Eagle River, near where I camped.
Tent just visible between the trees.
Next morning I walked back to the Nature Centre. On the way, I bumped into a nice old couple from Arizona who offered me a place to stay there when if I ever pass through. We exchanged contact details beside this view.
Contact details were exchanged.
I began my hitchhiking from the road beside the Nature Centre. First ride was from two oil workers in an open-topped, open-sided Jeep with a booming sound system. Sounds pretty cool but it was pretty cold when they got up to any sort of speed.
Looks cool, not practical.
Next ride was twenty miles with a commerical bush pilot, the one after thirty miles with a sheet metal worker. Outside a grocery store in Palmer, I was picking up my rucksack when a guy jumped out of a truck nearby, said “Hey buddy, we’re eating ice cream and you look hot”, handed me a choc ice and drove off almost before I had time to react. So that was nice.
Took a short ride with a house builder, then a much longer one with Sven and Signe, a Swedishly-named Alaskan brother and sister who were driving a 140-mile round trip to have dinner. The road was incredibly beautiful, with mountains on both sides and a huge river to our right. Part-way along we drove up a gravel side road to look at a house Sven was considering buying. Decent size house on two acres, $250,000. A snip.
I liked Sven and Signe’s hanging bird. Oh, there were mountains and an army convoy, too.
We stopped at a restaurant called Sheep Mountain with wonderful views over the Matanuska Glacier which I didn’t photograph. After dinner, I got chatting to one of the waitresses about the trip I was taking and how a lot of the appeal was in having no plan and nowhere in particular to go. Twenty minutes later, I was standing by the side of the road thumbing a ride when the same waitress wandered down the hill towards me. “I’ve got two days of leave,” she said, “and it’s my birthday tomorrow. I was thinking of taking a trip down to Valdez but everyone else here is working. Wanna come?”
“Sure,” I said. She spent a few minutes grabbing her stuff and we were on our way, driving up north towards Glennallen and then turning back on ourselves down the Richardson Highway to Valdez. She introduced herself as Chelsea, a French-graduate from Oregon who was working in Alaska for the summer while she decided what to do next. We chattered away happily through the spectacular scenery, stopping occasionally to take a photograph. Valdez is actually only about 30 miles from where we started but there are dozens of huge glaciers and mountains in the way so the road has to travel nearly 100 miles in the wrong direction. For much of the trip we had the beautiful triangle of Mount Drum directly in front of us.
Mount Drum.
The Richardson Highway continued to get more spectacular as we approached the coastal mountains near Valdez and the view over the top of the Thompson Pass at 2805 feet was simply unreal. I’ve rarely experienced anything like it. We were driving along already marvelling at the scenery when we went over the top of the final ride and suddenly the mountains opened up in front of us in a huge blanket of white. It was wonderful.
View from the top of Thompson Pass, a mile or so from where we camped.
I had unfinished business with this view. When I was twenty I came to Alaska on a bicycle tour and cycled up the Thompson Pass from Valdez at sea level. It took me four hours of continuous uphill pedalling in the driving rain but when I got to the top, the mist was so thick that I couldn’t see any of the mountains. I saw this time what I had been missing last time and it was so worth coming back.
We camped at the Blueberry Lake campground a mile or so from the top of the pass, justifiably described as one of the most beautiful in the state. We arrived at ten pm with the moon just rising and pitched our tents in a spot with a wonderful view.
View from where we pitched our tents at the Blueberry Lake campground, not long before midnight.
Later, Chelsea made us a fire by the lake and we stood there watching the fog gradually creep up the valley and encircle the campground. When our watches showed midnight we toasted her birthday and stayed beside the fire for another hour until it died, when the biting cold of the misty evening forced us to wander slowly back to our tents to sleep.
Everything in this post happened within a period of 28 hours. If it keeps on like this, I’m going to struggle to keep this blog up-to-date.
Total distance hitchhiked: 438 km.