Fairbanks and Family!

We made the most of a lie-in before the last leg of our train ride – we had certainly had some early starts & full days.  At 3.45pm we were back on the Denali Star heading to Fairbanks to “meet the family”!  We had dinner on the train, another great meal, & pulled into the train depot around 7.45pm.  By the time our bags were unloaded the cousins had arrived – Ann & Jennie.  We were staying with Ann, her husband Dave, and their son John but Jennie had come up for a few days from San Francisco where she lives, & her son Brian was visiting too, so it was quite a reunion.  We were made very welcome & spent some great times over the next few days visiting Fairbanks, & catching up with Aunt Magdalen, who is the only surviving sibling of my father.  We talked a lot about the Clohertys, and looked at some great old photos, including one of my father as a small child, which I had never seen.  Ann & I made a special trip to Walmart (not as scary as I had thought!) to get a copy made.  It was fantastic to make the family connection again after almost 40 years, & we are very much looking forward to them visiting us downunder in the future.

It was very interesting to hear about life in Fairbanks, especially in the winter months.  I think we were glad to be there in the summer, even though it really didn’t get dark – the sun drops just below the horizon for a couple of hours in the middle of the night, but it’s not dark.  It’s quite disconcerting to go to bed at 11pm with the sun still shining through the window and to wake up to sun again & not have any idea of what time it might be, or how long you’ve been asleep.

Ann very kindly got up at 5am on Sunday morning to take us to Fairbanks airport for our 6.25am flight to Seattle, then to Vancouver and finally Melbourne via Auckland.  We have nothing but praise for Air New Zealand’s Premium Economy class, great food & service & lots more space than in Economy.  We were also very pleased with the results of taking Melatonin for jetlag, we tried it in both directions & didn’t really suffer any effects from travelling.

More fun in Fairbanks

The 'other' car in the driveway - Chevy Camaro

Fairbanks has a fabulous privately owned car museum - a history of US vehicles dating back to the 1890's.  This is just one of more than 80 US manufactured vehicles in one of the best collections I have seen.

Fairbanks Family Fun - out with the boys!

Citabria floatplane in Dave's hanger at the aeropark!

Couldn't resist driving the Viper V10, housed in Dave's hanger.  Stunning performance!

If you can't find a Ferrari V12, then a Viper V10 is just as satisfying!

Fun with a Polaris ATV - climbs in and out of ditches without a sweat.

The Fairbanks Family

Julie with cousins Ann(left) and Jennie(right) and nephew Brian, at Alaska Adventure Park

Jules with Aunt Magdalen, enjoying a reunion after nearly 40 years.

Reaching across oceans and generations - Ann & Jennie(top) with Jules, Aunt Magdalen and Brian.

Anchorage to Denali

The State capital of Alaska is Anchorage and with only 300,000 people, it’s not a big city.  It has a large footprint, partly because of its 5 airfields, including its international airport as well as a huge army and airforce base.  But it does house over 25% of the state’s population.  It’s quite a nice place and we wished that we’d had more time there to explore, but on our 1 free day  we’d booked a tour to a glacier camp where we were to go dog-mushing.  However, once we got to base camp at the bottom of the glacier, we were told that the upper camp (at 4000ft) was snowed in and in white-out conditions.  We were extremely disappointed, given that this was to be a high-light of the trip – dog sledding across a glacier, high up in the mountains.   Consequently, our chopper pilot took us up to a lower glacier where we took a walk on the glacier, as well as flying to another glacier to check it out as it calved into Lake George.  On our walk, we marvelled at the huge crevasses which could easily swallow us if we made a mistake and we found, embedded in the ice, the body of a frozen mouse which may have been there for hundreds if not thousands of years – photo attached.

The following day we were up very early to catch the Denali Star railway train to Denali National Park.  The train is luxurious and extremely comfortable and the trip to Denali takes some 8 hours.  We arrived in Denali (or McKinley Village) mid-afternoon to find our very comfortable lodge at McKinley Village Lodge.  Denali National Park is 6 million acres of pristine wilderness taking in Mt McKinley, the highest mountain in North America at 20,320ft.  To see it without cloud is unusual and it was true to form.  Even with a fine (but very cold) day, we could see only a faint outline of the mountain, behind the mountain range that is the Alaska Mountains.  However, we did a wilderness tour into the national park and came across many animals in the wild, including Dall mountain sheep, moose, caribou, porcupines, ground squirrels and grizzly bears, as well as many varieties of native birds, including hawks, eagles and the local ptarmigan – a ground based (but not flightless) bird similar to a bush pigeon.  The park is sensational – a spectacular landscape – and the tours are well organised and the guides very knowledgeable.  Private entry to the park is banned. 

Tomorrow we catch the train again for the second part of our journey to Fairbanks, where we get to meet Julie’s aunt and cousins, who Julie hasn’t seen since her teen years.  Much excitement!   If only we could get a good night’s sleep – the sun sets about 11pm at the moment and it’s daylight again at 4am.  It’s a little disconcerting returning from dinner with bright sunshine and a temperature of about 5 degrees.  Too cold to sit outside with our last glass of wine!

Colony Glacier falling into Lake George

Bloody cold!

Dwarfed by the glacial features.

Frozen mouse - how old is it?

Calving glacier.

Hanging out! - of the side of the Denali Star

Savage River from the rail line

Dall mountain sheep

Mountain Goat!

The Panhandle

The Panhandle is that strip of Alaskan territory which runs down the west coast of Canada, the northernmost part of which we had now reached – Haines and Skagway.  We chose to stay in Haines because the cruise boats don’t go there and it is a very pretty town with a lovely harbour and a welcome as warm as any we’ve encountered.  A feature of the town is Fort Seward which was established around 1900 to control the huge numbers of gold prospectors travelling into The Klondike, where gold was discovered in the 1890’s.  The fort area has been largely restored and converted to hotels and accommodation and is very pretty.  Again our accommodation was fairly basic but comfortable and everything is within walking distance, including a couple of great restaurants we found.

Early one morning we caught the fast ferry across to Skagway, some 40 minutes away.  Skagway harbour contained 2 Princess line cruise ships, a Disney line and a Holland America ship, total capacity of some 7000 - 8000 holiday makers and Skagway was jumping.  The town looks like a Hollywood film set  - all painted store fronts representing the wild west.  There are dozens of jewellery stores, gift shops and ice-cream parlours and people everywhere.  The main object of our visit was to ride the White Pass railway which traces the trail used by the gold diggers to get to the Klondike goldfields.  The railway is fantastic and the track is amazing, climbing some 3000 ft through the White Pass into Canada, in the distance of some 20miles.  The scenery is amazing with raging waterfalls and rapids on the Skagway River and sheer drops of hundreds of metres into ravines, where many men and horses died making their way to the goldfields.  Most of the carriages are restored originals, some dating back to 1898 and the trip is spectacular – trestle bridges and tunnels and metres of snow by the side of the line.  We stopped at White Pass as this is the entry point to Canada and the pass is surrounded by mountains covered in snow.  The conditions in the 1890’s must have been terrible for the gold diggers, but this sort of thing happened around the world, wherever gold was discovered.

Returning to Haines, we discovered that the weekend was a holiday weekend for Memorial Day and the travelling Vietnam Wall – a replica of the one in Washington – was set up on the parade ground of the old Fort.  It was also the weekend of the Haines Brewfest, an annual event celebrating home brewers and boutique beer and the whole town was buzzing, with campervans, trucks and beer-lovers everywhere.  Every available space in the camping grounds was taken with small tents and we could only imagine what it would be like sleeping on the near-frozen ground. 

Early Saturday morning saw us loading suitcases into a small (5 seat) aircraft for a flight to Juneau, there to catch a jet to Anchorage and the next leg of our journey.  Winding our way through mountains in low cloud and rain in a small aircraft is not the best way to spend a Saturday morning and along the way we saw a number of whales in Frederick Sound, from as low as 300ft.  Our pilot, who seemed to be young enough to still be in high school, mentioned that he’d turn around if conditions got too bad, but he found a way through and we’ve lived to tell the tale.