The more than 1,500 miles of the Alaska Highway were adventure traveled in last week's installment and that accomplishment would allow us the opportunity to spend too little time exploring a state so large that if superimposed (using the same scale) over the lower 48, the Aleutian WW II National Historic Area would be situated in lower California, the Point Barrow National Arctic Research Lab would caress the Canadian border in North Dakota, and Alaska's one remaining Indian Reserve, Annette Island, would be a speck on the Florida panhandle.

Alaska is BIG.

We enjoyed the Palace Theatre's “Golden Heart Review” in Fairbanks which is a fabulous comedic segue into why anyone would live in Alaska where everything is super-sized including the tour buses that brought most of the audience. 

After a few days of the sights of Fairbanks which included the stern-wheeler cruise on the Tanana, we drove to Livengood (pop. 10) to the end of the pavement and looked off into the distance and imagined the more than 400 miles to Prudhoe Bay and the origin of the Alaska Pipeline, a pipeline that would parallel our journey south on sections of road to Valdez, it's terminus.

Near Fairbanks is the town of North Pole where we learned about frigid winters and engine warmers. When we visited the high school, I noticed what looked like RV electrical plug-ins. They were plug-ins for student vehicles so that during a day of classes the engine oil would not freeze rendering the car immobile. How does one breathe when it’s that cold? 

Our next major stop was Denali National Park and Preserve. 

We wanted to see Denali, the tallest mountain in North America at over 20,000 feet but we arrived during a usual cloudy day that obliterated the entire mountain.

At the visitor's center we learned that record is kept as to when exactly the mountain is viewed, and it hadn't been seen for over three weeks. We camped outside the park and the next day traveled the only road in the park in a school bus that served double duty as a tour bus in the summer.  The shallow foot hills of the massive mountain were visible, and we witnessed many forms of wildlife including golden grizzles and Dall sheep.

Unbelievably, on our third day the dawn arrived without a single wisp of a cloud and “the high one” was revealed in stark white contrast to a deep blue sky. Kodak made a fortune that day. We now concurred with author Steve Buskirk that “such a mountain must be seen, for only in the seeing does it become a reality.”

The colossal grandeur of the showpiece of the Alaska Range is beyond my limited descriptive use of language. More than 400,000 visitors from the world over, journey to this mountain Mecca each year but few glimpse it in its entire snow and stone glory as evidenced by the Asian group that had spent 23 days in the area and left the day before we arrived without a sighting.

We then motored south to Anchorage where we learned about scrimshaw, Russian stack dolls, ulus, and the strict rules about traveling through Canada with Native goods. We were safe buying an ulu even though we had no plans to build an igloo.

The Glenn and Richardson Highways took us to Valdez where we took the opportunity to take a chartered boat to witness the calving of a glacier and mingle with walruses as they relaxed on the resulting icebergs. I had no idea they were blue due to their density. Icebergs can be as small as cars or in the case of the largest, which formed 15 years after our trip, cover 4,500 square miles or the size of the state of Connecticut.

We also made the decision in Valdez to sell back our ferry reservations for the Inside Passage and travel like the locals sleeping on deck chairs and getting on and off as we pleased. This provided us with the opportunity to visit the Bald Eagle sanctuary of Haines, the only state capitol, Juneau, not accessible by road of any kind, Sitka and its onion domes of Russian heritage, the ancestral totem culture of the Mescalero Apache, and the wettest city in the U.S., Ketchikan, where the rain gauge in the center of town measures precipitation in feet.

Our last ferry stop was Prince Rupert, British Columbia which left us with about 1,300 miles to the town made famous in the first Rambo movie, Hope, and on to the lower 48 for another 1,500-mile sprint to New Mexico.  The Volvo purred valiantly during those final 3,000 miles. The repaired exhaust on the Alaska Highway maintained its integrity and the repaired air-conditioner on a Canadian side street made driving east of the Cascades very pleasurable.

By the first week in August I had detailed the car and returned the car-top carrier with a “We Drove the Alaska Highway” souvenir sticker displayed prominently. A traveling salesman spotted the For-Sale sign on the freshly waxed Orange Crate and purchased it without so much as opening a door or attempting to negotiate the price asked, which was enough to truly make the trip “priceless.” 

The new owner took delivery of the Orange Crate and drove straight to Phoenix, Arizona, thus ending another automotive chapter of the Farrington travel chronicles.

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