver blasting north. The views in my side mirrors alternated between a half-mile dust plume and a mud-caked trailer. Fifty miles roll by without seeing a car before a distant brown cloud catches the eye. Headlights emerge from a cloud of dust and flying rocks as a tractor trailer barrels across the plains. Most of the terrain is tundra - a ground-hugging mat of grasses, lichen and mosses broken by clumps of willow and dwarf birch. In the western arctic tundra alternates with taiga (or boreal forest), here dominated by thousands of miles of spindly black spruce. The northern taiga is an incredibly hardy world, where difficult growing conditions and short summers produce short, stunted spruce that may be more than 200 years old. It looks and feels ancient.

The Arctic Circle: 66 degrees and sunny

Then there's the whole arctic thing. Only two roads on the continent cross the Arctic Circle, the Dalton Highway in Alaska and the Dempster. Another reason why there isn't much traffic (there just isn't a lot going on up there.) Although I basically went for the chance to play cornhole at 68 degrees north latitude, it was amazing to cross that storied line. It also opened my eyes to what the true Arctic really is. Far from ice floes and polar bears, the Mackenzie River actually creates a microclimate able to support trees well north of normal treeline. It was more mountains, tundra and taiga, and the realization that the Arctic Circle is yet another human imposition on the land, nothing more than an arbitrary line. But it is cool to drive that far north. . .

When the Canadian government finished the highway in the late 70s, they also built Eagle Plains. A micro-civilization in its own right, it's a truck stop, gas station, restaurant, campground, hotel and bar located 230 miles up the road. High on a hilltop of wind-bent spruce (eagles? plains?) shines this beacon of commerce. I camped there on my way back down, leery of the bug-ridden, creek-side government campgrounds. From my journal, 7/7: Nobody wanted to repeat Night of the Living Mosquitos, so we camped at Eagle Plains. Built in the 70s and never updated. Like camping at a remote roadhouse but with a great, old-school lounge. Heads on the walls, cold beer bottles, a pool table and country music.

In the yard at Eagle Plains

Another stop on the road before Inuvik is Fort McPherson, a Gwich'in First Nations settlement and old trading post. These days, a cluster of houses and several pickup trucks augment a gas station, supermarket and picturesque cemetery. And on the local AM radio station: Good morning to everyone, good morning to everyone. . . Gladys Nightspruce sends her greetings to everyone in town, especially Patsy, remember Gladys is in a nursing home in Whitehorse. . . Tommy Goodall, your sister is looking for you, please call home, your sister wants you. . .
And Tsiigehtchic, a seasonal fish camp-turned-town of 200, at the confluence of the Mackenzie and Arctic Red Rivers. I stopped here in search of dryfish, a traditional preparation of coney (a local, freshwater whitefish.) I asked a kid on a bike and he pointed to a faded blue house. At the door, an old man seemed not at all surprised by a vanload of foreigners in an otherwise deserted street. He sold me a greasy brown bag for $10. Tough, but palatable and mild.

Finally, after hundreds of miles of mountains, rivers, valleys and entire hillsides covered with purple-red fireweed, we hit the city limits of Inuvik. Civilization hit all at once: first pavement, then a cop with a speed gun. A modest grid of gritty humanity followed soon after. For all the dust and mud, the listlessness and loitering, apparent lack of town planning and jacked-up trucks, Inuvik is not without a certain charm. It's blessed with a beautiful setting on the Mackenzie River delta and a cafe with very good coffee. Based on what I saw in the Mad Trapper Pub, there are at least three people in town who play musical instruments. And almost everyone I met was friendly. Sitting in camp, drinking a Coors and barbecuing a whole arctic char, gazing out across the delta, I thought for about five minutes that I could live there. But it takes more than great pike fishing to make a home.

Later that night, after the Mad Trapper, I was awakened by a wind storm at 3:30. As I ran around the massive cook tent, hammering down extra ropes in the twilight, I kept looking over at the ball of fire hanging in the east. Where the hell am I?

Permafrost solutions in Inuvik: houses on pilings and above-ground plumbing

Camping in the Chugach

Backcountry in the Chugach Mountains

Since my last post a lot has happened. After eating fanesca (a special bean soup) on Good Friday in Ecuador I returned to Vermont for a couple of weeks. I recorded a few songs in Khal's basement in Ontario. I went to the Hyde Away with Benji.Then I flew to LA on my birthday and started leading tours again. After two great trips in the Southwest I drove 3500 miles to Alaska.

Superlatives fall short up here, simply because Alaska is the ultimate. It's beyond badass. My mind is blown.

The mountains of central and southern Alaska dominate the landscape and are big on size and variety. Flying over the Alaska Range is a revelation. Every few minutes a fantastic new mix of peaks and valleys is revealed, horns and cliffs, black, brown and red. Streaks of quartz and rust tilt and spiral above massive glaciers and rushing, translucent rivers. High up in the cirques, tiny tarns and melt pools twinkle blue and turquoise. Down below, the tight mesh of the tundra ripples like a living hide.

Deep in the Wrangells, where the old volcanoes hang out, huge icy peaks stand sentinel over range after jagged range. Icefalls and glaciers give birth to frothing, milky rivers, which smash and slalom down gravel valleys, past surging salmon to the sea. Walking back from the bar in McCarthy at midnight in June, I paused on the footbridge over the Kennecott River. Far to the south a gigantic, barbed wall shone in the twilight, a rampart of the distant St. Elias Range. To the north, upstream, low clouds swaddled the Wrangells, with only the dark tip of nearby Donoho visible. The clouds hugging Donoho's flanks glowed with a dull luminescence, hinting at the hidden glaciers beneath the mist. After standing for several minutes, awe-struck, I crawled into my tent and drifted off.

The Chugach Mountains line the coast, arcing up from the tip of the Kenai Peninsula and across the top of Prince William Sound to meet the St. Elias Range. The Chugach rise straight up out of the sea in places. Part of the drama of the Chugach is the combination of rock and water in all their forms within a few thousand feet of the waterline. Above treeline, the range's forests and brushy flanks give way to dark, worn summits and remote passes. Glaciers are everywhere. Perched high in pockets, hanging off crumbling ridges, pouring out of valleys into the sea. One of my best views of the Chugach was on a gorgeous afternoon in July, standing on Mount Marathon. After climbing out of hemlock and spruce, up into meadows and across avalanche paths littered with rock and ice, we scrambled up the talus and stood spellbound. Below us stretched the long turquoise finger of Resurrection Bay. Across the water, a long sierra marched out into the sea.

Resurrection Bay

Yesterday I hiked up part of the old Iditarod Trail from Girdwood. I left the Crow Creek trailhead under low cloud and spitting rain, hoping for the best. It was a stiff climb up and over Crow Pass, but the rewards were huge. Descending into the valley, I saw Raven Glacier lurking like a moody giant on its craggy perch. The cloudlight caused the ice to glow blue from the inside out, while far down the valley Raven Creek raced between willowy banks, across gray stone and out of sight.

I set up camp about seven miles in, near the Raven Gorge Bridge. On the backside of a little nob, out of sight of the trail at the foot of a talus slope, a lounged away the afternoon as the clouds over Crow Pass opened up little by little. The greenery was divided between low, brushy thickets of willow and alder and flower-filled meadows. Lupine, cow parsnip, blue bell, Jacob's ladder, columbine, bunchberry.

The next morning I woke to a deep blue sky a 360 degree Chugach mountainscape, including the kniferidge between Emerald and Vertigo Peaks at the north end of the valley. I managed to lounge away the morning too. . . reading, writing and pondering why humans love mountains so much. I may never know but I don't care either. Good times in the Chugach!

Vertigo Peak and friends over Raven Creek