Tag: alaska-range

Fairbanks to Gakona – Part 2 of 4

September 21, 2025

Here are more of the things I saw as I drove south. About 20 minutes after having seen where the Trans Alaska Pipeline was hoisted over a river I arrived in the small city of Delta Junction. As you will see, this is there the Alaska Highway ends.

Oh, and there is a much-larger-than-life mosquito here, too.

Why, I don’t know….

After taking a lunch break here I continued south, this time on Hwy 4. Highway 2, which had brought me down from Fairbanks, goes southeast from here to get to Tok, AK and eventually the Canadian border. I will take it when I leave this part of Alaska later in my trip.

As I drove south on Hwy 4 I continued to pass low mountains, but I would drive through another portion of the Alaska Range of taller mountains, though they were further off the highway. It had been overcast all day and some of the clouds were starting to lower.

Looked like a long drive….

I passed another military training site but there didn’t seem to be anything going on. I presume it is for training in cold and snowy conditions. All I could see was a building next to the highway.

If there hadn’t been a sign there I would have driven right past it.

As you may have guessed looking at some of these photos, after Delta Junction there are no towns or villages out here. I saw a small number of motels that were closed and abandoned, but no stores, gas stations or residential housing. In the winter I doubt if this portion of the highway gets much traffic unless the military is engaged in training exercises. I had hardly seen any traffic when I was on Hwy 2, and saw even less now that I was on Hwy 4.

The road just went on and on, and it didn’t look like I was going to get a very good look at any on the mountains due to low clouds.

And the hillside right next to the highway kind of closed in for a short while.

(Continued in next post)

Other Denali Mountains

September 17, 2025

There were a few other mountains in the “Denali Complex” that I could see as I drove about 30 miles further north on Hwy 3 from the Southern Viewpoint. They are mostly other large mountains, but I don’t know exactly which ones they are. And I found three more of Mt. Denali itself, taken from a more northerly viewpoint and which clearly shows the separation of the South and North peaks. Let me show those first:

And I used the digital camera with zoom lens to get a closer look at the two main peaks:

The rest of these are mountains further northeast of Mt. Denali itself. One of them is probably Mt. Silverthorne and another may be Mt. Mather. The Alaska Range continues for quite a distance, and the entire range is aligned from southwest to northeast.

Some photos were taken from the highway and some are from the North Viewpoint (but there was no sign there identifying them as there was at the South Viewpoint). I didn’t want to post these with the others as I presumed that most people were interested in the three main mountains.

The mountains in the Alaska Range southwest of Mt. Foraker are further away from the highway so I never even got a glimpse of them as I drove north. The road had trees on the side in many places which blocked my view, and of course I was mainly focused on driving.

The second one appears to be the same mountain on the left in the photo above it, but the road had turned left so I was looking right at it. They were taken 2 minutes apart.

These were all taken the same day as I took the main Denali photos. I would come back up here the next day but you will see in the next post that it was overcast and I couldn’t see these mountains at all.