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.