Tom turned the Jeep around at the Nabesna sign and drove us back to the airstrip. While we were there taking photos, Juan drove up in his white van with the canoe on top. “I saw your note,” he told me. “Let’s go to Eagle together! I’m going to explore the mines then I’ll pick you up from the campsite this evening.” I snapped a picture of him as he drove away and we continued back down the road.

Juan’s white van with a canoe on top, just visible in the distance.

Gary and Tom offered to drive me back to their RV near the highway and let me sleep the night in their spare bed but I wanted to go to Eagle with Juan so I politely declined. They dropped me at the campsite and I waved them off. Then I packed up my tent, made myself some dinner and lazed around as I waited for Juan to turn up. And waited. And waited some more. Eventually, it was 10:30pm and I gave up waiting for him and put my tent back up.

“I wonder if he’s OK?” I mentioned idly to some of the other campers I’d been hanging out with and then I went to sleep.

In the morning I packed up my tent again and was sitting drinking a cup of tea when Juan pulled into the campground entrance, a couple of hundred yards from where I was sitting. Oh good! I thought. He must have been delayed by something last night but at least he’s here now. Unfortunately, my positive mood didn’t last long.

Rather than driving around the campground’s loop road to look at all the sites, he gave a cursory look to the left and the right, evidently decided that I must have already left, and put his van into reverse. Realising what was happening, I jumped to my feet and sprinted as fast as I could towards him, yelling out his name, but it was too late. By the time I reached the campground entrance he was already on the road and the last I saw of him was his van disappearing around the corner in a literal cloud of dust as I stood a hundred yards behind him waving my arms in the air and shouting.

I remained motionless there for a minute as the dust settled, letting what had just happened sink in, and then I began to swear loudly. I stomped back to the campsite to tell the other campers my tale of woe. “That idiot!” one of them said, “Why didn’t he drive round the loop?”

“I don’t know!” I said with considerable feeling. I’d been looking forward to going to Eagle for a long time, and now I was reduced to thumbing a ride out on a road with almost no traffic, after turning down Tom and Gary’s offer of a ride and a bed in their RV the night before. I waved the other campers goodbye, grabbed my pack and stomped out to the road again, where I sat down in the dirt, made myself a sandwich and continued to loudly curse the Juan that got away.

Once I’d begun to calm down, and realised I wasn’t going to have any luck flagging down the non-existent passing traffic, I wandered over to the bar to ask if anyone there was driving out. As it happened, I was in luck. A guy called Kenny (from Alaska this time, not Kentucky) was heading out within half an hour and was happy to take me with him in his RV. He was heading towards Anchorage, the opposite direction to Eagle, but it’s good to be flexible in life so I took a ride with him as far as the Richardson Highway. I’d been intending to head to the far north of Alaska at some point and it seemed like the wind was blowing me there now.

Kenny was a nice guy and we chatted away quite happily for the couple of hours we spent together. Before he left, he rummaged around in the back of his RV and came out with a big bag of smoked salmon and some cheese and crackers, which he gave to me. Once he’d driven off to the south, I sat in the dirt by the side of the road and savoured this feast before I stood up again to hitch.

Home-smoked Alaskan red salmon. Absolutely as good as it gets!

I stood there for an hour or so without much luck until a large pick-up truck pulled over and the guy in the passenger seat got out. “Where are you headed?” he asked me.

“North,” I said.

“We’re going to Fairbanks,” he said. “Get in.”

He introduced himself as Chris and the driver as Marcus. They’d been down in Chitina for the weekend fishing but it hadn’t been a successful trip: dipnetting from the bank of the Chitina River, they’d only caught four salmon while people with boats in the middle of the river were hauling in dozens. It seemed like they’d had a fun time, nevertheless.

A few minutes after they picked me up, Chris turned around to look at me. “I’m just warning you so you don’t freak out,” he said. “We’ve got a gun we need to test so we’re going to pull over into a gravel pit and try it out. Don’t worry!”

“OK,” I said, but stayed a little warily in the truck once they pulled over until it became clear that they weren’t going to shoot me.

They picked a pile of gravel as a target and were firing at it from about twenty feet. I got out the truck and Marcus beckoned me over. “Have you ever fired a gun?” he asked. I shook my head. “Well this is your lucky day!” he said, and handed it to me. It was a .44 Magnum, which is apparently a big powerful handgun (“like learning to drive in a Formula 1 car,” Marcus said later) and they gave me careful instructions to hold it tightly with both hands to stop the recoil hitting me in the forehead.

I hate the idea of handguns, the purpose of which is almost invariably to kill other humans, and I’m so glad they’re illegal back home, but gun culture is hugely embedded in the Alaskan psyche, and I felt like I should experience firing one at least once. So I did. It went off with a bang and a huge ringing in my ears: they’d forgotten to give me a set of their ear plugs. “I’m so sorry!” said Chris, as I squeezed the sides of my face in discomfort. “The ringing will die down eventually.”

We got back in the truck and Marcus handed me my camera. He’d suggested taking a photo of me to mark my first time, so here it is:

Apparently my technique was pretty good for a beginner, which is not something I’m particularly proud of.

The ringing in my ears died down within twenty minutes or so. We drove for several hours, first through some pretty scenery and then through the mother of all rainstorms. It was really hammering it down. I hadn’t told them where I was going, other than north, but they seemed content to keep driving me. They were fun guys and we had a good time laughing and joking before they entered into a long conversation about guns and military equipment (Chris was quite high-ranking in the US army, it turned out) and I fell asleep.

I woke up when we stopped for gas in Delta Junction and then again nearer Fairbanks. The horrible storm had persisted and Marcus said he felt bad for me because I was planning on sleeping in my tent. “You can stay at my house if you like,” he said, after calling his wife to make sure it was OK. Of course, I said yes. He lived with his wife and three kids a few miles down the road to Chena Hot Springs, just outside Fairbanks. We arrived late at night and they let me sleep on an airbed in their lounge.

“We’re going to church tomorrow morning,” Marcus said, just before he went to bed. “You’d be welcome to join us.”

“I’d be happy to come along,” I said, “but I’m not actually a Christian. I’m an atheist.”

“That’s fine!” he said, brightly. “It’s an Evangelical church. You’ll be very welcome. They’ll want to convert you!”

“Well in that case, sure!” I said, and that was that. He went to bed and I stayed up late doing a load of very-necessary laundry.

In the morning I went to my first ever Sunday church service. It wasn’t nearly as intense as I was expecting from an Evangelical church in the US. We sung hymms, the pastor talked for a while, some very earnest children spoke about their experience at a Christian summer camp… and then kept on speaking about it, for what seemed like an inordinately long time. Fortunately I wasn’t along in thinking this. Marcus and his family eventually got fed up and led me quietly out of the room. “I’m sorry, it doesn’t normally last that long. It should have been done half an hour ago,” he said.

They took me out for a very-tasty brunch and then asked me where I wanted to go. Overnight I’d decided that now was the time to head to the Arctic. They took me to the visitor centre to get maps and information about the dirt roads to the north, then dropped me at a viewing area for the oil pipeline (of which much more later) just off the highway a few miles north of Fairbanks. I got a ride quickly and didn’t end up at all where I was expecting that night, but that’s a story for another post.

Total distance hitchhiked: 4,330 km.
Total number of rides: 37.

After thinking about it for more than a month, it was finally time to go to Nabesna. I was given a ride north from Caribou Creek by a girl who worked at Sheep Mountain Lodge, the restaurant where Chelsea was working when I met her, and put up in a cabin by a couple of this girl’s friends in a motel they were renovating by the side of the Glenn Highway. The next morning I was given a ride to Glennallen by a Swiss German couple on their honeymoon and another ride from a guy who told me he’d been a buffalo in a previous life. “I got shot by a squaw with a bow and arrow,” he told me, “and they made a teepee out of my hide. I remember a dog pissing against the side of me in camp.”

I stood on the corner of the Richardson Highway and the Tok Cutoff for a long time before getting my next ride. It was with a Spanish guy called Juan, in a bashed-up old van he’d bought for $800, which he was intending to drive from Alaska to Argentina over the next year and a half. We got on well. We were about the same age, doing roughly the same thing, and both had some good stories to tell. His best one was driving up the Dalton Highway to the Arctic at the end of April and breaking down a hundred miles north of Coldfoot. Fortunately he’d brought two months’ worth of food so he waited it out for a couple of weeks until someone came by and helped him fix his van.

He was also heading onto the Nabesna Road but he stopped at Mile 1 because he wanted to go to the visitor centre in the morning. There wasn’t anywhere great there to camp so I hitched up to mile 6 and pitched my tent next to a nice lake. There were a couple of guys in their fifties on a fishing trip camping in the same spot who were a bit suspicious of me when I first arrived, but before long they were sharing food with me and we talked the evening away.

A nice lake to camp beside.

It’s difficult to describe quite how in the middle of nowhere the Nabesna Road is. There are only two roads into the 13.2 million acres of Wrangell St. Elias National Park. One of them leads out to the town of McCarthy, which I’ve already written about in another post, and which has a summertime population of a few hundred. The Nabesna Road is much less populated than that. It’s one tiny strip of human activity in the middle of the mountains, glaciers and endless forest of a national park the size of Switzerland. Or in other words, it’s exactly up my street.

Up my very-isolated street.

The two guys from my campsite gave me a ride up the road the next morning where I was in for a shock: there was a bar! Called the Sportsman’s Lodge, it was a real backwoods Alaskan bar, complete with a large Sarah Palin sign on the outside, a poster inside of a scantily-clad woman standing barefoot in the snow above the caption “Alaskans wear fur bikinis” and another sign which read:

GUNS ARE WELCOME ON PREMISES
Please keep all weapons holstered unless need arises.
In such a case, judicious marksmanship is appreciated.

The old bartender was probably the grumpiest, most unpleasant person I met in my entire time in Alaska but I’d be back in the bar that evening because there wasn’t anywhere else to go. In the meantime, I went to the Park Service campground next door to the bar, set up my tent and made some lunch. I was just packing my stuff away into my bear-proof food container when a brand-new very fancy Dodge Charger pulled up to the spot next to me and out got a guy in his sixties. He came over and introduced himself as Kenny from Kentucky and asked if I minded if he joined me for lunch.

“Of course not,” I said, so he collected a bag of food from his car and came and sat down.

“Where’s your car?” he asked me, and when I told him I had hitchhiked there, and was intending to hitchhike all the way to Chile, he suddenly got very excited. “I’m a backpacker too,” he told me. “I know what it’s like. Here, take this!”

He gave me an orange. “I know that whatever food I put in front of you, you’ll eat it,” he said, which was a perfectly reasonable assumption because I was almost always hungry and forever losing weight. By chance, though, I had just eaten an enormous can of pink salmon and a couple of bagels and was for once genuinely full. The problem was, he was so enthusiastic about giving me food that I didn’t have the heart to say no. So I ate the orange, and the crackers and large hunk of cheese that followed, and then the apple and a couple of biscuits and thanked him for it because he was a cheerful and friendly guy.

After letting our food settle for a while, Kenny drove us out a few miles to a dried-out creek bed and we went for a hike into the hills. It was pretty but we were following a quad-bike trail which Kenny didn’t seem to enjoy so we went for a wander around a local lake instead.

Hiking with Kenny from Kentucky, before we turned around.

At about 6pm we headed back to the campground and Kenny cooked us a light dinner on his camping stove. I was used to eating at 11pm and going to sleep at 2 or 3am in the part of the night where it at least pretended to get partially dark but Kenny was an early-to-bed kind of guy and I didn’t want to turn down his enthusiastic hospitality. After dinner we sat around drinking tea and Kenny asked me a surprising question: “How often do you shower?”

“Whenever I can get one for free,” I said, honestly. “Which varies a lot. I had one four days ago at the homestead I was staying on.”

“I like being clean,” he declared. “I’m going to go to the bar and pay to have a shower and I’d like to get you one too.”

That was $7 worth of shower, which is most of a day’s budget for me, so I wasn’t about to say no! I grabbed some clean clothes (or more accurately some somewhat-less-dirty clothes) and Kenny drove us around the corner. Inside, there were five or six people drinking beer at the bar and a couple of guys sitting on armchairs in front of the TV. Kenny showered first, in a bathroom beside the bar, and I sat around chatting with the guys on armchairs. Everyone in the bar was either related to the old bartender or worked for him. Other than the bartender himself, it was a friendly place.

I had my shower, making the most of the deliciously-hot water, and was drying myself off when I heard Kenny’s voice drifting in through the door. “That guy in there is amazing,” he was telling someone. “He’s from England and he’s hitchhiking from Alaska to Chile on a budget of $10 a day!”

He went on in the same enthusiastic vein for the couple of minutes it took to dress myself, and by the time I opened the door I was a local celebrity. “Come over here and have a slice of pizza,” a middle-aged lady at the corner of the bar told me. “Let me buy you a beer,” said her husband. “I want a hug,” said her sister and before long I was holding a simultaneous conversation with everyone in the room, being asked to sign the guest book, given as much smoked red salmon as I could eat (“we’re drowning in the stuff, go for it”) and being invited back the next morning for pancakes. It was a lot of fun.

I got a good night’s sleep, waved Kenny off as he drove up to Fairbanks to start a tour of the Arctic and then went and had my pancakes. “Have you seen Juan, the Spanish guy?” I asked in the bar. We had talked about going to the town of Eagle together once we left Nabesna. I had always wanted to go to Eagle and he wanted company after driving around on his own for so long.

“Is he the one with the canoe on his van? He drove by yesterday afternoon. He’s up the road somewhere.”

So I walked out onto the road and stuck out my thumb. Before long I was picked up by Gary and Tom, a pair of retired brothers from Chicago on a road trip around Alaska, which was a huge piece of luck on a road with only a handful of passing cars each day. They were staying in an RV they’d parked near the highway but were driving a Jeep to have a look round the mine buildings at the end of the Nabesna Road. A few miles after they picked me up we passed Juan’s van parked at a hiking trailhead and I slid a note through the crack in his window telling him where I was camping. Then we drove on.

Four miles before the end of the road was the Devil’s Mountain Lodge, an outfit specialising in backcountry hunting trips. They had their own rustic airfield.

Rustic airfield.

It was a good thing Tom and Gary had a Jeep because the road beyond this point was pretty awful. Gary often had to get out and guide Tom through the muddy ruts so we didn’t get stuck.

A very minor rut. There were some incredibly deep ones further along.

After a few slow miles, we turned off when we saw the mine building. The surrounding ground showed clear signs of its industrial past.

That ground has minerals in it. Or pollution.

Rusted, abandoned barrels.

We climbed up the steep little hill to the mine building. The actual mine was way up in the mountains behind but they had a cable car carrying the ore down to here.

Elegantly crumbling.

Before I explored the building, I followed an overgrown path along the ridge to the left and found various other structures hidden in the undergrowth.

Generator building being swallowed by the trees.

Generator.

Further along were several buildings in a row connected by a cracked boardwalk. They looked like company houses for the miners. They were clearly being squatted in because there was a new pair of boots sitting in the entryway to one of them and I’m pretty sure I heard snoring coming from inside. I didn’t linger long enough to take any close-up photos because people in the woods in Alaska can be jealous of their space and I didn’t feel like getting shot at.

Company housing.

After wandering around in the undergrowth for twenty minutes, I went back to explore the big building.

Ground floor. The door with the Keep Out! sign is up that ladder and off to the left.

After exploring the lower two floors I climbed up a fairly-precarious wooden staircase, similar to the one in the photo above, and crouched down beside a huge cast-iron vat to take a photo of the mountains out of the window. Framing them neatly was difficult from the position I was in but it’s still one of my favourite photos from my time in Alaska because it was such a memorable experience climbing around inside those old, collapsing buildings from the gold rush era. Also, a lot of Alaskans I met had been never to Nabesna, so it’s pretty cool to be able to say that I have!

One of my favourite photos.

Once we’d explored the buildings to our satisfaction, we drove the last few hundred yards to the end of the road, just to see what was there. We bumped into this sign and realised that Nabesna was specifically the name of the company town where I found that row of buildings, which provided a nice sense of completion to our exploration.

The end of the road.

Total distance hitchhiked: 3,865 km.
Total number of rides: 35.
Distance from Nabesna: 0 km.

In the morning, Chelsea took me over to meet Jim and Bea, the couple who own the homestead. They’re interesting, lovely people. He’s in his eighties now and his family were among the original Alaskan homesteaders so he’s lived at Caribou Creek, surrounded by mountains and rivers and glaciers, on and off since he was a small child, long before there was a proper road out there. She’s a minister of the Unitarian church, probably the most liberal denomination there is, which makes her very unusual in as conservative a state as Alaska. Even though I’d just turned up on their doorstep they made me incredibly welcome and I ended up staying at Caribou Creek for more than a week.

Jim and Bea a few yards from their house at Caribou Creek.

The weather was spectacular that first afternoon so Chelsea and I went down to the river bar and sunbathed. It’s a truly glorious spot, where Caribou Creek meets the Matanuska River.

A perfect day to do nothing at all.

Moose prints in the mud.

Jim and Bea live on the ground floor of a big house they’re in the process of building and which I didn’t take any photos of. Chelsea was staying in a cabin a hundred yards away, which was smaller but still had room to sleep eight or ten people at a stretch.

Not a small cabin.

I don’t remember exactly what I did for the eight nights I spent at Caribou Creek but a lot of it was sitting around looking at pretty views with Chelsea, hanging out with Jim and Bea and going to bed at 6am. There’s something about that homestead that makes time run differently from usual: it just drifts by pleasantly without you really realising it. Even the view from the armchair in the living room of the cabin was beautiful.

The mountain Lion’s Head as seen from the armchair, with a pretty fringe of pink fireweed.

The cabin was rustic in the sense that it didn’t have running water or electricity but it was very comfortable in there. There were propane lamps to light the living room in the evening and the upstairs had high enough ceilings for me to stand up without banging my head, which is more than you can say for some cabins I’ve been in (as is the very existence of an upstairs).

This is what cabin living in Alaska looks like. That’s a gas lamp, in case you were wondering.

In one of the bedrooms upstairs, a bear had once wandered in up the steps and got stuck so there were some hilarious claw-shaped scratch marks on the walls from when it tried to extricate itself.

Poor bear. Poor wall.

One afternoon, Jim gave me a tour of the outdoor sawmill he built and has been using for decades. He’s well known in the area for building log cabins and selling logs and there was a sign on the wall of the cabin we were staying in for his Caribou Cabin Company.

On the same spot since 1958! (Jim’s company, that is, not Chelsea).

Jim’s sawmill is incredibly picturesque. It looks like something from the goldrush era and the scenery around it is stunning.

Lumber yard.

Logs.

Sawmill and sawdust.

With Lion’s Head in the background.

What a place to work! I had such a nice time with Jim and Bea, who are great storytellers and great fun, but eventually I managed to drag myself away. I went north, which was the opposite direction to Chelsea who left at the same time as me to look for a job in Girdwood, so once again I was on the road alone.

Total distance hitchhiked: 3,460 km.
Total number of rides: 28.
Distance from Nabesna: 317 km.

The day Danny and Dustin picked me up was the day the Supreme Court legalised gay marriage throughout the US so we did the obvious thing, which was to go to Anchorage’s main gay bar with a bunch of Danny’s friends. It was a total blast. Everybody there was so happy, it was like a carnival and I can’t remember the last time I was in a place which felt so positive. Plus, I really like the stamp they used to show we’d paid the cover charge. All in all, a great night.

Fading kisses.

I spent a few nights staying with Danny and had a great time. He’s generous and super friendly and his friends are all pilots and really cool. We went out to some nice places in the woods just north of Anchorage during the day, and spent the evenings in various bars. One night Dustin flew out to visit family in Utah so Danny and I went down to the airfield, which overlooks the water in a pleasant spot on the cliffs, and listened to his air traffic control radio as Dustin’s plane communicated with the tower and then flew away over the water. My first experience of plane spotting and it didn’t seem nerdy at all.

Walks in the woods.

I left Danny’s in style. He got off work after 10pm, came home and then flew me to Talkeetna, with a friend of his who came along for the ride. We got there about midnight, went to a couple of different bars for a drink and then they walked me across the railway bridge to a spot on the beach where I could camp for free. I set up my tent, then walked back to the airstrip with them and watched them fly away as the sun began to rise again at 3am. Not long later, I was asleep.

In the morning I woke up in a sauna. Danny had warned me that the beach had eastern exposure but I hadn’t really paid much attention to him. Now I understood what he meant: the sun was beating down on the walls of my tent and it was absolutely sweltering in there. I got out of my sleeping bag and took off all my clothes but it didn’t help and I was soon caked in sweat. There was nothing else for it: I put on my swimming shorts, charged out of my tent and jumped straight in the Talkeetna River, much to the surprise of the large group of Asian tourists standing on the bridge above me taking photographs.

My own portable sauna on the beach, as seen from the railway bridge.

Feeling refreshed, I got dressed, made breakfast sitting on a log on the beach and then wandered back across the bridge to explore. Talkeetna is a cute little town, and later on in my trip I’d come back a couple of times and decide it was one of my favourite towns in Alaska, but during the day it’s completely full of tourists on organised tours. They come in droves on the standard Seward-Anchorage-Talkeetna-Denali tour and there are dozens of stores selling knick-knacks to them, as well as more expensive excursions like flightseeing up towards Denali, the nearby 20,000 ft mountain which is the highest in North America. Unfortunately, haze from the summer’s forest fires meant Denali wasn’t visible from Talkeetna any of the times I passed through there but I did see it several times from various different places. It’s a gigantic, snowy mountain.

About 7pm, all the tour groups disappear and Talkeetna is transformed into a quiet little town, though admittedly one with a happening bar. I went to the Fairview Inn for one drink and ended up staying all night, mainly because they had the most impressive small-town open-mic night I’ve ever come across. It went on for at least 6 hours, most of the people who came up to play were great, and the crowd were a lot of fun too. I got chatting with Savanna, Stephanie and Nicole, three cool girls from the Lower 48 states who were in Alaska working on the railroad, and they offered me a ride back to Anchorage with them the next day.

I went out to breakfast with Savanna and Stephanie after they went to one of the flightseeing offices and managed to blag a free flight and that evening the four of us drove the couple of hours back to Anchorage. We had an awesome barbeque of meat and fish at the house they all shared and they put me up for the night. The next morning they left at 5am to go to work and I woke up at 10 alone in the house. I’d been in touch with Chelsea, who by now had left the job at Sheep Mountain and was living on a homestead a couple of hours north of Anchorage, and she drove down and picked me up at the library later on that day.

We decided to go to Girdwood because we’d enjoyed ourselves there the last time we’d passed through. When we got there, we found that the campground we’d stayed at had been taken over by the annual Girdwood Forest Fair. Because it was a 4th July festival, we’d thought it didn’t start for a couple more days but before we really knew what was happening we had camping passes and were setting up our tents in the woods in the area where all the stall holders were camping.

We stayed at the Forest Fair for four nights. They had live music (including Blackwater Railroad Company, the band I saw at the Summer Solstice party at Moose Pass), all sorts of cool, artistic stalls and a stall which sold really incredible chocolate-chip-and-mint cookies for a dollar. In the evenings after the official fair had closed, local bars had live music and then people hung out beside the river all night. One evening we were walking through the campground and bumped into Danny, barely a week after he’d flown me to Talkeetna. “I was wondering if I was going to see you here,” he said, and we hung out with him and his friend Forest after that.

Down by the river in Girdwood.

The fair ended on Sunday but we didn’t leave the campground until Monday, mostly because we hadn’t got around to packing our stuff away. Before we left Girdwood, we did the Winner Creek trail, a hike which Stephanie had recommended. We were both tired from the fair and it was an incredibly humid day but we walked for a few hours and it was totally worth it. The forest we walked through was beautiful and there was an awesome hand-tram suspended over one of the rivers which whisked you across in a little cage.

It was a day for psychedelic colours.

Pulling someone else across the hand-tram, unfortunately with the lens-cover not fully open.

We drove that night to the homestead at Caribou Creek where Chelsea was staying, stopping in Anchorage briefly to buy supplies. The last part of the drive had the potential to be dangerous. It was a narrow, twisty road which got relatively dark because the mountains blocked out the light and there were so many moose in the area that locals had nicknamed it Moose Alley. If you have a head-on collision with a moose you’ll probably die because you’ll take out their legs and their body will slide over the front of the car and smash through your windscreen. But Chelsea drove slowly, and all the moose we saw were by the side of the road rather than in the road, so we reached Caribou Creek safely.

The homestead was a couple of miles off the road down a bumpy dirt track which Chelsea didn’t think her car could handle so she parked near the beginning of the track. It was about 2am and pitch-dark so we found our headtorches, grabbed only the stuff we really needed and began to walk. Other than getting slightly freaked out when we saw what we thought was fresh bear scat (but in the light of the next day turned out to be very old bear scat), we made it comfortably down the path and were soon relaxing in the cabin Chelsea was staying in. In the morning I’d meet Jim and Bea, the awesome couple who own the homestead, but for now we just sat down and had a cup of tea or two.

Total distance hitchhiked: 3,460 km.
Total number of rides: 28.
Distance from Nabesna: 317 km.

When I was at Chickenstock, I hung out with a cool guy called Danny who invited me to visit him in Anchorage sometime. I got in touch with him from Homer and said I was going to hitch up to see him. “Would you rather I flew down to pick you up?” he said. Funnily enough, I said yes. He told me to meet him at the airstrip, which was a bit of a slog from Bob’s house but I arrived at the same time as Danny and his housemate Dustin so it all worked out well. Danny took us into the little office to submit a flightplan and look at the weather forecast because they’d had a rough journey on the way in, then we walked to the airstrip and I stood for a while admiring his plane, a cute little four-seat Cessna from the 1960s.

Pretty little plane.

Then we were off.

Climbing up above Homer.

Once we were stabilised, he explained a few things then let me take the controls. So suddenly I was flying a plane! It was amazing how light and responsive it felt beneath my hands. I flew for what felt like a long time, concentrating on keeping it level and straight, and totally loved it.

A position of responsibility.

The landscape below us was pleasant but relatively flat by Alaskan standards, with many winding rivers and lakes. At first there were lots of houses as we followed the road, but then the road turned away to the east and we kept going straight north towards Anchorage, suddenly in the wilderness.

Lots of people.

No people.

Danny let me fly until we got to Turnagain Arm, the body of water just south of Anchorage. The air was choppy over the water and he had to communicate with air traffic control about his upcoming landing, though that wasn’t too challenging for him because he’s an air traffic controller by profession.

Slighty choppy air over Turnagain Arm, but nothing to worry about.

He landed in Anchorage, with the little plane juddering in the wind, and Dustin helped him tie his plane down at his parking spot beside the airstrip.

Tying down.

All in all, I’ve had worse rides.

Total distance hitchhiked: 2,825 km.
Total number of rides: 27.
Distance from Nabesna: 480 km.

It took me 12 hours to hitchhike from Moose Pass to Homer, which was a little ridiculous considering it’s less than a three hour drive. The most memorable ride of the several I got that day was with a guy who lived in a cabin in the woods with no electricity or running water in a place “where there ain’t no women.” To deal with his manly urges, he confided, he’d driven up to Anchorage to sleep with a few prostitutes. Unfortunately he’d got carried away and spent all his money so he was worried that he wouldn’t have enough gas to get himself home. He drove as slowly as he could on the busy, single-lane highway to conserve gas while we stared at the fuel gauge wondering if we were going to make it. It was like a really lame, reverse version of the movie Speed.

In the end we got all the way there, but not before he had this gem of a conversation on the phone: “Buddy, I’m sorry. I feel asleep at the wheel about an hour ago and only woke up when I drifted over the bumps at the side of the road. I had a fifteen minute nap and then picked up a hitchhiker. I’ll be there soon.”

I got into Homer late and camped in the very pleasant campground on the hill. A couple of baby moose were hanging around the outhouses, which sounds cute but you don’t want to get between a momma moose and her calves so I gave them a wide berth.

They are cute, it’s true. Also, another great view from a loo.

I was feeling desperately dirty by this point, so I sent a bunch of couchsurfing requests around midnight and when I woke up the next morning, had an offer of a place to stay that night from a guy called Bob. He asked me to hang around until evening because he was busy, so I packed up my tent and went to see Jurassic World at the little independent cinema in town, where I chomped my way happily through a huge bucket of popcorn.

Bob was an interesting guy. In his fifties, he made his living making crowns for teeth from a lab in his front room. We had a good time chatting on his balcony, and he made me some lovely food, but the main thing was finally having a shower. Oh my god, it felt good! Cleaned up and freshly shaven, I felt like a new person.

I spent four nights staying with Bob, first on an inflatable bed in his front room, then in my tent on his front lawn when some other couchsurfers who’d got in touch with him before me showed up.

In amongst the vehicles.

I spent my time lazily exploring Homer, which is a lovely little place with quaint shops and a laid-back vibe.

What a fantastic name for a bookshop.

It’s also the furthest south point of the peninsula south of Anchorage, so the road ends there. I’ve never been to the Land’s End in England but at least I’ve now been to the one in Alaska.

Homer: End of the Road.

It’s not really the end of the land, though. There’s another large spur of land to the south, it just doesn’t have any roads on it. But at least it makes the view nice!

A couple of evenings before I left, I went for a long walk along the beach. On my way back, strolling through a beautiful meadow in the late-evening light with snow-capped mountains in the distance, I felt a thrill of excitement as I reflected for the first time since leaving home about what exactly it was I was doing. I was hitchhiking around Alaska, something I had always wanted to do, and it was going fantastically!

A view worthy of reflection.

Total distance hitchhiked: 2,701 km.
Total number of rides: 26.
Distance from Nabesna: 832 km.

My ride back through the tunnel to Girdwood was an interesting one. Picture the scene: it’s a baking hot day, I’m wearing my shorts and t-shirt and I’ve just walked about 5 miles to the tunnel entrance carrying over twenty kilos of gear. So I’m pretty sweaty. Then add to the picture the fact that it’s now been twelve long days since I last had a shower, twelve days since I properly washed my clothes- my one pair of now-muddy trousers, one pair of shorts and four t-shirts- and twelve days since I slept anywhere that wasn’t in my tent in a forest surrounded by moss and soil. In short, I’ve never been dirtier in my life.

I had intended, when I arrived at the area outside the tunnel, to change out of my sweaty t-shirt, which even to my own nose smelled pretty awful, but I didn’t have time. The single-lane tunnel was about to close from my direction and I immediately got a ride with the last guy who made it through the tunnel before the hour-long wait for the next opening. So there I found myself, sitting in the front seat of his brand-new, very expensive pick-up truck as we drove slowly through the dimly-lit tunnel, sweating all over the seat and feeling very conscious of quite how bad I smelled.

Talk was a little awkward at first but eventually we got going. He told me he had been the manager of a restaurant in Anchorage for the last forty years and had just driven down to Whittier to check his shrimp pots, which were unfortunately empty because an octopus had got in and eaten them all. He asked a bunch of questions about me and I told him how I’d saved up my money so that I could spent a while travelling before I had any real commitments tying me down to any place. As he pulled into a parking space at the gas station in Girdwood, a few miles past the end of the tunnel, he turned and looked straight at me.

“You know,” he said, “I envy you. I had the opportunity to travel like you’re doing when I finished college but some friends of mine were starting a restaurant and convinced me to go and help them. I told myself I’d make time for travelling later on. Now it’s been forty years and I still haven’t taken that trip.” He shook me by the hand, wished me good luck as I pulled my bag from the back of his truck, and then drove off towards his restaurant in Anchorage.

I changed my shirt, bought myself a cinnamon cookie the size of my face from the bakery beside the gas station and hitched a ride a couple of miles along the road leading into the centre of Girdwood to charge my dying phone in the library. Then I hitched back out of Girdwood again and stood beside the road going south on the main highway. I didn’t really know where I was going but I put my thumb out and before long was picked up by a father and son in a pick-up truck.

“Where are you headed?” I asked the son as he moved stuff around in the back to make room for my bag.

“We’re going to Seward,” he said.

“Cool,” I said, and got in.

The drive to Seward took an hour or so through some nice mountain scenery. The father and son lived right in the centre of town, not far from the waterfront, and they offered to drive me round some of the downtown campsites to find a spot I liked. This turned into a bit of an awkward endeavour because the campsites sucked so hard that I didn’t want to stay in any of them. There were hundreds and hundreds of people crammed into these park-like grassy spaces with noisy, generator-running RVs as far as you could see in every direction. It felt like the whole of Alaska had suddenly converged in this little town and overrun the place. After several days on my own in the woods, it was overwhelming and horrendous and I wanted to turn around and leave immediately. So I did.

“Could you just drop me back on the highway, please?” I asked the son. I went into a nearby grocery store to buy some supplies and then stood by the side of the road with my thumb out, barely an hour after I’d first driven into town. It was 9pm but it was also the longest day of the year and I was in Alaska, so I didn’t have to worry about running out of light. Forty-five minutes later, I got a ride with some guys from Seward driving out to a summer solstice party in Moose Pass, a tiny settlement half an hour back where I’d just come from. They were going to camp out beside a lake and invited me to join them. We set up our tents and walked a mile to the other side of the lake where a couple of hundred people were crowded into a log cabin dancing to an Alaskan bluegrass band called Blackwater Railroad Company, who I’d eventually go on to see twice more later on in the summer.

The show was totally awesome, they played for hours and the crowd danced so exuberantly that we broke the floor of the cabin. It was a crazy experience: the wooden floorboards bucked and warped with everyone jumping up and down so that it felt like being on a bouncy castle, just a bouncy castle made of wood. After the show I went to the local bar with some people I’d met until we got kicked out at 3am, still in broad daylight. Then I wandered back to my tent (who knows where the guys I got a ride with ended up?) and fell asleep.

This is the only picture you’re getting to accompany this post because it’s the only one I took. Sorry about that.

Total distance hitchhiked: 2,465 km.
Total number of rides: 20.
Distance from Nabesna: 634 km.

I pitched my tent on a little bluff above the beach with the skimming stones we’d sat on the night before. It was a really spectacular spot: a flat, soft little clearing in an elegant grove of trees with views out over the beach towards the distant lights of Whittier and across the water to the glaciers and mountains on the other side of the inlet. I had the place to myself and the solitude was wonderful. On the first afternoon I left the raincover of my tent off and dozed in the cool shade of the trees, then later ran down to the beach and jumped in the water. I dried off after my swim on a rock in the hot sun, which stays high in the sky well into the evening in the Alaskan summer.

My own little slice of paradise.

The view over the beach from ten feet to the left of my tent.

The view across the inlet from ten feet in front of my tent.

I spent the first couple of days taking it easy and simply existing in such a nice place. I’d walk twice a day to a nearby waterfall to collect water to filter, exploring the narrow, often overgrown, trail through the trees and the damp, lush meadows which extended up the hill beside it. When camping in bear country, it’s good practice to keep the area around the tent free from smells which might interest the wildlife so I spent a lot of time walking back and forth between my tent, the meadow where I kept my bear-proof food container and toiletry bag and the beach where I cooked all my food. In the evenings, I’d sit on a piece of driftwood on the beach, writing in my diary and making myself endless cups of tea on my camping stove. True bliss.

Very narrow, often overgrown trail…

…with some interesting bridges.

The meadow where I kept my bear-proof food container, several hundred feet from my tent. As well as food, bears like the smell of deodorant and minty toothpaste so I kept my toiletries in a bag hanging from a tree near here. Twice a day I’d stand at this spot while I brushed my teeth, which wasn’t too unpleasant.

On the third morning I woke up to find a bunch of kayakers had paddled out to my beach. We chatted for a little while before they took to the water again.

Visitors.

That afternoon I packed up some food and my water filter into my small rucksack and took off along the trail in a more serious way, hoping to make it all the way out to Emerald Cove, several hours’ walk away. The trail had a great mixture of terrain, climbing up into the meadows above the trees with views of the mountains and then dipping down again into the dark, humid rainforest. I particularly enjoyed the wildflowers and other shrubs carpeting the ground.

Pretty.

Also pretty.

In a couple of places, side trails ambled down to the waterfront and I spent some time at the end of one of them, exploring a little lagoon surrounded by stacks of crumbling slate. There was a cool spot at the head of the lagoon where driftwood had accumulated.

A little lagoon beside the big inlet, surrounded by stacks of slate.

Gnarly driftwood, dude.

After a couple of hours of walking the trail abruptly disappeared in the forest. I searched around for a long time trying to find where it went without any success. It seemed to disappear into nothing. Frustrated, I clambered down a ravine to a little cove where I sat on some rocks and made myself a sandwich. As I ate, the tide gradually receded, uncovering more rocks around where I sat, and I had an idea: instead of searching around in the forest for the trail, why didn’t I just wait for the tide to go further out and clamber straight over the rocks all the way to Emerald Cove?

So off I went. The still-damp rocks were covered in exceptionally-slippy kelp and I nearly fell over on at least three occasions. Despite my precarious footing it never occurred to me to turn around and I kept going for what seemed like a very long time, though it was probably only about twenty minutes. After passing over a section of rocks so slippery that I had to weigh up each step for ten seconds before I made it, I clambered down from the outcropping and with a rush of excitement realised that I could see the mouth of a cove just ahead of me. My plan had worked! Surely this was Emerald Cove!

A relatively dangerous path I trod.

Feeling triumphant, I wandered around the corner and was very surprised to find in front of me a row of tents and a small crowd of people cooking dinner beneath a suspended tarp. “What the hell are these guys doing here?” I thought to myself, quite taken aback, and used the excuse of photographing the cove to take a moment to compose myself.

If I was surprised to see that group of what turned out to be kayakers, it was nothing compared to what they felt when I casually wandered into a cove that was supposed to only be accessible by water. I walked up to their camp, waving my hand in greeting. “Is this Emerald Cove?” I asked, cheerfully. Several of the group were looking at me like I’d emerged unbidden from beneath the waves, but a lady sitting near me smiled and said, “No, this is Emerald Bay. Emerald Cove is on the other side of that ridge.” She pointed at a forested hill across the water from where they were sitting.

“Ah,” I said. “Can I get round there from here?”

She shook her head.

“Drat,” I said, suddenly sounding exceedingly English in my own ears. “I don’t suppose you have a map I could look at?”

She rummaged around in her bag and pulled one out. In a straight line, I was about two-thirds of the way to Emerald Cove but my scramble over the rocks had taken me on completely the wrong path. There was nothing for it but to turn round and go back the way I had come. “That’s a shame,” I said, suddenly feeling very tired. “Thanks for your help.” And I began to walk away.

“Wait a minute!” one of the shocked-looking people called after me, still incredulous. “Where did you come from?”

“Over there,” I said, pointing vaguely out of the cove and continuing to move away from them.

“Where are you from?” he called, louder this time.

“England,” I said, now approaching the end of the cove.

“And how did you get here?” he shouted.

“I walked,” I called back airily and disappeared out of sight around the corner.

The kayakers I emerged from the sea to visit.

Now that I was tired, the clamber back over the rocks felt considerably dicier and I took it exceedingly slowly and carefully. As I climbed back up out of the ravine to the trail, I started to feel a little frantic: I was still a long way from my tent and it suddenly didn’t seem so fun to be out hiking alone in a forest in bear country. With my adrenaline pumping, I began to hurry, shouting out the customary “Hey, Bear!” to warn the wildlife of my presence a lot more frequently than usual. After a few minutes, I was chanting it continuously, like a mantra. “ʜᴇʏ, ʙᴇᴀʀ!” I’d shout in a high-pitched lilt, followed by a low rumbling “HEY, BEAR!”, over and over again, barely pausing for breath.

I half-walked, half-ran, continuing to chant, for nearly an hour and half back along the trail, sweating buckets in the rainforest humidity. In my haste, I took the wrong turning at a three-way junction and only realised my mistake after I’d gone for nearly ten minutes in the wrong direction. Back on the right path, I stumbled several times over fallen logs and other obstacles, always emerging unscathed, until I slipped off a rock and trod knee-deep into a huge pit of mud. Startled, I pulled my leg out with a revolting squelch and inspected the damage: thick, damp mud stuck to my right trouser leg, coating the top of my sock and, worst of all, beginning to seep down inside my boot.

“Fuck,” I said quietly, as I stood taking in what had just happened. Then again a little louder, “Fuck!”, as the mud began to harden on the only pair of trousers I had brought with me to Alaska. And then again and again as I began to walk once more, my swearing gradually picking up momentum and volume as my temper rose and my speed increased, until eventually I was charging through the undergrowth in a blind rage, shouting “FUCK!” over and over at the top of my voice as I railed against the injustice of the universe.

I can’t quite decide now whether I’m relieved or disappointed that I didn’t bump into anyone on the trail while I was letting it all out. It would have been funny to see how they reacted to a crazy English guy running through the woods swearing his head off, but equally it would have been embarrassing and difficult to explain why I’d got myself so worked up about getting a little dirty when out on a relatively gentle hike. I finally began to calm down when I was forced to stop by the waterfall to filter water into my empty bottle.

I think on reflection that’s what caused me to act so strangely: I was dehydrated from sweating in the humidity of the forest and even the couple of litres of water I’d already drunk weren’t enough to stop me drying out. I don’t think I brought enough food with me either, and threading my way along the overgrown trail, and over those slippery rocks, probably used more energy than I realised. In any case, by the time I’d made it back to my beach and sat down on the log to inspect my boot, I was back to my normal calm self again.

Probably not enough mud to warrant such an explosion of anger but sometimes these things happen in life. Especially when you only have one pair of trousers.

I washed off my trousers, socks and boots as best I could and hung them out to dry, then I cooked a large dinner and drank several cups of tea. In the morning I packed up my stuff, walked the several miles along the coast to Whittier and got a ride back through the tunnel to Girdwood in the middle of the afternoon. By midnight I was dancing to a live bluegrass band at a summer solstice festival in a log cabin overlooking a lake, but that’s a story for another post.

Total distance hitchhiked: 2,267 km.
Total number of rides: 16.
Distance from Nabesna: 539 km.

After packing up camp, we drove through a tunnel under a mountain to the town of Whittier. Admittedly, this was in the opposite direction to Nabesna but that plan of mine had to go on the back-burner for now.

Whittier is a very strange place. Surrounded by mountains on three sides and water on the third, it was cut off from the rest of Alaska until the Second World War when the army decided to bulldoze a railway tunnel through the mountains, which was later widened to take cars as well. It’s only a single lane, though, so you have to wait in a queue at one end while cars drive towards you from the other.

Once you get through the tunnel and head into what passes for the centre of town, you’re immediately confronted with two realities. Firstly that the area around Whittier, with the mountains, water and glaciers, is extremely beautiful and secondly that the high-rise building at the back of town is disproportionately large for such a small place. I mean, that building wouldn’t look out of place as a tower block in central London, a city of 7 million people, and here it is casually rising up in front of the mountains in Whittier, population 217. The question of why it’s there is a little bit more involved that I can be bothered to explain right now but if you’re interested, the Wikipedia page for Whittier, Alaska gives a reasonable overview. Suffice it to say, almost the entire population of the town lives in that one building, which goes part of the way to explain why there’s a book about Whittier entitled ‘The Strangest Town in Alaska’.

Whittier is a town of roughly two-hundred people. I think it’s pretty damn weird that nearly all of them live in this one building.

But it sure is pretty down by the water.

We wandered around town for a while in the sunshine, looking in all the shops aimed at the cruise ship passengers, and both ended up buying the same pair of sunglasses, which will appear again later on in the blog. The most interesting thing to see in Whittier is definitely the Buckner Building, a now-abandoned concrete monstrosity built by the army which used to be the building the whole town lived in until they moved en-mass down the road.

This is the Buckner Building, the building everyone in town used to live in.

It’s been comprehensively trashed on the inside…

…but retains some valuable advice on the outside.

From the Buckner Building we drove along the little stretch of road they’ve recently built along the coast. It’s a pretty place.

View of the Billings Glacier from the newly-built road leading along the coast from Whittier.

We carried on despite this sign, which makes us pretty much badass, right?

After a couple of miles, the road abruptly came to a halt and we had to walk across a couple of creeks to carry on. We cooked dinner on the back of Chelsea’s car then went for a wander about half an hour up the trail where we found a little beach with thousands of the most perfect skimming stones you could possibly imagine. And a whole bunch of flies, but we’ll forget about that.

Some of the creek-crossings were a little precarious. The water was deeper than it looked.

Narrow trail through the trees.

We skimmed some rocks and sat on the beach as the light slowly faded, looking out at the water. After a while one of the huge cruise ships sailed by.

A floating city coming into port. This isn’t the place to discuss the impact on a town of two-hundred of a cruise ship bringing in literally thousands of people. But you’re free to think about it in your own time.

We wandered back over the creeks to the car, grabbed my tent and set it up in a large gravel pit with a view of the Billings Glacier across the water. We used Chelsea’s tarp to cover our gear in case it rained and I picked up four flat-ish rocks which were compacted into the dirt outside the tent to hold the tarp down. We left the side of the tent with the glacier-view open. In the middle of the night, in the mostly-dark, Chelsea got up to pee and managed to scare the crap out of both of us.

“Jacob,” she whispered urgently from just outside the open vestibule. “There are fresh bear tracks here.”

Immediately awake, I jumped out of my sleeping bag and slipped on my boots, bear-spray in hand, adrenaline pumping. “Where?” I said, and she pointed at a few paw-like indentations in the dirt a few feet from the tent, which definitely hadn’t been there when we arrived.  I bent down to take a closer look, heart-pounding, wondering whether we would have to evacuate back to the car, and then suddenly burst out laughing with relief.

“They’re not bear tracks!” I said. “It’s the holes from where I took the rocks to hold down the tarp!”

Chelsea bent down to have a look herself and burst out laughing as well. We spent a couple of minutes marvelling at how realistic those holes looked. If you didn’t know what they were from, they really did look like bear tracks: four indents in the ground, two on the left, two on the right, and staggered exactly as though a bear had loped along past the open side of our tent. Much relieved, and shivering in the cold now that the adrenaline had worn off, we got back into the tent and were soon asleep.

In the morning, Chelsea left early to make the long drive back to Sheep Mountain in time for her noon shift. With considerably less urgency, I sleepily packed up my tent and cooked breakfast before walking further out along the trail away from Whittier to do some more camping, now all on my own.

Total distance hitchhiked: 2,226 km.
Total number of rides: 14.
Distance from Nabesna: 573 km.

Despite my poultry-filled detour, I still wanted to go to Nabesna. I thought it might be fun to go with Chelsea, and we’d talked about meeting up again on her days off, so I called her up using a free satellite phone provided at the festival. Her phone went straight to voicemail. I tried again a couple of times throughout the day but had the same result. That left me with a quandary when I came to leave Chicken the next morning: should I just go alone to Nabesna with no way of contacting her, or should I go back to the lodge where she worked at about the time she finished her shift so we could go together. In the end I chose the latter, which proved to be an interesting decision.

The first thing to say is that Sheep Mountain Lodge is a hell of a long way from Chicken. 463 km, in fact. I got a ride out of Chicken in the late morning with a 22-year old guy from the town of Eagle, which is even further north and even closer to the Canadian border than Chicken. He dropped me in Tok, after telling me all about his childhood running teams of huskies in weather down to minus fifty and catching several thousand chum salmon in his family’s industrial-sized fishwheel to feed the dogs over the winter. Interesting guy.

In Tok, I sat outside the visitor centre eating lunch and was given a handful of grapes, two slices of apple and four cherries by a friendly old couple who had driven up from Texas. That was more fruit than I’d seen in a long time, so I was pretty excited. Getting a ride out of Tok took an hour-and-a-half, by far my slowest ride up to that point, and it was hot work in the beaming sunshine. I did definitively confirm that hitchhiking is legal in Alaska, though, because I was standing not far from the police station and got a whole bunch of friendly waves from the cops driving to and fro.

I got picked up by a guy whose job it was to transport RVs from one place in the U.S. to another. He told me he’d earned nearly $200,000 from this the previous year, which suggests that there are a lot of RVs parked in the wrong place in this country. He’d driven the RV he picked me up in pretty much non-stop from Seattle, with only a few hours of snatched sleep along the way. That’s 3,500 km, for goodness’ sakes. He was glad of someone to talk to, particularly as the RV’s radio was stuck on a station which played nothing but Christian rock.

He was driving past Sheep Mountain Lodge on his way to Anchorage so he offered to drop me off. By now, though, it was getting late and it seemed as though that hour-and-a-half I’d spent waiting in Tok was going to burn me. Sure enough, when I arrived at the Lodge, Chelsea had already finished her shift and left for the evening, though nobody knew where she’d gone and she still didn’t have any phone signal. (It later turned out that I’d missed her by barely half an hour and she was round the corner at the cabin of an 80-year old guy who was one of the area’s original homesteaders). I borrowed the wi-fi to send her an email, then wandered outside to a bench where I very grumpily sat down and made myself dinner. It had been a very long and hot hitchhike and I wasn’t best pleased that it had failed so spectacularly.

It was already 9 pm and I needed somewhere to sleep, so I decided to head further south in search of somewhere to camp. I wasn’t in the mood for passively standing by the side of the road with my thumb out so I set off walking along the side of the highway, figuring that if I walked until midnight I was bound to find somewhere to pitch my tent. As a few cars began to drive past me, though, I decided to stuck out my thumb as I was walking to at least try and get a ride. Nothing happened. A few minutes after that, I decided to turn and look at the oncoming cars as they passed me, and I got a ride almost immediately with a guy heading from his home in Glennallen to his weekday work-camp in Sutton.

He dropped me at a nice camping spot on a river bank about an hour’s drive further along the highway. I got my tent set up and cooked myself a second dinner, then I wandered over to the river to wash my dishes. Although the day hadn’t gone exactly as planned, it was difficult to remain too downbeat in a spot like that. Here’s a video of the river I camped beside:

In the morning I decided to head into Palmer to use the library and update this blog. I was standing by the side of the road cleaning my glasses and not trying to hitchhike at all when a large pick-up truck skidded to a halt just beyond me. And guess who got out to say hello? Gene, the guy with the fishwheel I’d stayed with in Copper Center! We laughed at the coincidence and chattered away for the hour or so it took us to get through all the construction on the roads.

In the library I had a message waiting from Chelsea saying she was sorry to have missed me and asking where I was. After a bit of correspondence, and a few hours spent sitting under a tree outside the library reading my book, she came to pick me up. We stocked up on food and headed up towards Hatcher Pass, a noted local beauty spot (though to be honest, pretty much everywhere in Alaska is beautiful).

Along the way we saw a sign for the Gold Mint trail and decided to go for a walk. It was a lovely trail but it was also extremely hot in the sun and after a few miles we were ready to turn back. Before we did, though, we walked up the trail another hundred yards to a spot which looked like it would have a nice view, which turned out to be an excellent decision. Around the corner we found in front of us a lovely little beaver lake with a spectacular view of the mountains behind. Within thirty seconds, I had stripped down to my underwear and jumped in. The water was cool without being icy and I can’t remember the last time I felt so comprehensively refreshed. It was magnificent.

A wonderful place for a swim on a hot day. Thanks Mr Beaver for making us such a nice pool.

Down river from the pool.

After drying off in the sun, we drove up towards Independence Mine, an old gold mine set in a spectacular mountain bowl. The carpark nearest the mine was closed for the night but we walked up the hill from the lower carpark in the wonderful evening light and looked around the crumbling old mining buildings, which I didn’t photograph very well.

The view from Independence Mine. Not a great photo, I’m afraid. The smoke in the distant valley is from forest fires.

We then tried to drive over Hatcher Pass but were prevented by a very severe man in a Parks Service pick-up truck because there were forest fires going on over the pass in Willow. It was already 11 pm but we decided to drive down to the town of Girdwood, a little way south of Anchorage and about two hours from where we were. We stopped at midnight by the side of the highway to cook some food, and saw what I consider to be an archetypal scene of Alaskan summer:

Alaskan summer summarised in one photo. It’s midnight. We’ve stopped at a beautiful river beside the busiest highway in the state to cook dinner on a propane stove on the boot of Chelsea’s car. Beside us, men in Xtratuf rubber boots are loading boats onto trailers, children in the same boots are running around playing and I’m about to go and dump our food waste into a bear-proof trash can. What a place.

We stopped in Anchorage to buy ice for the cooler and then drove on through to Girdwood. By the time we’d messed around finding a campsite it was 2 am and as close to dark as it was ever going to get. In the morning, it turned out that the grove of trees in which we’d camped was truly beautiful, which was a nice surprise.

Went to bed in what passes for dark out here.

Woke up in a beautiful, peaceful forest.

Total distance hitchhiked: 2,188 km.
Total number of rides: 14.