Tag: alaska

Tok to Anchorage – Part 2 of 4

September 14, 2025

As I travel between Tok upstate and Anchorage near the water, the road would take me on a long open stretch between Glennallen and Palmer. A little short of halfway the road rises to an elevation of about 3,000′ (Tok and Glennallen are at around 1,500′). There was a constant string of mountains to the south and I started to see snow on some of them, and the telltale cloud cover which seems to occur if there is snow or a glacier at high elevation.

Some of the mountains shown above have a solid coating of snow. And before I had a chance to stop and get to a place to take those photos, I could tell that the clouds on the right hand side were obscuring an even taller peak covered in snow. I believe that tallest mountain is either Mount Witherspoon (12,012 feet elevation) or Mount Marcus Baker (13,176 feet elevation). And each of the peaks in the photo, snow covered or not, are separate mountains in that “small” area. When I got to Anchorage I asked if there was a map showing the locations of all the glaciers along the coast and was shocked to learn that there are over 100,000 glaciers in Alaska and there are no maps to make identification easy.

Here are a few shots I took with the digital camera and a zoom lens.

And back to my smartphone for the rest of this group as I continue driving towards Anchorage.

That mountain ahead of me had rain falling from the clouds above it. The next ones are what I call the “brown mountains” which appeared to be shorter and without snow on them.

With clouds behind them, that group appeared to be closer to the highway I was on, and were perhaps obscuring the view of other mountains closer to the coast.

Once I got past Eureka Roadhouse the mountains would start to play hide and seek (in Part 3).

Tok to Anchorage – Part 1 of 4

September 14, 2025

My first full day in Alaska would involve a 318 mile drive on Alaska State Hwy 1, which Google Maps said would take 5 1/2 hours without stops (although I made many stops to take photos). My route would take me southwest to Glennallen, and then west-southwest to Anchorage.

Before I left town I drove from my Airbnb back to the closest gas station to fill my tank. When I went inside to get a cup of coffee I embarrassed myself by trying to pay with a Canadian 5 dollar bill. The clerk asked “Do you have any American money?” and I sheepishly replied “Oh yeah, I’m back in the Unted States now…”. The young man behind me offered to pay for my coffee and I thanked him profusely. I also thanked him for his service, for when he learned I was from North Carolina he informed me he had done some military training in my home state.

It had rained overnight and there were some low clouds when I started out but they soon lifted and it was a nice day to drive. Traffic was light and this stretch of road was in very good shape.

Most of the mountains were on my left, but the photo below was off to the right.

I realize the photo above is quite small but it shows the horizon far to the south to be lined with tall mountains. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park covers a large part of southeast Alaska, and backs up to Kluane National Park across the border in Canada, and between the two of them there are lots and lots of VERY big mountains. I believe the mountains you see above are in Wrangell-St. Elias NP. It is the largest National Park in the United States. Once I reach Glennallen and start driving more to the west towards Anchorage the large mountains you will see are mostly in the Chugach (pronounced CHEW-gatch) Range, which also have some very high peaks.

The gap in the mountains in the two photos above really piqued my interest. I think they may be down at the coast where Valdez is located. I will be going to Valdez later in my trip, but that seems to be the only spot on the map that would have a gap like that.

So while I started the day seeing mainly lower, tree covered mountains, the further I drive I will slowly get closer to the coast and have a slightly better view of those larger mountains. The next part of this post will cover the section of road near a place called Eureka Roadhouse and the types of mountains I was seeing would change slightly.

Highways in Alaska

September 13, 2025

I’ve referenced THE Alaska Highway quite a bit the past few days, but this is a discussion about the highways within the state. They are technically intrastate and not interstate highways because they do not connect to another US state.

I made a post in real-time shortly after arriving in Anchorage about the highway system. I will repeat part of it again and add a photo of my AAA map on which I’ve highlighted all I roads I actually drove on.

(Photo credit: AAA.com Alaska Map)

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. The part that runs from the border to Delta Junction is the westernmost part of THE Alaska Highway.

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.

I have driven on almost all parts of the those four, and several of the others (to Homer, Seward and Valdez). The picture I posted above does not include the two short roads I drove on in the Alaska panhandle – going south to Haines and then north from Skagway. I took a ferry between the two towns which saved quite a bit of driving by not having to go back up to the Alaska Highway to get to Skagway.

Yes, there are some 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. I did NOT drive on it.

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

5 – Which branches off from 2 to run northeast to Chicken. I did NOT drive on it as I was told by one of my Airbnb hosts in Tok that it is either unpaved or not in good shape.

8 – I had not listed this one previously. It runs west to east in the center of the map above between Cantwell and Paxson. The reason I didn’t include it (or drive on it) is that it is a seasonal road and is closed in the winter. It may or may not have even been open while I was there in mid to late September, but I had read numerous places that if you rent a vehicle in Alaska the rental company will likely forbid you to drive on it. I heard stories that it is very rough, and that flat tires are common.

After studying various maps more closely I have discovered a few other very short roads, but my trip focused solely on the 4 primary highways plus ones that would get me to the coastal towns I wanted to visit.

I also mentioned in my original highway post that these primary roads are located in the southeast part of what I call the “mainland” – excluding the Aleutian Islands and the panhandle. Here is another photo of the AAA map illustrating that point.

(Photo credit AAA.com Alaska Map)

Alaska border crossing to Tok, AK

September 13, 2025

This is the last installment documenting my day-long drive from Whitehorse, YT to Tok.

After driving through the worst part of the Alaska Highway I finally reached the border between Canada and Alaska.

There were only two vehicles in line ahead of me, and it didn’t take long to be on my way. The only thing I had to surrender were my mandarin oranges, though my banana and apples were apparently acceptable. The customs agent confiscated a plant from the car ahead of me.

I commented in an earlier post that the first part of the highway once I got into Alaska was pristine, but it didn’t take long for that to change. Roads this far north are a challenge to maintain. The majority of the roads in Alaska were fine, but it is wise to always be alert for changing road conditions. The US didn’t have little roadside signs warning of bad spots, but there were sometimes permanent signs warning of a “Rough Road” ahead, which generally meant those spots were pretty bad. And potholes were definitely a problem in parts of Alaska.

Here are some of the things I saw as I continued on to Tok.

I was still driving northwest, and the highway had changed numbers from Hwy 1 in Canada to Hwy 2 here in Alaska (though I am still on the “Alaska Highway”). I will talk more about other Alaska highways in my next post.

I had driven past the mountains I had seen earlier in the day and now, when I looked left (south), I could see tall mountains way off in the distance (behind lower hills and mountains in the foreground). I don’t really know for a fact but I believe I was seeing the tall mountains in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. If that is true then I estimate they are about 180 air miles away.

It had also become overcast. I still had about 2 hours of driving to get to Tok.

It was starting to look more ominous on the horizon ahead of me.

There was one place where I once again had to stop and wait for a Pilot Car. I was bracing myself for a long construction zone (the sign had stated the distance) but fortunately, once we got moving I learned that they had just completed an area of new construction and were just painting lines – so we had to weave back and forth to avoid fresh paint and the machinery being used.

Even though I had gained an hour at the border (Alaska has it’s own time zone, which is one hour ahead of Pacific Time) I was starting to get nervous about making it to Tok before dark. You can see the headlights of approaching vehicles in the second photo below, and it did start raining shortly after I took these photos.

I finally made it! My Airbnb hosts were out of town but had given me instructions for getting to my room which was separate from their living quarters. There isn’t much in Tok but I grabbed something to eat and unpacked my stuff for the night. I will have another long drive (with numerous stops for photos) getting to Anchorage tomorrow.

Getting to the Alaska Highway – Part 1 of 2

September 11, 2025

Today is the day I start my trek towards Alaska! I would drive about a half hour west to the small town of Kitwanga and get on Hwy 37, also known as the Stewart-Cassiar Highway, for the 450 mile drive north. Total drive time for the day will be 9 hours.

I saw this when I got out to the main highway after leaving my Airbnb.

That was looking west towards the coast, although the ocean is pretty far away. I don’t know what caused that effect (other than the rising sun), but it really caught my eye. I was driving into town to fill my gas tank before heading north.

When I reached Hwy 37 about a half hour later I turned right and immediately drove over a bridge. This time the dramatic view was to my right – looking east towards the rising sun.

After crossing the bridge I stopped to take pictures of two signs.

The distance sign shows 724 kilometers (450 miles) to get to the Alaska Highway.

Good thing I had just filled my tank! Various people I had spoken with, including the RCMP, had advised me to fill my gas tank at every opportunity along the way. They said there would be a few opportunities (I counted about 6). I did plan to stop about halfway north. I was driving during the day, and the weather and temperature were ok (though it would rain later). The road, however, was a complete unknown and I didn’t really know what to expect. The RCMP told me it is paved most of the way and, of course, to watch out for animals.

Here are some of the things I saw during my drive north:

Right off the bat, a sign warning of animals.

The cloud ceiling had been pretty high when I started out but I could tell that it was starting to lower. It had already started to rain lightly.

I stopped in a pullout area after crossing the Bell 1 bridge. This map shows the route I am taking – from Kitwanga at the bottom to the red arrow in the upper right hand corner (just west of Watson Lake). My destination for the day is a place called Nugget City, less than 2 miles west of the intersection with the Alaska Highway, and it is, barely, in the Yukon Territory province. Also note the bright white area on the left side of the map. That is the southernmost part of the Alaska panhandle. Earlier on my drive I went past the turnoff for Stewart, Alaska. As you can see, a highway does go there but stops just after the border

That is a relatively small sign warning me not to stop as I was in a mud slide area. Terrific…

(continued next post)

2025 Canada/Alaska trip recap

I am back in Durham after my 5-month 2025 road trip. I apologize for the long delay, but I have now reviewed all the photos I took between August 8 and August 31 and will begin posting them in small batches. Some days will have lots of photos, some days will only have a few. I will continue to review photos taken during the remainder of my trip and that should allow continuous posts highlighting my time in Canada and Alaska.

All told, I drove a total of 26,490 miles. 10,061 in the “lower 48” getting to and from western Canada, 12,608 in four of the provinces in Canada, and 4,421 in Alaska.

I spent 142 nights on the road. 20 with family and friends and the remainder in Airbnbs. Most of my time in Canada was spent in British Columbia (33 nights), with 16 in Alberta, 6 in Saskatchewan and 6 in the Yukon Territory (mainly stops while driving to and from Alaska).

I was very fortunate to have had good weather most places, and was able to get in and out of Alaska before any significant snow fell. I encountered little bits here and there, but nothing which impeded my travel. My car was a real trouper, only breaking down one time (in Utah) towards the end of my trip. In all the years I have traveled my cars have treated me very well.

My overall experience was AMAZING! I saw so many beautiful places and met some very nice people along the way – both fellow travelers and my Airbnb hosts. I have had very good luck using Airbnb over the years and find it a pleasant way to get local knowledge as well as staying close to the places I want to see. I passed on some of the more popular ways to see things (by air, by boat or by train) but prefer to do my own thing and travel by car. I avoided some of the more crowded venues.

I hope you enjoy the photos I am about to share.

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!