johnboystravelblog

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.

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.

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Next up – getting from Delta Junction to Tok.

October 6, 2025

After I left the Dog Mushing Museum I walked around the small downtown part of Fairbanks and stopped along the Chena River. There was a large sign there which had photos and details about the flood which occurred here in August of 1967, three years after the earthquake which hit the state down near Anchorage.

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.

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.

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.

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.

October 3, 2025

Overall, the weather today was better than it was yesterday, but there were still waves of dark clouds passing through the area. Once again, I could only travel on the first 15 miles of the road into the Park. I had already taken lots of photos of the various mountains and again focused much of my time looking for animals. I would either crawl along the road in my car or park and walk along the road, keeping my eyes peeled for animals.

Here are more of the things I saw as I drove and walked up and down the road:

I returned to the place on the road where there was a plaque showing where to look to possibly see Mt. Denali. In the two photos above there is a faint image of a mountain in the distance but I honestly don’t think it is Mt. Denali. Even if it is, you can’t see it clearly so I really don’t think it matters. Given the general visibility and clouds moving through I doubt that it was visible. Having seen it two weeks ago it was pretty much fully covered with snow and there seems to be too many dark spots in these photos. There will be others later in this post.

There is a huge gap of time between the time I took the photo above and the next mountain picture I will post. I honestly don’t remember what I did during that time other than continue my search for animals. I know I spent a good bit of time at the high spot on the road just before the bridge, scanning various areas with binoculars.

At one point I had driven towards the Visitor Center, turned around and was coming back in and there were several vehicles stopped by the road. That almost always means an animal sighting. Sure enough, other visitors pointed out a cow moose, probably two hundred feet off the road. I got my digital camera out and was able to zoom in and get these photos. She was in an area with pine trees and scrub brush, and didn’t move very much.

After two and a half days of searching I considered it a small victory, but a victory nonetheless.

I believe the two mountains in the distance (above) are the lower “black” mountains shown on the sign. The distant mountain on the right is just below the words “North Peak” on the sign, and the one further left is the long mountain which goes over to where Double Mountain starts to rise.

This is Double Mountain…

… and Denali, if visible, would be about 2/3 as tall.

I have looked online and haven’t seen an image that was taken from that spot.

You can see that by late in the afternoon most, if not all, of the snow that had been plowed off next to the road had melted.

That’s pretty much it from inside the Park for the day. The next post will be of a small village out on the main highway just north of the Park entrance. As you will see, just about everything there was closed, and most of the shops were literally boarded up for the winter.

I will come back into the Park for part of the day tomorrow before leaving to drive up to Fairbanks. I can tell you now, there won’t be many photos.

October 3, 2025

When I awoke for my second full day in Denali National Park it didn’t appear to have snowed overnight but I was in the town of Healy, which is 20 miles north of the entrance. The temperature was still right around freezing and so I didn’t leave until about 845am. I stopped for coffee and food for breakfast and lunch and proceeded to the Park.

The highway getting to the Park was wet but not slippery.

When I arrived in the Park and climbed up the hill to get to the part of the road which had the best views, I discovered that it had snowed there and there was a little more accumulation than there had been yesterday. I did hit a slick spot as I rounded a curve while climbing the hill and slowed my pace a little bit.

Again today, there clearly had been some traffic, mostly going in, but I think it was construction workers who were able to go deeper into the Park.

The sun was out but there were dark clouds on the horizon.

I drove back down to the main Visitor Center parking lot to update family and a few friends via text messages. There is no cell signal once you venture away from the Visitor Center so I would always retreat to the parking lot to send or receive messages.

When I got back up to the main road I discovered that the maintenance crew had plowed the little bit of snow that had been there about 30 minutes before. In addition to a small staff of rangers (to make sure visitors behave, and help with any problems) evidently there was a skeleton maintenance staff on hand as well.

There were clouds moving much as they had the day before, but there were more periods when the sun was out so I was able to get some mountain photos with the new fallen snow.

There were more dark clouds moving in but it turned out to be a little bit nicer weather than it had been the previous day. Hardly any traffic. At one point I stood outside the car at the high point on the road just before the Savage River bridge for 20 minutes and never heard a sound. Pretty remarkable for being on the only road in a major National Park.

For now, the blue sky was behind me as I drove further in to the Park.

(Continued in next post)