The Alaska Pipeline

No trip to Alaska would be complete without seeing the pipeline.  In 1975 when I first saw Fairbanks it was a boom town.  Now it's just grown a lot.  The pipeline runs to Valdez because it's the only Alaskan port that doesn't freeze.  It begins on Alaska's North Shore and runs 800 miles.

The boys were more interested in the pipeline than the girls were.  Go figure!

According to Aleyska, since the pipeline first started running they have pumped over 16 billion barrels of oil.

It is an engineering marvel to be sure.

Selwyn looks so happy because he just retired and took a trip to Alaska.  Susan always looks happy.  She says that people talk about their cup being half full or half empty but hers is always brimming over.  I love her positive attitude - maybe that's why we have been friends for 45 years!!

We continued our trip south towards Valdez, stopping many times along the way to admire the scenery.  We used the Milepost guide which is extremely useful as a guidebook.

Mt. McKinley revisited

National Lampoon Alaskan Vacation

When we left Denali we headed north again towards Fairbanks.  It's not as scenic between the two places as the rest of our trip.  There was also a big fire so the air was dense with smoke.  I don't want to insult anyone who loves Fairbanks, but it wasn't my favorite place on our trip.  It's a city and it has a nice visitor's center.  We stopped and had fresh fish on the river and watched boaters for awhile before heading south towards Valdez.

What kind of vacation is a real vacation without a visit to someplace tacky?  North Pole, Alaska is south of Fairbanks, and celebrates Christmas all year round.  Our group was divided on the importance of visiting this festive place.  It is of note that Frommer's Alaska Guide omits the North Pole.  You can see the smoke in the air.

"North Pole has the magic of Christmas in its name and the great Alaskan outdoors for its backyard.  The City has an incredible opportunity to be the destination for the interior, a beautiful small town set in the great Alaskan outdoors and home to Santa Claus."

We stopped in to visit the gift shop and bought some cute souvenirs.

Susan was probably the most enthusiastic about this stop!

It was worth the photo opps.

4 a.m.

Our new friend and guide, Bud, said that the best time to see animals was in the early morning.  Now I am NOT a morning person but when I woke up at 4 a.m. I decided to try my luck.

Although I was not lucky finding any animals, I did get some great shots.  I don't know if it was night or day, though, it never got any darker than this.

Now where are those bears???  They're missing the sunrise.

Visit Scenic Sunday to view scenery from all over the world.

Denali National Park

Denali National Park is accessible by one road and that one road is only accessible by bus.  So, if you are going to stay in the park you need to think ahead.  Fortunately we did.  You are allowed to drive in to your campground but there you must stay.

Denali contains 6 million acres of wilderness and yet it is not the largest park in Alaska, just the most accessible.

It's almost impossible to take in the vast amount of space contained within the park.

Unfortunately some of these views are obstructed by people in the bus.

The bus drivers are good about looking for wildlife and stopping for pictures but you have to jostle around people and their cameras.  Sometimes they let the passengers out.

Sometimes when you do see the wildlife they are quite far away.  These are Dall sheep, the little white dots on the hillside.

I was surprised to see a fox as well.

He didn't appear to mind getting his picture taken, but I'm not sure he was healthy.  Maybe it was the heat that day.  He didn't say.

This cow moose posed for awhile too.

And so did this ground squirrel.  I love the entrance to his house, very well done.

This truck was coming down from a hotel deep in the park.  They were getting ready to open for visitors.  Again, we were early in the season and the farthest point out on the bus was not yet open so we went as far as we could that day.

We met a really nice guy with a huge camera lens named Bud.  He took us to this spot because there was a wolf den nearby but we didn't see any wolves that day.  He was a great tour guide and big lover of Denali.  He and his wife come from Fairbanks often.  He also highly recommended going to Valdez.  It was good advice.

We also saw some grizzlies but they were so far away they looked like little dots on the landscape, not good for anything but professional photographers with massive lenses!  Other animal pictures from near and far can be found at Camera Critters.

On the way to Denali National Park

Mt. McKinley is a famous mountain for many reasons.  It's the tallest mountain in the U.S.  It's also one of the hardest to see.  It rises 4 miles, 6.4 km, from the base to the summit,  at the highest it is 20,320' or 6,194m. The top has its own climate, usually cloudy.  The scenery around it isn't too shabby either.

If you look really hard (enlarge the picture) you can almost see it.

This is a "braided" river, a result of silt, slope and channels running through it.

This is the first and only "official" Mt. McKinley overlook.  We sometimes glimpsed the mountain at other times in other places but often there were trees in the way and no pullover.  Go figure.

OK, this is NOT my picture, but just so you can see the mountain on a clear day, here it is.

Any guesses on what kind of flower this is?  Something that wasn't a dandelion which was blooming everywhere.

We stayed at Byer's Lake for the night.  This cabin was part of the scenery.  A woman from New York married an Alaskan and moved here.  They expected to make it rich but didn't.  She had two children here before they gave up and moved away.

It looks like a nice place to live in the summer.

The water was so clear.

Early evening, still no night to speak of.  We enjoyed our walk around the lake.