Homer, Talkeetna and... Denali
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I tore myself away from
Ninilchik and drove to Homer, mainland Alaska's southernmost
road-accessible town. I am forever on the lookout for a place I
might someday want to live and I had heard Homer described as a
friendly artists' community with an appealing ambience. So I
went there with a hopeful attitude and the idea that I might
stay for a while and get to know the place. As I approached
along the coast I was encouraged by the magnificent view across
Kachemak Bay to a range of snow-and-glacier-covered mountains
similar to those facing Seward in Resurrection Bay.
Unfortunately,
that first positive impression of Homer didn't last. I found the
town big by Alaskan standards, and scattered. Beyond a few
blocks of cute tourist shops on Main Street, mundane businesses
and strip malls prevailed. The residential districts spread for
miles along the rolling coast, sensible houses competing for the
waterfront view. At that point I was undecided about the place.
I tried to book a seat on a small sightseeing airplane to fly
over the mountains, but they were full. "Come back
tomorrow," they said. I looked in vain for an Internet
cafe, finally settling for a commercial computer store to log on
for email. Then I cruised out onto Homer Spit.
The
"Spit" is an appropriate name for Homer's main tourist
attraction, however you choose to define the word. A long, flat
stretch of gravel and dirt connected to the mainland by a
causeway, it juts out into the bay a couple of miles, reaching
towards the glamorous mountain range on the other side. But
Homer Spit could hardly be more at odds with it's stunning view.
Whether by
design or accident, it is the single most concentrated display
of tasteless, tourist-fleecing, money-grubbing,
trinket-and-attraction-peddling commercialism I have seen in a
long time. Homer's famous Spit is lined on both sides with
broad, barren RV parks completely devoid of vegetation, yet
filled to overflowing with hundreds and hundreds if not
thousands of the metal and fiberglass beasts. It made me ashamed
to be driving one myself. In between these sprawling RV
mini-cities were row upon row of tourist souvenir shops of the
tackiest kind selling T-shirts and all manner of make-believe
Alaskan crap made in China. The stores were crammed cheek to
jowl with dozens of pseudo log cabin huts brandishing oversized
signs peddling boat tours, airplane rides, sport fishing
excursions and every other tourist junket imaginable. The air
stank of dead fish, diesel, auto exhaust and capitalistic greed
run rampant.
Was it
ugly? Oh, my god, it was hideous! I fled, mumbling
expletives under my breath, and didn't stop until I had
backtracked the 40-odd miles to my sanctuary on the Ninilchik
quay. So much for Homer, Alaska.
Early the
next morning I left sweet Ninilchik to head north. At the very
moment I was about to pull out of my space between the beach and
the fishermen's harbor, a bald eagle flew past my windshield at
eye level heading due north. It was an unusual sight to see an
eagle cruising so low, and it seemed a striking coincidence of
timing. Someone who believes in omens might have marked it as
meaningful. Then, a couple of minutes later as I turned onto the
highway itself to begin my northbound journey, another eagle (or
maybe the same one) appeared across the road above a wooded
gorge. It, too, was flying precisely at my eye level and was
heading north. Perhaps, I thought, the Universe was indeed
signaling its approval of my direction and my timing. That
couldn't hurt.
I stopped
in Anchorage just long enough to re-provision and use the wi-fi
Internet connection I'd found last time I'd passed through, to
check my email and make a few phone calls. Then I carried on up
Route 3 towards the Alaskan Interior. Along the way I
passed this Alaskan parody of Wal-Mart:
I stopped
in Talkeetna, a small town a few miles off the main road that
sounded interesting from what I'd read and heard. It's a center
for flightseeing trips around Mount McKinley in the Denali
National Park, being fairly close as the raven flies. Also, they
host a wacky annual event called the Moose Dropping Festival.
The day I visited was too overcast for flightseeing and I'd
missed the festival by a couple of weeks. I just went to check
out the town and the people.
The
Talkeetna spur leading off Route 3 was broad and newly paved,
suggesting that tourists are expected and welcomed. That is not
a good sign in my book, but the village turned out to be a mixed
bag, part tourist attraction, part real. The 3-block village
center was spruced up for the summer trade with a rustic Alaskan
facade and featured gift shops, a few basic restaurants &
snack stands, a tiny museum, one or two local art galleries and
a couple of saloons. Tourists were arriving, leaving and milling
about, but it wasn't crowded. Beyond the village center, small,
plain houses and wood cabins were strung along a few back
streets and tucked into the woods, and a quiet grass runway
ended just a block from downtown. I suspected the locals might
be an interesting bunch, but aside from the shopkeepers I didn't
see any around. I did not stay long, but while there I met a
pretty woman from Anchorage whom I hope to see again.
Denali
National Park
The Denali
National Park is Alaska's biggest tourist attraction, both in
terms of its volume of visitors and the sheer size of the place
- some 6-million acres, an area equal to the entire state of
Massachusetts. Like all US national parks, Denali is governed by
a long list of rules and regulations strictly enforced by
uniformed Park Rangers. They're intended to protect the land and
the wildlife from so many human beings, an unfortunate
necessity. I tend to pass through such places quickly or else
bypass them altogether, preferring the relative freedom and
solitude of National Forests. I don't blame the Park Service;
they have to preserve the fragile environment while
simultaneously accommodating way too many people. I just
personally prefer less crowded, less controlled environments.
However, I wasn't going to miss this Alaskan Mecca and in the
end I found Denali to be exceptionally inviting and delightfully
well managed.
As a
walk-in customer without a reservation, I had to wait two days
for a campsite to open up. That's because they limit how many
people they allow into the Park at any one time. This keeps it
from ever feeling crowded, a nice change from places like
Yellowstone and Yosemite in the Lower 48. The delay posed no
problem for my open-ended schedule. I simply found a quiet
campsite a few miles away, off the main highway, and returned
each day to see some of the open Park near the entrance.
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This
included attending a free dogsled demonstration given
by an enthusiastic young park ranger who concluded her
lecture by riding a sled fitted with wheels around a
short gravel track. It conveyed some of the excitement
of what the real thing must be like (look at her go!).
By the way, the lead dog on the right in these photos
was named Tor.
On
the day of my official entry into Denali, I rose early
and was at the checkpoint 14 miles into the park by 6
AM. Beyond this point, the only motor vehicles allowed
along the 90-mile park road are Park Service vehicles
plus about 30 authorized tour busses. They also allow
a few special case visitors, which I'll tell you more
about shortly, and a handful of RV's like mine going
to a campground fifteen miles further in that's
exclusively for Recreational Vehicles.
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Denali National Park is home to a large number of wild
animals, all of which are protected within the park
boundaries. These include eagles, hawks, falcons,
ptarmigan, which is Alaska's State Bird, and numerous
other birds, plus caribou, moose, Dahl sheep, wolves,
wolverines, foxes, coyotes, arctic squirrels, hares,
illusive black bears and, most notoriously, brown or
grizzly bears.
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The
landscape falls in to two basic categories, taiga and tundra.
Taiga is lower land forested with white spruce, which look like
classic Christmas trees, and/or black spruce, which are smaller
and scrawnier with dark trunks. Tundra is the land above the
tree line. The vegetation there is all low to the ground with
the occasional small bush or stunted tree poking up. Both the
taiga and the tundra lie over a base of permafrost just beneath
the surface; the underground has been frozen hard for centuries
and nothing lives or grows in it. So all the plant, insect and
animal life occurs in the top foot or less. As a result plant
roots are shallow, leaving the trees vulnerable to blow-downs.
The whole ecosystem is similarly fragile.
Both the
taiga and the tundra are carpeted with deep, soft moss. When I
was there things were relatively dry due to lack of rain, so the
moss was dry. Even so, walking anywhere cross-country was like
walking on a sponge. It's kind of dreamlike. Your foot sinks
down several inches and there's an eerie, living springiness to
it, as if you're treading on some huge, alien creature. It's an
effort to walk over the tundra, even more so when it has been
raining and the moss is saturated. Then you wind up wet as well
as tired.
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For
this reason, most hiking is done either along the
road, on the solid rock of the high ridges, or on the
many broad, stony riverbeds, which tend to have more
dry surface than wet. There is enough wildlife around
to see from these vantage points and everywhere the
scenery is pleasing, accented with prolific
wildflowers.
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My first
day in Denali I struck off on foot from my campsite, following a
riverbed for several miles, occasionally climbing onto a high
knoll along the bank for broader views of the terrain. Then I
hiked into the taiga forest where I first experienced that
strange sponginess walking on the thick moss carpet. I was all
keyed up for encounters with anything from raging bears to
charging moose to savage wolf packs. Carrying firearms is
prohibited in any national park, but I was armed to the teeth
with pepper spray, hunting knife and my probably ridiculous bear
stick, which I hope might deter any critter that gets close
enough for me to whack on the snout. It's an unlikely scenario,
I suppose, but what the hell. Carrying it makes me feel a little
more secure and gives me something to twirl and drop while I'm
walking. As it turned out, my most dangerous confrontation that
day was with a pair of sparrows. Conservationist that I am, I
refrained from whacking them on their snouts.
On the
second day, the temperature and humidity were nearly perfect and
the sky alternated between partly cloudy and mostly sunny. I
spent about 10 hours riding on a Park Service bus with two dozen
other tourists, gawking at the views and photographing the
scattered wildlife through open windows. The bus took us to the
end of the line, 90-miles into the park and back again, stopping
every so often at rest areas or anywhere an animal showed up. In
that one long day we saw a coyote, several small herds of
caribou, a few grizzly bears, some with cubs, numerous white,
horned Dahl sheep perched high up on the mountainsides, various
birds, lots of pudgy ground squirrels and one lone wolf. The
wolf was wearing a collar with a small radio transmitter collar
that researchers had put on him to track the pack. It made him
look like somebody's dog.
One of the
highlights that day was watching a brown bear chase after a
caribou with the clear intention of killing it to eat. When the
caribou saw the bear charging up the hill towards him, he reared
up onto his hind legs like Hi Ho Silver and took off at a full
gallop across the tundra. Bears are fast, but not that fast. The
grizzly quickly gave up the chase and went back to its usual
occupation foraging for berries.
One fellow
I met had taken the same bus ride the day before and witnessed a
more dramatic episode. Apparently a grizzly had killed a wolf
cub and was eating it not far off the road. There were at least
two other wolf cubs nearby, oblivious to the danger, but their
mother was frantic. She kept harassing the bear, getting right
in his face snarling and threatening until the bear left its
quarry to chase her. The wolf would then dart off, trying to
draw the bear away from her cubs, but the bear kept returning to
it's meal. It was quite a show.
I'm often
surprised at the depth of some of the people I meet traveling.
An elderly woman seated across from me on the tour bus made some
comment or another and we struck up a conversation that lasted
for an hour or more. She must've been in her 70's, at least.
Born on the west coast of Norway, she had been an actress much
of her life, first in Norway, then in New York. She dropped some
names of shows and actors I was supposed to recognize but
didn't. She was extraordinarily well traveled. I could hardly
name a country or part of the world she hadn't visited. Europe
and the US, of course, but she'd also spent months in India,
knew Thailand well, South America, Africa.
The old
Norwegian lady shared a few stories from her youth and it struck
me, as it often does these days, what a pity it is that we only
get to be here and do this for a few decades, maybe a hundred
years if we're lucky. It isn't nearly enough time. And when the
spirit outlasts the body's ability to get up and go adventuring,
it's worse. What good is a willing heart and a curious mind in a
failing body? I wonder sometimes whether our Creator didn't make
a seemingly small but crucial miscalculation here. I'd have done
it differently. A few centuries of perfect health coupled with a
fraction of the reproductive impulse strikes me as a much kinder
balance.
After a
full day on a bus, I decided to do some cruising at my own pace.
So early the next morning I brought my mountain bike with me
aboard an inbound bus. Only certain Park busses can take a bike,
those with an open space in the back for camper's gear or wheel
chairs, and then only if there's room when they get to wherever
you're boarding. They told me this as if it were going to be a
great inconvenience, but I got aboard without a hitch and we
traveled into the interior for a few hours. I hopped out and a
roadside visitor center about 40 miles from my campground. I
then spent the next two days riding back on the bike, and a
third day going another 18 or 20 miles beyond my home base so
that I pedaled a total of almost 60 mountain miles in three
days. This became my great Denali adventure.
That first
day it rained, initially in fitful showers and then in a steady,
dismal downpour. The air was cold and damp and any time I
stopped for a while I became chilled. I was suited up in a
bright yellow rain suit that kept the water out well enough, but
it also kept the sweat in so I wound up wet anyway. I'm in
pretty good shape these days, but I'm no Lance Armstrong. That
first 20 miles stretched my endurance to it's limit. Peddling a
bicycle 20 miles may not seem like a big deal, but if those
miles are mostly up and down mountains it is, at least to me,
and that's what I was doing all that day and the next and the
next. Still, it was so awesome out there I almost didn't care
how wet I got or how much my leg muscles ached and throbbed on
the long, uphill slogs. Almost.
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I
occasionally met people along the road who were
driving their own cars inside the Denali National
Park. I was curious how they managed to get permission
to do that, so I asked whenever I had the opportunity.
One was a professional photographer and his wife
(Michael DeYoung, www.mdphoto.com)
who, along with a handful of others of the same
profession, had won the Park's photographers' lottery
that year, allowing them to spend up to a week
cruising around in their own camper taking pictures.
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Another
couple in their own car had won a similar Park Service lottery
for professional artists. The woman was the painter. Her
husband, a biologist, got to come along "to carry the
water," as he put it. They were staying in a neat little
log cabin provided by the Park Service, on the banks of a river.
During the day she took photos from which she could later paint
when she returned to her North Carolina studio. I wondered
whether the Park Service had a special access lottery for
writers.
At the end
of the first day's ride, I left the bike locked to a rail behind
a tour bus rest stop. I arrived there wet, muddy, exhausted and
elated. The only person around was a maintenance ranger, a
short, stocky man in his early thirties with strawberry hair, a
rugged Irish complexion and a ready smile. "Just this
morning," he told me, "while I was straightening
things up, a big ole' griz' poked his head up at the edge of the
road just over there." He pointed across from where we
stood, where the rail-less shoulder dropped off abruptly 2000
feet to the glacial riverbed below.
"So,
what'd you do," I asked?
"Well,"
he said, "I hopped up into the maintenance truck, is what I
did, and honked the horn, and that bear's head disappeared again
below the rim.". His point, I think, was that bears keep
popping up anywhere and everywhere in Denali (as I was to
discover for myself on my next day's ride). The ranger drove off
and a few minutes later a bus came along. With a final glance
back at my bike, I limped aboard. That evening I was especially
glad I wasn't staying in a little pup tent in the rain at the
end of such a long day. Instead I luxuriated in a piping hot
shower, a hot meal and a soft bed in my cozy RV.
Next
morning I caught the first bus into the interior and continued
my ride through Denali in weather much improved from the day
before. My leg muscles were sore as hell from the first day's
ride, but once I got going and warmed up they loosened and felt
better. While it is true that the road went down about as much
as it went up, in practice the slopes seemed to be heavily
imbalanced in favor of up. That's because it only takes a few
minutes to coast down off a mountain, but it takes much, much
longer to pedal all the way up the next one. So I was actually
spending much more time going up than down. From necessity I
figured out a few techniques to help me get up the long, steep
inclines. For example, I found that pedaling standing up with
the bike in a medium-high gear allowed me to use my full body
weight to propel the bicycle and to coast momentarily every
third pedal stroke, giving alternate leg muscles a two-second
rest. Small things like that became important.
It was at
the end of a fast, exhilarating downhill stretch that I met my
bear. When I first spotted him he was a good 100 yards off the
road, grazing on blueberries. I stopped, laid my bike off to the
side and watched though binoculars. There's something awesome
and sobering about big bears, the way they move, their
enormously powerful bodies draped in the thick, shaggy coat of a
wooly mammoth. The grizzly is the top of the food chain. You
know it. He knows it. And don't let his proclivity for berries
fool you. He's omnivorous. He'll eat practically anything.
So I was
understandably nervous standing alone and exposed within sight
of this quarter-ton brute. You can't run away from a bear if he
decides he wants you, not even on a bicycle. He can maintain 35
miles per hour for at least a couple of miles and you can't. If
that bear wanted me he would have me, and my little can of
pepper spray notwithstanding there wouldn't be a whole lot I
could to about it.
All this
was running through my mind when the bear suddenly turned and
strutted down the embankment onto the road about 30 feet from
where I stood, eyeing me suspiciously.
Well, I am my father's son
and I did what I believe he would have done in this situation. I
started taking photographs. Happily, the bear showed no further
interest in me, but simply crossed the road, walked along the
adjacent riverbed, and vanished into into the dense bush. I
stood on the road, camera in hand, not knowing quite what to
feel. Awe. Relief. Exhilaration. Tor Crocket, bear chaser.
On my last
day in Denali National Park I rode a stretch of the road
outbound, from my campground halfway to the park entrance.
Midway through that leg I had an unlikely run in with a caribou.
It began when I spotted a moose and her calf up in the brush and
stopped to photograph them. They were some distance away, barely
within range of my camera's small zoom lens and certainly
outside the 75- to 100-yard radius you're supposed to allow a
moose in the wild so they won't get nervous and charge at you.
The moose
and calf eventually moved off into the bush. I had mounted my
bike to continue my ride when all of a sudden a really big buck
caribou came bursting out of thick hedge onto the road just 50
feet in front of me. Then he turned towards me and charged, or
so it seemed to me. What the hell?! I never heard of a caribou
charging a person, but this fellow had antlers broad enough to
impale a Buick and he was bearing down on me at a fast trot, so
I didn't stay to argue the point with him. I whipped the bike
around and hightailed it down the road as fast as I could
peddle, the caribou hard on my heels. Lucky for me he was only
trotting, not running full out. Otherwise he'd have overtaken me
very quickly.
Just then
a camper van came along, heading out of the park from the RV
campground. What they saw was a guy flying down the road on a
bicycle, shirttails streaming behind him, and a big damn caribou
hot on his tail. I don't know what they must've thought when
this unlikely spectacle hove into view, but as I came even with
them the man driving called out, "Is that thing chasing
you?"
"Yes,"
I panted, "I believe it is. Mind if I hop in with you folks
for a minute?"
"Sure,"
he called out as I careened past, "come around the
back." And that is what I did, skidding around behind the
RV, dropping the bike on the fly, and scrambling in through the
side door, which the wife opened just as I got there.
Immediately
we all looked out of the windshield. The caribou charged right
up to the front of the RV and stopped abruptly, looking startled
and confused at finding himself there. After a moment or two, he
moved down alongside the van and, as calmly as you please,
strolled on down the road, no longer in a hurry. By the time I
ventured outside and snapped a picture of him, this was all I
saw (Man, I wish those folks in the RV had taken a photo of me
flying down the road in front of that thing. That'd be one for
the scrapbook!):
I left
Denali National Park the next morning feeling a little leaner
and a good deal richer in experience. The park's icon, Mount
McKinley, appeared on the way out, 70 miles distant and
cloud-free for the first time since I'd gotten there. It seemed
a fine and fitting farewell from this very special corner of the
Alaskan Interior.
Next Entry: 08/12/04
