Day 53 (July 6). Glenn Highway; Alaska

From: Anchoage, Alaska

To: Tok, Alaska

Miles today: 322

Total miles: 11012

[Note to readers: I again apologize for the delay in these posts.  It seems that "up north" even places that have WiFi don't really support image uploads.  I think things will be better now that I am in southern British Columbia.]

On the road again.  I left Virginia seven weeks ago; seven weeks is the amount of time I spent hiking on the Appalachian Trail when I was 21.  Now that I have ridden to Alaska, I have to ride all the way back.  This will take me another five weeks, the same amount of time it took me to ride from San Francisco to Houston when I was 22.  How do I feel about getting/having to ride the cycle for five more weeks in order to get home?  Pretty damn fortunate.

I left Anchorage on AK 1, the Glenn Highway, for Tok again.. This 320-mile stretch will complete a large triangle between Tok, Fairbanks, and Anchorage. Just past Tok I will turn south on AK 2, the Alaska Highway (versus the Top of the World Highway I came in on) and head back to Whitehorse in Yukon and then down to British Columbia.

It was one of those rare summer days in Alaska where the sun was shining, the air was warm (85 degrees by the late afternoon), and visibility was unlimited.  After the town of Palmer, the route turned into the mountains; the road was nicely twisty, and the views were spectacular. It was one of those days when progress was ridiculously slow, not because of road conditions, but because I was continually stopping to take pictures. Roaring rivers next to the road; snow-covered mountain peaks rising over the taiga; even glaciers.  I suspect the views around Denali were at least as spectacular, but I didn’t see much of those. These will do.

River, mountains, forest, blue sky; you get the picture.

Folks, that is a glacier.

 

Cool pattern on the taiga floor

Approaching the Wrangell Mountains. You come around a curve and this view greets you.

Despite the modest traffic and the two-lane nature of the highway, this route did not feel nearly as remote to me as earlier travels.  I think this was due in large part to the fact that I had 4G cell phone bars much of the way, and gasoline was available in many places along the road.  The road surface was good, with a few exceptions, and there were plenty of “scenic view” road signs with large pull-outs.