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.