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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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