Skookum Traveler: Whirlwind tour of Alaska (AK)

Along the Richardson Highway.

Alaska in August 2012 was nearly all business, though I was fortunate in that the work also entailed a whirlwind tour of several project sites from Valdez almost to Fairbanks. At Valdez, I camped with the bears at a skinny campground along the beach. Most of the vacationers wisely slept in RVs, while I and a young couple in a neighboring site chose to pitch tents. In the camper truck next to me was a family from Australia, enjoying their first leg of an ambitious journey from Prudhoe Bay to Tierra del Fuego. They planned to complete the epic over several years and several trips, rather than as a single marathon. Nice folks.

During the night, I awoke to some loud snoring (it might have been my own!) and then a couple of times more to the groans and growls of a bear on the beach. The bruin sounded like s/he was only yards from my tent, my fortress of nylon, splashing in the shallow water. But with the salmon running and the bears well fed, I wasn’t too concerned as I listened to the beast making hay with a fish. I soon drifted into another deep sleep.

It was fairly light out and misty when I arose, which was not long after hearing a vehicle start up and drive away. I sunk my toes in my boots and when I exited the tent I saw that the Australians had left. I was a little sad to have missed the send-off. On my way out of Valdez I stopped to film a bear terrorizing spawning salmon in a shallow creek near a fish hatchery. I noticed he would snatch a fish in his teeth, drop it on the gravel and stomp on it. If eggs squirted out, he would joyfully lap them up. If not, he would shrug (I'm certain bears do shrug) and go kill another fish. He killed perhaps six fish in ten minutes, without eating any of them. The seagulls didn’t mind his piggishness, however, and feasted on the carnage. I wondered about the numbers. At this rate, a single bear could do in a few thousand fish in a week. Imagine what a hundred bears could do. I guess it’s a good thing that ten million salmon can return to Valdez in a year.

There is much that can be written (and mocked) about several days of driving across the interior of Alaska, but my days were so rushed with the miles I had to cover, that I couldn’t do much justice to the place in words or pictures. Nonetheless, I snapped a few along the way. A stop at various waysides, the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park visitor center and Rika’s Roadhouse at Big Delta State Park were highlights, as was the very scenic drive across the Denali Highway on the slog back to Anchorage. I spent a night off the Denali tenting in the tundra, pleased not to wake up to any more bear growls in the night. More unsettling, however, was the need to get back to Anchorage ursine-quick in order to catch my flight back to Seattle. Gotta do this right next time and take a couple weeks at least.