Forays into Travel Blogging: Days 19-20: Wrangell St. Elias and Valdez

The place in Gakona did NOT have WiFi, so I’m back-publishing that one. Our drive that day only had two hiccups: we forgot the cold cuts that we’d just purchased in our refrigerator at the last motor lodge, and then we got distracted by a side road into Wrangell-St. Elias Nat’l Park that I didn’t know existed and just happened to be directly along our path! So obviously our planned arrival time of 5:15ish went straight out the window and we took the road.

The Nabesna Road begins in the town of Slana

We popped into the National Park Ranger Station before committing to the drive and chatted with a super cool ranger there. I'd guess she was my parents' age, rocking some killer blue eye liner, and totally chill about encouraging us to take the road into the park; "you'll only have to ford 3 creeks." She hooked us up with a CD audio tour of the road that we listened to and learned all kinds of cool information about the park itself but also the history of the First Peoples who've lived in the area for thousands of years and the more recently arrived homesteaders who were able to buy land from the US Gov't for $2.50 an acre as recently as 1986.

Wrangell-St. Elias itself is split into part National Park, part National Preserve, which just means that the different spaces have different regulations on hunting. Alaskan law allows for subsistence hunting and gathering so that folks can continue living off the land. As the sign in Slana said, "this place... [is] one of the last places on Earth where a person can live as an integral part of our wild environment." Not sure about last places on Earth, but definitely one of the last places in the USA.

43 miles of road, 28 miles unpaved

When the lunch meat fiasco was happening, I realized that our AirBnB hosts had never sent along a final address for their cabin, so I sent a message saying that we were en route from Tok and asking for it. The reply was two sentences: "Take the Tok Cutoff Road. We're the last cabin on the left." Those were our 150 miles worth of directions. Great.

4 fox kits we passed just before reaching Gakona

My goodness they were cute. Like tumbling dice, falling over each other.

We arrived at the cabin after 9pm (turns out their directions were adequate to get us there) and it was STIFLINGLY hot. I finally convinced M&D that the old refrigerator in the place was putting off so much heat that the space wasn't going to cool off, so we unplugged that and things got to be much more reasonable, fast. It was a pretty basic hunting cabin, albeit with pumped in water for a shower. Just fine for getting a good night's rest before officially joining the Richardson Hwy in the morning.

Yesterday's trip from Gakona down to Valdez was absolutely breathtaking. We stopped along the way at the Worthington Glacier for a hike and no one died.