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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.