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JohnBoy’s Travel Blog

Photos and stories of my journey across the US and Canada

I am back in Durham after my big 2025 road trip and have now resumed posts.  I apologize for being so far behind but I have reviewed and prepared pictures taken through August 31 for posting and will post a few things at a time so as not to overwhelm people.  I will continue to review and prepare photos taken in September and will have them ready when I exhaust the list I have already.

Thank you for your patience!

I will eventually (probably the summer of 2026) be creating a number of pdf files which list all my previous posts, enabling visitors to find specific posts from earlier trips (over 1,400 and counting).  I know how to do it, I just need the time.  Lord knows I had plenty of that at home in the weeks leading up to my departure, but it was consumed with other projects, prepping and packing.  I will let everyone know when they are completed and will email them to anyone interested. 

If you use the calendar grid to the right, go back to May, 2025.  Then click on May 13th.  There you will find a post I made which contains 100 links to some older posts from 2018 (San Diego)/2019 (Eastern Canada) to give you an idea what I’m talking about.  You may also use the calendar grid on the right side of this page to go to any other month the blog existed.  I started the blog in the Spring of 2016.  I traveled and took photos for two years prior to that but have only posted a select few, and some of my early posts only included 1 photo (I was a blog newbie) and I need to post more from the tens of thousands of photos I’ve taken.

FOR THOSE OF YOU NEW TO THE BLOG:

Welcome to my travel blog, where I post photos of my trips throughout the United States and Canada.  For details on my intent for this project please click on “About” in the upper right hand corner.  If you have comments or requests please feel free to contact me by clicking on “Contact” in the upper right hand corner.

If you are new to the blog please note that you are seeing the most recent posts first.  As you scroll down you are going back in time.  You may read statements which may not make much sense right at the moment because they may refer to a discussion earlier in the blog.  If you want to find posts for a specific place (e.g. Grand Canyon) enter it in the search box.  You may also use the calendar grid to use the “way-back” function to time travel back to a particular day’s posts.

Enjoy, and PLEASE feel free to share the blog address with others.  Also feel free to copy and save any photos I’ve taken.  You should be able to right-click on them and save them to your device (but if you sell them and make a gazillion dollars, please slip me a zillion or two. We’ll just keep that between us).  The photos are best viewed on a computer or tablet, not a phone.  The larger the screen the better.

Tok, AK to Haines Junction, YT

October 8, 2025

Today I will drive southeast from Tok and spend one night in the Yukon Territory. Tomorrow I will head south from Haines Junction and re-enter Alaska to spend one night in the small coastal town of Haines. The day after that I will take a ferry to another small coastal town in Alaska – Skagway. I will only be there a short time to see the town and have lunch, and will then drive north, back into Canada, and spend that night in Whitehorse.

I didn’t take too many photos on today’s drive, but I did stop at a large parking area from which I saw a mountain range off to the west.

Further up the road I found some other spots where there was sun getting through the morning clouds to highlight the snow on some other mountains.

I soon crossed the border into Canada and got to the closest village on that side of the border, Beaver Creek.

I then found myself back on some of the worst parts of the Alaska Highway.

Flashbacks of alternating gravel and pavement, as you see above, and long stretches of just gravel. There was still one long construction zone where they were completely rebuilding the road and traffic had to wait for a Pilot vehicle to safely guide us through the construction vehicles and the large tandem trucks hauling rock.

The further I drove the nicer the day became, with the morning clouds yielding to blue skies.

I arrived in Haines Junction, checked into my Airbnb there, and went out for something to eat. This was the view looking west when I got back to my car shortly before 8pm.

Delta Junction to Tok – Post 2 of 2

October 7, 2025

Here is one more of my multi-photo panoramas. This mountain range was beyond a long bridge I was approaching. I took a “conventional” single-shot panorama photo with my iPhone and will post it first to show the entirety of the range. It will be followed by a bunch of photos, taken with my iPhone, panning from left to right. The mountains were much closer than they appear in the single shot, one reason I don’t take that many of that type of photo as they end up being too small to see much detail when posted. I tried crossing the bridge to get even closer but then the low pine trees were blocking part of the mountains, so I came back to this end of the bridge.

Here are the individual photos:

I continued driving towards Tok and saw these two sets of mountains ahead of me, further down the road.

As I was approaching town I saw this entrance to a touristy area next to the road, but it was closed for the season.

I finally arrived in Tok. I was staying in a different place than I did when I arrived in Alaska. This was my little cabin. I was very modern inside, and I wish it had been available on Airbnb when I arrived in Tok a few weeks ago.

After getting my stuff for the night moved in from the car I decided to treat myself to a steak dinner at one of the few restaurants in town.

This will not be my last night in Alaska. After crossing the border into Canada tomorrow I will drive south in the western part of the Yukon Territory to the town of Haines Junction. The next day I will drive further south and cross into the panhandle of Alaska to go to the coastal town of Haines, and then I will take a ferry to another coastal Alaska town – Skagway.

Delta Junction to Tok – Post 1 of 2

October 7, 2025

After stopping to take photos of the mountain range west of the highway I continued on to Delta Junction. I had passed through here previously but today I will turn left onto Hwy 2 to head back to Tok. I had stopped in Tok on my first night in Alaska and will be staying there again before I exit the “mainland” part of the state and go back into the Yukon Territory.

I had posted some photos from Delta Junction previously but here are two I had not taken. These will back up the extremely low overnight temperatures I have seen for Fairbanks on my weather app.

After turning left on Hwy 2 I crossed a bridge over a wide river and saw this mountain range on my right. I walked out onto the bridge and took this series of photos with my iPhone camera, as these mountains were much closer. These photos are of the mountains looking from left to right. Once again, you will see some overlap in the photos.

I continued on down the highway towards Tok and saw a few more mountains ahead of me.

I will have one more makeshift panorama in the next post.

Fairbanks to Delta Junction – 2 of 2

October 7, 2025

This is a continuation of the previous post. It shows digital closeups of a mountain range to the right of the highway as I drove south from Fairbanks.

These are in random order, and are intended to be viewed on a standalone basis to emphasize the variety of terrain, depth of view and snow cover.

Tomorrow I will post photos of the second part of today’s drive – from Delta Junction to Tok, Alaska.

Next up – getting from Delta Junction to Tok.

Fairbanks to Delta Junction – 1 of 2

October 7, 2025

I am going to break up my trip to Tok into two parts – getting from Fairbanks to Delta Junction (which I have done before) and getting from there to Tok (which will cover new turf). I took lots of photos of several mountain ranges and will post them in a somewhat different manner.

The first set will be of mountains that were to my right, looking across a wide river which I posted photos of when I made this trip the first time. It will start with a few photos I took with my iPhone that will create a “panorama” from left to right when viewed in sequence. There are two sets of three, which were taken 1 hour and 16 minutes apart, so they were from slightly different vantage points on the highway. The second set of three will then be followed by 28 photos taken with my digital camera zoomed in to show detail of the terrain, depth of view and snow cover. There may be some duplicates, and you will see some “overlap” as I moved the camera from left to right (i.e. what is on the right side in one photo may be in the center or left side on in the next photo). I am pleased with the quality of the digital photos so am just going to post them all.

Here is the first set of three, taken at 103pm. Again, these create a panorama effect, from left to right, when viewed in sequence.

And here are three photos of the same mountain range, taken from further down the road at 219pm.

Those three don’t show the entire mountain range but it appears the road I was on had taken me closer to the mountains. This was the vantage point from which the digital photos were taken.

I will now post the first 14 photos taken with the digital camera. The following post will include the second group of 14 photos. My intent is for you to view these photos on a standalone basis and just take in the variety of terrain in each of them.

These are in random order and don’t necessarily follow the left to right viewing scheme.

Continued in next post.

Fairbanks Dog Mushing Museum

October 6, 2025

This was one thing on my list of things to do that I was hoping would still be open late in the year, and I was in luck. Located on the second floor of an older building downtown, it was a little run down but had lots of things to see. It also doubles as the Fairbanks Community Museum, so it had more things than just dogsleds.

As I mentioned, there were artifacts and tributes to other parts of Alaskan history, such as the Gold Rush and various other things.

I will include some photos about another historic event which occurred in Fairbanks in the next post.

And I will mention something else that I learned about Fairbanks. It gets REALLY cold here! I have a weather app on my phone so I can check conditions and forecasts for various locations. I had put Fairbanks in earlier this year, in early February, I believe, and was shocked at the temperatures I was seeing. Numbers like -40 degrees Fahrenheit at night and “highs” of -14 degrees during the day. Oh, and the difference between sunrise and sunset was only 5 hours the day I looked. I believe it gets even shorter than that at times, and places further north don’t see the sun at all for parts of the winter. I will have another example of those kinds of temperatures soon, when I start heading back to Canada.

Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum

October 5, 2025

I was in Fairbanks AK about two weeks ago and picked up some brochures from their Visitor Center. I also consulted my list of “things to do” which I had made from the TripAdvisor website. This classic car museum is consistently rated number one on the TripAdvisor list based on positive reviews. When I mentioned it to my Airbnb host he said it is definitely a “must see.” He also told me that in addition to the vehicles themselves, the museum owner’s wife suggested they incorporate “period” men’s and women’s fashions in the exhibit. You will see some of them in the photos that follows.

I just checked the museum’s website yesterday and read that it closed April 1 in order to move the collection to a new, larger location. As popular as the museum is, I doubt if that process will take long.

Enjoy!

The next two photos are of classic snowmobiles (or snowmachines as they are often called in Alaska).

There was a video running which showed the snowmobile above in action. And I will briefly jump to when I left the museum and saw this item sitting outside the entrance.

Final Day in Denali NP

October 4, 2025

I will travel into Denali National Park one last time before leaving late in the afternoon to drive up to Fairbanks. I didn’t take very many pictures. I had driven up and down the same 15-miles of road for four days and didn’t see anything different today. The few photos I will post are probably very similar to ones that I posted previously. Again today, I spent lots of time looking for animals, without success.

After leaving Denali I drove the same route, Hwy 3, up to Fairbanks. It takes about two hours. I didn’t take photos when I went up there about two weeks ago, but today I did notice some snow covered mountains way off in the distance which I hadn’t seen on my previous trip.

I took those with my digital camera, as they were pretty far away.

Milepost 238.5

October 3, 2025

Strange name for a post. This installment focuses on a small “village” just north of the entrance to Denali National Park. I Googled several of the larger businesses in that “village” to try and find a name for it but there doesn’t seem to be one. If a business had a physical address listed it was a milepost reference.

After leaving the Park and turning left on Hwy 3, I first crossed a river.

There was a parking area near the bridge and a walkway out over the water. In the distance I could see the back of one of the hotels in the village.

On the right side of the highway, high on a hill, was what looked like a restaurant which, on a clear day, probably has a terrific view.

As I drove through the village I saw lots of boarded up businesses. Mostly small restaurants and lots of gift shops.

If you look closely at the photo above, you’ll see a Harley-Davidson motorcycle location! Undoubtedly the smallest one I have ever seen. I imagine Harley riders would stop in at times when the shop is open to snag a Denali Harley t-shirt.

Above is one of two big hotels which have frontage on the highway. It is operated by a cruise ship line, and they bus people up here from a port downstate where the ship docks, and then bus the guests into the Park where they would board Park buses to travel deep into the Park. The Alaska Railroad also goes into the Park near the main Visitor Center and unloads passengers there. Denali National Park is a very busy place in the summer months.

By the way, the hotel shown above is apparently undergoing renovations over the winter, as there was lots of furniture, chairs and lamps piled up in front of the building.

Maybe the whole village is called Rainbow Village but no one else seems to use the name.

This is the other cruise ship related hotel. Sorry the image is a little crooked. Sometimes I just take a photo for my own reference. There may be other cruise ship lines which have lodging here but if so, they weren’t out by the main road, and I didn’t see them on Google maps.

By the way, the clock must be broken as the photo was taken at 540pm.