Category: Places & Travel

By NewMexiKen [from 1998, minor edits]

Alaska has 10 or 11 highways (some are gravel), each with a number and most also named after someone. The only road north out of Anchorage is Hwy 1, the Glenn Highway. The Glenn goes northeast for 310 miles until it meets the Alaska Highway (the AlCan) at Tok. Thirty-five miles northeast of Anchorage, Hwy 1 intersects with the Parks Highway, Hwy 3. The Parks Highway begins at that intersection, tends west for 50 miles, then north past Denali National Park and, after 325 miles, Fairbanks. We did every mile of Hwy 3 twice.

The area near the road on the Glenn Hwy for the first thirty miles out of Anchorage seemed more suburban than rural. Eventually the 6000-foot peaks of the closest of the Chugach Mountains loom imposingly a mile above you along the highway (which is a freeway) and the last few miles you pass through the Palmer Hay Flats State Game Refuge. Once you turn left onto Hwy 3 however, the roadside congestion and clutter is again frightful as you pass through Wasilla. For several miles the roadside businesses exist for the recreational vehicle trade. Drive-through espresso places abound. Eventually, but not before you are 50 miles from Anchorage, you escape and are truly in rural Alaska.

There is very little along Hwy 3, yet it is not wilderness either. It seemed to me that man has left his mark on every mile — homes, the odd business, the service stations and convenience stores, abandoned cars, trucks and bulldozers, the half-dozen communities (in 200 miles). Not without beauty and interest, but not untarnished either. It gets better the further north you go, especially when you get into Denali State Park at mile 132.

We took the detour to Talkeetna up a 14-mile spur road and back. Talkeetna (population 600) is the jumping off place for climbing Mount McKinley and some think, as close to the Northern Exposure Cicley as real Alaska gets. The village began in 1901, but became more settled when the Alaska Railroad was built from 1915-1923. We stopped for a beer in the Fairview Inn, where President Harding is said to have been poisoned after he hammered in the last spike at Nenana in July 1923. He died later in San Francisco. The Inn is on the National Register of Historic Places and has a fascinating collection of photos and memorabilia on the walls, half real Alaskiana and half seemingly tourist-attracting kitsch. The clientele appeared to be about half locals and half tourists also. The Inn has seven rooms with a public bath. The village also has a museum that charges $1 and the model of Mount McKinley alone was worth more than that. Unfortunately the National Park Service ranger station for climbers was closed. Most attempts for the top of the highest mountain in North America (20,320 feet) are in May and June.

There is rumored to be a lovely view of Mount McKinley from Talkeetna — they are about 50 miles apart. We wouldn’t know though, as the clouds continued to hang low, particularly around The Great One. Indeed, the rain began just as we stopped at the first view point in Denali State Park (itself 506 square miles). We thought we could see the ends of the glaciers at the foot of the mountain, forty miles away, but clouds obscured all above. The view of the Chulitna River in the foreground and the autumn gold cottonwood forests on the endless hills was magnificent enough.

We arrived at Denali National Park and Preserve just before 5 PM, the temperature around 40º with occasional rain. The clouds hung low on the mountains, which near the eastern edge of the park rise to 5000-5500 feet, about 3500 above the Nenana River. The Nenana parallels the Parks Hwy for the last 25 miles south of the Park and for 50 north of it. The visitor center was open until 7 on this, a busy weekend. (By Tuesday, it would be on a much more limited schedule as winter came on.)

The only available campsite that late in the day was at the entrance campground, Riley Creek. We selected a beautiful site, then headed out on the 30-mile round trip into the Park. The road in this area tends east-west with the turn around at 15 miles at the Savage River. The Savage is the first of several parallel rivers running north from the mountains toward the Yukon River. The road rises and falls with the shoulders of the mountains ranging in elevation from 2000 to 2600 feet. The mountains are twice that height in this area, so impressive enough in their rise from the surrounding terrain.

The hills were mostly alpine tundra (at 2500 feet!). Closer to 2000 there were cottonwood and spruce forests, mostly sparse, but with ample willow and other brush. The colors, even on the gray day, were magnificent — the green of the spruce, the gorgeous yellows and golds of the cottonwoods, the autumn reds of the brush and wild flowers. We felt being there in September had paid one reward, buses into the Park or not.

Traffic was active and, like all the parks, you stop when others have stopped to see what they have seen. About 14 miles out we saw moose, a bull and cow. We were amazed. We had seen moose in Wyoming, but these were giants compared to those. These moose were gone on our return trip a few minutes later but we found seven others on the way back, a bull and six cows so far as we could tell. We assumed that the bull moose, like the elk, acquires a harem during the mating season. They were very close to the road.

There was some brightening of the sky while we were watching these moose, so we doubled back to an overlook that promised a view of Mount McKinley. Using the GPS, the DeLorme atlas and the compass (and adjusting for magnetic north), we knew exactly where to look to see The Great One 70 miles away, but the clouds remained. Because of weather, the peak is only visible 30% of the time year around, so we were not alone in our disappointment. We never did see it.

These photos were taken in October 2001.

This first is of course, Jefferson’s home, Monticello.
The second looks toward Charlottesville
and the University of Virginia.

It cost $8 to visit Monticello that day.
The change included a $2 bill.

NewMexiKen assumes every place is as pretty today as Albuquerque and — ironically I suppose — feels wanderlust. Or at least, wanderlist.

Rough Guides has this list of the Best of USA:

• Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
  The national park that started it all has it all, from steaming fluorescent hot springs and spouting geysers to sheer canyons and meadows filled with wild flowers and assorted grazing beasts.
• Hawaii’s volcanoes
  Hawaii’s Big Island grows bigger by the minute, as the world’s most active volcano pours molten lava into the ocean.
• Driving Highway 1
  The rugged Big Sur coastline, pounded by Pacific waves, makes an exhilarating route between San Francisco and LA.
• Monticello, Virginia
  A squirrel’s hop from the Blue Ridge Mountains, this elegant plantation was the home and final resting place of Thomas Jefferson, author of the Constitution and third US president.
• Skiing in the Rocky Mountains
  The site for some of the best skiing anywhere, from glitzy resorts to atmospheric mining towns.
• Country Music Hall of Fame, Tennessee
  Everything you ever wanted to know about country music, enshrined and explained in loving detail.
• New England in the fall
  Fall in the northeast is a breathtaking spectacle, the copious foliage presenting an ever-changing palette of color and light.
• Aurora borealis, Alaska
  Winter visitors to Alaska see the skies ablaze with the shimmering veils of the Northern Lights.
• Savannah, Georgia
  Mint juleps on wide verandas, horsedrawn carriages on cobbled streets and lush foliage draped with Spanish moss; this historic cotton port remains the South’s loveliest town.
• Ancestral Puebloan sites
  Scattered through desert landscapes like Arizona’s magnificent Canyon de Chelly, the dwellings of the Ancestral Puebloans afford glimpses of an ancient and mysterious world.

Arizona attractions of “exceptional interest and quality” from AAA.

• Canyon de Chelly National Monument
• Casa Grande Ruins National Monument
• Chiricahua National Monument
• Amerind Foundation Museum (Dragoon)
• Glen Canyon National Recreation Area
• Grand Canyon National Park
  Tusayan Ruin and Museum

• Lake Mead National Recreation Area
  Hoover Dam
  Lake Mead National Recreation Area

• Montezuma Castle National Monument
• Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park
• Navajo National Monument
• Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument
• Petrified Forest National Park and Painted Desert
• Phoenix
  Arizona State Capitol Museum
  Desert Botanical Garden
  Hall of Flame Museum of Firefighting
  Heard Museum

• Sharlot Hall Museum (Prescott)
• Oak Creek Canyon (Sedona)
• Havasu Canyon
• Boyce Thompson Arboretum State Park (Superior)
• Tombstone
• Tucson
  Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum
  Arizona State Museum
  Mission San Xavier del Bac
  Tucson Mountain Park
  Saguaro National Park

• Tumacácori National Historical Park
• Tuzigoot National Monument
• Walnut Canyon National Monument
• Wupatki National Monument

Following the Paper Trail: “California law grants access to the entire coast. A band of hikers finds out the hard way, along 1,196 miles, that it’s a work in progress.”

The Arizona Daily Star has an intersting and amusing description of the trip from Tucson to Nogales. One excerpt:

The hard-to-miss mountains on your left are the Santa Ritas. The highest peak is Mount Wrightson, named after William Wrightson, killed by Apaches near Sonoita in the 1860s.

The second-highest peak, topped by the Smithsonian Institution’s observatory, is called Mount Hopkins, after a man named Gilbert Hopkins. Also killed by Apaches. You may notice a theme here.

“Apache,” by the way, is not an Apache word. It’s a Pueblo Indian word, and it means “enemy.”

The Continental road leads up into Madera Canyon, where in March 1860, a young woman named Larcena Pennington Page was kidnapped by Apaches. She had malaria and couldn’t keep up the pace, so her captors stabbed her, took her clothes and shoes, and dumped her off a ledge.

Sick, wounded, starving and almost naked, she started back on her hands and knees. Nine to fourteen days later – accounts vary – she crawled back into the lumber camp where she had been abducted and nearly scared the loggers to death, so ghastly and unexpected was her appearance. Larcena Pennington, as she is usually called, lived to the age of 76 in Tucson, but her father, first husband and two of her brothers were eventually killed by Apaches. The number of Apaches killed by Penningtons is not recorded. A downtown street is named after the family.

The lumber camp in Madera Canyon was an outpost of the sprawling Canoa Ranch, part of which now lies under the town of Green Valley. A Scottsdale company has proposed developing other parts of the old land grant: plans include three or four ground-watered golf courses in addition to the seven Green Valley already has. The Canoa Ranch project promises to generate the only warfare in the Santa Cruz valley this coming year.

From Primary Sources in The Atlantic (January/February 2003)

Despite recent events fewer than one in five Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four could locate Afghanistan on a world map, and only one in seven could locate Iraq on a map of the Middle East and Asia. Nor did Americans have much success in identifying U.S. states: barely half could find New York, and only a third could find New Jersey. Worst of all, 10 percent of Americans could not find the United States on a world map. And although it provides little solace to consider some of the strange lacunae in Europeans’ knowledge (for instance, despite the 355-mile border between Germany and the Netherlands, nearly a third of Germans couldn’t identify the latter—which they seemed to locate just fine in 1940), Americans can take heart from this: more than a third of young adults in the United States were able to place the island used for the fourth season of the television series Survivor in the South Pacific.

And dinner at Caruso’s while I’m at it.

Best Italian — “charm, great service, consistency and an outdoor patio that’s a dining delight.”