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Make sure your lips touch the toe!
Hello from Denali National Park, Alaska!
After a very enjoyable, relaxing, alcoholic couple of days with Rob and Cath at their beautiful, remote, fairy-tale log cabin near Whitehorse, we headed off up the Klondike Highway to “Sin City”, A.K.A Dawson City. Originally a frontier town, it boomed with the goldrush in the late 1800’s and hasn’t changed much since – keeping many of the original buildings, but now catering to tourism with music halls with dancing girls, rough and ready drinking dens, wooden sidewalks and the like.
We used Dawson as a base to drive the infamous Dempster Highway, a rough gravel and mud track that runs up to the north coast, with the promise that if we had no punctures or repairs to pay for, we’d sample some of the delights of Sin City on our return.
The Dempster was a rollercoaster ride through a beautiful wilderness that took us to the Arctic Circle and the tundra beyond where we saw our first grizzly bear. We camped north of the Circle at Rock River, a remote site with just a cute, fluffy Snowshoe Hare for company. We then retraced our steps the next day, back through the mountains, lakes, rivers and past remains of wildfires that covered acres.
Good old Bowser took the rough terrain in his stride, as did our new tyres. So with no repairs to pay for, it was back to Dawson City for a few days of R and R. It is a crazy town, with a mix of tourists from the Grey Nomads in their huge motorhomes to backpackers, and locals ranging from hippy-dippy artists to gnarly old gold prospectors.
It’s difficult to fully explain our time at Dawson, but some highlights were drinking a cocktail that contains a real, severed, human toe (“Drink it fast, drink it slow, but your lips must touch the toe”), Bry getting invited onto the stage with the cancan girls and removing one of their garters with his teeth and an evening of very pro-feminist, all female wrestling. It was different!
From there we headed to Alaska over the Top of The World Highway, through the little town of Chicken (just a shop, cafe, bar and liquor store all owned by the same woman), back to the Alaska Highway and up to Fairbanks, where we stayed a couple of days near a public swim lake, chilling in the sun. The weather has been great, in the mid-eighties, not really what we were expecting for Alaska. An added bonus, for Bry anyway, was the nearby US Air Force Base with B52s, fighters and tankers flying over all day! And we saw our first moose – a mum and baby – still none of the big ugly males though!
Nearby was the town of North Pole - named in the 1950’s in a failed attempt to get toy manufacturers to move there – where it’s Christmas every day, the roads all have Christmassy names, even the church is St Nicholas’! We visited Santa Claus’ house, saw his reindeer and the local post office that deals with thousands of letters every year from hopeful children. The community of about 2000 actually get together and attempt to respond to every letter they receive – which is nice!
So now we’re in Denali National Park, named after North America’s highest mountain (previously known as McKinley). The weather has gone a bit cloudy, so we haven’t had a great view of the peak itself, but the park is pretty with lots of other mountains in the Alaska Range.
From here we head off on the Denali Highway – another long gravel track – before winding back to Canada.
TTFN