We left Palmer under heavy skies and drove the super-scenic Glenn Highway eastward. The road is in fair to middling condition and runs along the Matanuska River and past the Matanuska Glacier. This is a fairly sizeable glacier, being nearly two miles wide where it terminates at the river it has created. Some glaciers are growing, some are ebbing and some are stable – the Matanuska is one of the stable ones.
Which leads me to a question I’ve been pondering since we encountered our first glacier in Alaska. Why do folks find them so fascinating that they’ll go miles out of their way to see one? After all, they are just old snow and some of it fairly dirty snow at that. They generally hang out in inaccessible places, make the area around them chillier than you thought it would be ( and haven’t dressed appropriately) and don’t do anything except at, you should pardon the expression, a glacial pace. But folks can’t seem to get enough of them.
The Milepost has advised us to be on the look-out for trumpeter and tundra swans in the small ponds that are dotted around the landscape. We saw a number of swans but from a moving vehicle and at a great distance, we couldn’t tell if they were trumpeters or tundras. We’ve been told there’s a goodly difference in size (which could only be judged if they were side by side) and that the tundra has a small yellow area on the beak, whereas the trumpeter’s beak is all black. Either way, they are elegant and regal and wonderful to see in the wild.
The Glenn Highway intersects with the Richardson near the town of Glennallen and a few miles north we picked up the Tok Cutoff. The cutoff is not exactly a speedway and we encountered areas of construction with some lengthy delays waiting for the “follow me” car. We had confirmed reservations in Tok so were in no part- icular hurry. The clouds were quite low that day so we weren’t able to see the wonderful views of the Wrangle Mountain Range The Milepost bragged about.
Now that we were in Tok we had a steady and consistent supply of ice with which to keep the refrigerator cold. Or at least cold-ish. It had a nervous breakdown while we were in Palmer and the halibut (and a variety of other frozen foods) became endangered. It turned out that Russ and Rochelle were in Tok at the same time we were and so I created a chicken dish to use up some of the food cache and we had a vicious game of Aggravation.
There was a winding down feeling in Tok. Maybe it had something to do with all the sales at the gift shops and the empty RV sites and lack of traffic. We couldn’t help but notice that some of the aspens along the Glenn and Tok Cutoff had started to take on some color and the fireweed was down to its last few blossoms and showing tufts of “cotton”.
Russ and Rochelle left to take the Top of the World Highway from Chicken to Dawson City while we opted for a more sane route toward “home”. Which is how we came to be in Destruction Bay along with a caravan of about 20 coaches. When the caravans stop, the owner of the Destruction Bay Lodge takes off his camp- ground owner/chef/baker hat and puts on his entertainer hat and we were invited to join in the evening’s festivities. He sang and told stories about the path he took to this wide spot in the Alaska Highway. We were all particularly interested in what one does in Destruction Bay in the dead of winter. It’s a long drive to Whitehorse for supplies, that’s for sure.
The trip to Skagway and our visit there deserves a chapter all to itself and so that will follow shortly.
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