alaska – johnboystravelblog

Texas XX2.2L

They say everything’s bigger in Texas. That may be true until you start talking about Alaska , which in land mass alone, is 2.19 times larger. It’s a big place. And I have only been traveling in a small portion of it. The main roads are all in the southeast corner of the state and there is much, much more land to the north and west.

This is a sign I saw in Earthquake Park, north of Anchorage, a few days ago.

It talks about comparable areas of wetlands between the two. which is a whole nother matter.

There are 4 major highways in Alaska, not surprisingly numbered 1, 2, 3 and 4. Yes, there are other, smaller ones I’ll talk about in a minute.

1 – Runs from Tok, southwest through Glennallen, west through Anchorage and south to Homer. 538 miles, 9 hrs 38 min (per Google).

2 – Runs from the Canadian border with Yukon, northwest through Tok, Delta Junction, and Fairbanks plus a few more miles to Livengood. 624 miles, 7 hrs 34 min.

3 – Runs from Palmer north to Fairbanks. 327 miles, 5 hrs 36 min.

4 – Runs from Delta Junction, south through Glennallen to Valdez. 268 miles, 4 hrs 37 min.

Yes, there are shorter stretches of highway with different numbers:

11 – The “Dalton Highway” north from Livengood to Prudhoe Bay, a dangerous stretch of road not for the faint of heart, and not considered a major highway.

9 – Which branches off from 1 to run south to Seward.

5 – Which branches off from 2 to run northeast to Chicken.

7 & 98, in the Alaskan Panhandle which run south to Haines and Skagway respectively, though I will drive through much more of the Yukon Territory and extreme northwest British Columbia to actually get to them than I will while I am in Alaska.

This is part of the reason I am so far behind posting photos here on the blog. It takes me a long time to get from Point A to Point B, plus the time to stop and take photos. My 2 hr 22 min trip to Valdez took over 6 hours because I stopped every 4 minutes to take pictures! So please be patient with me. Believe me, I am seeing many amazing things EVERY DAY and I am banking lots of photos. I will get caught up eventually.

Welcome back to the United States, JohnBoy…

…. now let me see your oranges!

Real time post – A week ago today I crossed the border from the Yukon Territory into the United States near Beaver Creek, YT. It was around 6pm PDT, which then became 5pm AKDT when I crossed the line. As big as Alaska is, most of it is in one time zone – except the extreme southern Aleutian Islands which are on Hawaii Time. And Alaska only has one Area Code – 907.

Actually, I was already in the US – I had crossed the line about 30 miles earlier but the Customs Inspection Station wasn’t until later. I guess they really want to nab you before you can slink back into Canada.

When it got to be my turn it was pretty straightforward until we got to the subject of fruit. The agent was only interested in my 1 1/3 bags of mandarin oranges which I had purchased at a Walmart in Prince George, BC. He didn’t seem to care about the one banana I had left, or the two partial bags of apples I was packing.

He confiscated them. (He took two large potted plants from the woman in the car ahead of me. Lord knows what was in the U-Haul her traveling companion was driving).

Maybe he was hungry and was outfitting his apartment.

Anyway – I was cleared to go shortly thereafter and on my way to Tok (pronounced toke), AK.

And I just talked about road conditions in my last post. The first 10 miles or so of the highway in the US were pristine. Newly paved and without blemishes. (Take THAT, Canada… we know how to do roads over here!)

Then things started to go south. Same issues as in Canada except little or no warning at offending spots, and POTHOLES! Lots of POTHOLES! I honestly don’t think I saw a single pothole on the Alaska Highway in the Yukon. I swear they must go out every morning and patch them before they get worse. Not so on the US side.

Guess AKDOT needs to tuck it’s tail between it’s legs….

In their defense, I will give AKDOT kudos for repairing the road near Anchorage after a major earthquake many years ago. I remember seeing news stories about how they removed and replaced entire sections of the badly damaged roadway in record time. They apparently had all the materials ready to go, and moved in as soon as it was safe to do the rebuild.

That IS impressive.

5 weeks in – a JohnBoy travel update

Sunday, August 31 marked the end of 5 of my planned 8 weeks in western Canada. So far everything is going exceptionally well. I am behind with posting photos which means every day is filled with new adventures. I am prepared to post my photos of the first National Park I visited in the Canadian Rockies but can’t find my Park maps on which I made many notes which I need to reference. The back seat of my car looks like a bomb went off, and I need to root through it and find them. Of course, they aren’t where I thought they were…

As I write this I am in Red Deer, Alberta – finishing the first of 3 nights here. I was in for a shock yesterday morning as I drove up here from High River, AB, south of Calgary. After I bypassed Calgary to the east on Highway 2, a major north/south route, I continued north towards Red Deer (about halfway between Calgary and Edmonton) where I was greeted by a very noticeable low brown cloud of haze. It didn’t smell like smoke, and I wasn’t aware of anything going on in the immediate vicinity, but there it was. I drove a little past Red Deer and it seemed to improve somewhat so I just chalked it up to smog, even though Red Deer only has a population of about 113,000 people.

Overall visibility after I left Castlegar and drove east of the Canadian Rockies Sunday morning was not that great and I thought maybe it was just high pressure keeping whatever was in the air close to the ground. Well, this morning I learned that an air quality alert of over 10 (they call it 10+ on a scale of 1 to 10!) has been issued for little Red Deer. It seems that smoke from a massive wildfire up in the Northwest Territories (a large province due north of Alberta and Saskatchewan) has made its way south. In the last day or two I had read about a big wildfire up in Yellowknife (in the NWT) but didn’t pay much attention because it is 1,000 miles north of here and I wasn’t going much further north than Edmonton. Well, nature works in mysterious ways…

Environment Canada says it is supposed to clear out of here in the next day or two. Today I am planning to drive about 50 miles west to “The Cowboy Highway,” Route 22, the southern part of which I had driven on to get to High River on Sunday. Route 22 has been on my list of scenic roads here and I am sticking with that plan. Other than photo ops I will be in the car with the A/C on “recirculate” so hopefully whatever is in the air won’t bother me. I am tempted to just hunker down and stay inside for the day but I figure one day won’t kill me… If I start out this morning and the haze has gotten any worse I will retreat to my Airbnb and prepare more photos for posting. When I leave Red Deer Thursday morning, I will be driving much further west and should be away from the NWT and the smoke for good. Everything on my route going forward looks fine.

The other travel news is that I am moving my trip to Alaska UP by a week and will start heading north Wednesday of next week! I have decided to hightail it up there and get it in sooner rather than later and then retreat in a more leisurely fashion and finish my time in British Columbia on my way back to the US. I had already booked things through Prince George, BC and will drive north and west from there. I don’t have the itinerary set yet but am hoping to be in Alaska 4 or 5 weeks depending on the weather. I am still on the original overall plan, just rearranging the order in which I’m doing things.

So as of Sunday, 5 weeks in to my original plan, I have driven 6,225 miles in Canada, and a total of 10,825 miles since leaving Durham the morning of July 1.

I just had my oil and filters changed and had the tires rotated so I am all set for the next 10,000 miles! Bring it on!