6/13/18 – Alaska at last!!!

It took us 3 weeks and almost 2,200 miles, but we finally arrived in Alaska!  (I'm not counting the almost 2 years of planning and preparation it took to get us going.)

The Canadian Beaver Creek Customs Station is about 20 miles before the border and the US Port of Entry, not back-to-back like others we've seen.  I don't know why.

We crossed the border, then stopped for the obligatory pictures at the "Welcome to Alaska" sign at the international boundary.  

There’s an obelisk with “Canada” on one side and “United States” on the other.  You can actually see the border because they’ve mown a 20’-wide swath along the 141^st meridian to mark exactly where it is.

There's an Alaska-Yukon benchmark that’s actually a bench!

The US Customs station Port Alcan is about half a mile further on.  The sign showed the height of the portico was 12’10”,  but we were both concerned because it didn't look high enough for us to go under. George was watching up for that, and barely saw a warning light come on as we drove through.  

When we got to the window, the border patrol guy asked the standard questions. 
Then he asked if we’d had any healthcare issues recently.  
(That was nice but unprecedented.)
“No,” we said.  
He asked if there was anything that could cause the sensors to pick up radiation? 
I told him I’d had radiation treatments last summer.  
“Shouldn’t last that long”, he said.

He started naming some things that could trigger the alarm.  When he said “old military compasses”, George had an "AHA!" moment, then told him he had an old Army compass in the backpack behind the seat.  We were told to park at the end of the building and come inside.

He seemed to be the only one working the window, so we sat in the office waiting for him to get a few more people through.  Finally he grabbed a classy looking Geiger counter and went outside.  He was gone about 5 minutes, so after he found the compass, he probably checked out the rest of the truck. Since he didn’t even ask for keys for the 5^th wheel, I knew I didn’t have to worry about putting everything back together before we could leave.

He told us that military compasses made before the mid-60s had radium dials—and that was it.  Who would have guessed their equipment was that sensitive!  The agent was polite, thanked us, apologized for the delay, then went back to work.  (This is what you get when you travel with old guys who keep souvenirs from their time in the service.  When we go home, we'll put the thing on the dash!)

We’re in Alaska now—and these mountains are in the Alaska Range!   

A few more pics here:  Entering Alaska 

6/12/18 - Kluane National Park & Preserve

The drive on the Alaska Highway west from Whitehorse kept getting more spectacular.  The mountains were getting bigger and closer and whiter.  

These are the St. Elias Mountains up ahead in Kluane National Park & Reserve in Yukon, Canada. 

We stopped for a break at Historic Canyon Creek Bridge, built by Sam McGee and some other guy for the goldminer's stampede in the early 1900's.  (You probably know Sam McGee's name from the Robert Service poem--this was the real guy.) There's a new bridge just behind where I'm standing, but this is most of the original.  Looks a lot more interesting than the replacement.

Haines Junction is on the edge of Kluane National Park. Once we turned northwest, we could see more of the mountains in the park, although we weren’t actually in the park at that time.  I’d missed the Visitor Center as we went through town, but I plan to stop on the way home.

I have no idea how George can do it, but he can take pictures while he’s driving without taking his eyes off the road!  Frequently he takes pictures of what the same ones I do, and mine are blurry from the bounces on the road and his horizon is still level.

I don’t know the name of the mountain, but look at all those glaciers!

The park map shows the St. Elias Mountains—the far side is the Icefield Range and the side near the highway is the Kluane Range.  There seem to be only two roads into the park, both noted as “rough, narrow 4x4 road”.  There are a few hiking trails, but it looks like an awful lot of work to me.  I like hiking, but tend to choose shorter, less strenuous—and definitely warmer—trails.

Just across the Slims River bridge is the Thachäl Dhäl Visitor Centre.  The picture of the building in the brochure looks forest green, but it must be faded.  I told George to get ready to turn at the green building.  He didn’t think it looked green.  We finally made it into the parking lot.

Talk about location—the Kluane Range is behind it, across the road is Kluane Lake and beside the building is Sheep Mountain (now called by it’s old name Thachäl Dhäl).

Sheep Mountain is named for the Dall Sheep which are very common here.  There are powerful telescopes and binoculars on the deck next to the visitor center, lined up to see the sheep high up on the mountain.  Sheep count today was 30.  You’re going to have to trust me on this, (and maybe squint and close one eye), but the White dots are actually Dall Sheep.  The little tiny white dots are lambs.

Sorry, but this is the best I can do for long distance with this camera.  I’m well aware that there are cameras who could make them not only visible but really bring out the wow factor.   This is real life, long distance, and it's actually more than I could see just with my eyes.  And there are really quite a few animals up there—not just signs advising you to look for the animals.  I’m happy.

More pics in Flickr:  Kluane Natl Park & Reserve 

6/11/18 – Beringia Interpretive Centre

George chose the first museum of the day; I got to choose the second.  Located right next door to the Transportation Museum and the Whitehorse Airport, the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre is easy to get to.  It’s also easy to recognize even from the highway because there’s a family of woolly mammoths standing out by the parking lot, not something you see many places along the Alaska Highway.

Along the path and through the woods is another animal you can’t ever see anymore—a giant beaver.  I had to hang onto him to get him to stand still so George could take our picture.

We followed the path to a building that looks like it’s not finished yet, although my guess is that the yellow arches are supposed to signify woolly mammoth tusks or scimitar cat teeth.

 

Just inside the door is a giant globe.  I was standing there looking at it and a very nice docent came over, asked if I’d like some information on what I was looking at.  I said yes and he started explaining about The Last Great Ice Age. (I could tell he was capitalizing and italicizing each word as he said it.  He was really enthused about this museum and his job!) 

I didn’t stand in the right place to take the picture, but there’s a land bridge between North America and Asia that remained uncovered by glaciers during the Ice Age. This sub-continent of eastern Siberia, Alaska and Yukon was named “Beringia”, after the Bering Sea.  It was cold but didn’t get a lot of precipitation.  Without precipitation you don’t get snow and ice.  Without snow and ice, animals can live on the grassy  tundra.

Skeletons of prehistoric mammals have been found all over the area.  The most impressive is the woolly mammoth. I don't know if we're most impressed by big extinct animals because they're big or because they're extinct.  

I don’t think I’d ever heard of the Giant Short-Faced Bear.  He was bigger than a grizzly and probably would have not have been impressed with bear spray.

The docent told us that some fossil bones of a big ground sloth had been sent to then VP Thomas Jefferson.  The future president not only thought the old bones and claws were from a lion, but he didn't believe in species going extinct and thought these critters were still wandering around the continent. When he sent Louis & Clark out exploring in 1802, he asked them specifically to look for live animals.  The docent credits the Jefferson's ground sloth with the expansion of the US.  I don't know if that's valid, but Lewis & Clark probably weren't looking forward to dealing with an animal this size, one who probably didn't move as slowly as today's smaller sloths who didn't make it onto the Extinct List.  

Beringia didn't have saber-tooth tigers. The region's big cat is called a "Scimitar Cat".  They mounted the bones, and then reconstructed what they think he might have looked like.  I think paleontologists have finally admitted that they haven’t a clue whether the big cats had stripes. This one seems to have both--as well as very large teeth.

We watched a video—but I think I would have enjoyed talking to the docent longer. We had talked about other fossil beds we'd seen during our travels.  He was excited that we'd been to Idaho and actually seen a Hagerman horse fossil. 

I really enjoyed this museum—although I think we missed a section. The brochure I picked up said there were frozen ice-age carcasses uncovered by gold miners, and there were exhibits of paleontologists’ work in northern Yukon.  I don’t remember seeing any of that so I would go again, but George probably won’t want to when we go back through Whitehorse.

The pictures are here: Beringia Interpretive Centre