Destination #26: Alaska: Into the Wild (Part 2)

Friday 13 May 2011 - Tuesday 24 May 2011

Juneau

After another four-hour journey on the Alaskan Marine Highway we arrived in Alaska's state capital: Juneau. Yep, surprise, surprise, Juneau, not Anchorage is Alaska's capital city. And that despite the fact that roughly half of all Alaskans live in Anchorage and only about 30,000 people live in Juneau. The Anchorage folks have tried to move the capital a couple of times to their home turf but so far to no avail.

We spent five days in Pearson's Pond, around the corner from the massive Meadenhall Glacier. Only in America can you go to a "drive-in glacier" where you can drive your SUV right up to the start of the glacier. Sporty as always, we decided to bike it instead. It has to be said that never in our lives, have we seen so many signs with "End of the Road" on it. That is the problem with Alaska, they just don't do roads very well.

Despite our now growing fear of bears - who we suspected to be hiding behind every tree we passed - we decided to hike the aptly called "Perseverance Trail". Emma complained before, during and after the hike and unsurprisingly it was our first and last hike in Alaska.

We spent our evenings in Auke Bay, piling on the pounds with the killer Oreo milkshakes from Hot Bite. I also discovered that my former colleague John "Mr Analysis" Chan was the proud owner of a booming restaurant business in Juneau, something he clearly never mentioned to me before. Chan's Thai Kitchen was excellent though.

Seward

An Air Alaska flight got us to Anchorage where we picked up a massive 4WD and drove all the way down to a small seaside town called Seward. The 200km Seward Highway down from Anchorage to Seward is labeled as one of the most scenic routes in the US and admittedly it is every road tripper's wet dream.

Traveling is as much about the places you visit as the people you meet and in Seward we met two fantastic characters: Dennis and Pat. Dennis and Pat are the proud owners of the Bear Lake Lodgings B&B where we stayed for a night. In the evening, Dennis - part time floatplane pilot, full-time psychologist - would tell us some fantastic bear stories after which we decided to open the car remotely from inside the safety of the house and then run as fast as we could from the house to the car. Only in Denali we found out that our "bear avoidance strategy" was fundamentally flawed, but more on that later. We politely declined Dennis' offer to go for a quick hike in the forests close to the house ("We saw some bear prints there the other day, just take the bear spray, you will be fine"). It gets better though, Dennis' day job is being the Head Psychologist at the Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward, Alaska's highest security prison, and home to Alaska's most famous serial killer the "Butcher Baker". The "Butcher Baker" was an Anchorage baker who, in the 1970s and 1980s, picked up prostitutes, flew them in his floatplane to a lodge on one of the remote islands off the Kenai Peninsula, raped them and then set them free on the island so he could hunt them and finally kill them. Sounds like a great guy, no? Moral of the story is: never trust your local baker.

Pat at her turn was a self-made ice-cream entrepreneur and she spoiled us with her home-made artisan ice-cream. They were good. Really good actually. So good that we agreed to meet her again after our Denali trip to make sure we could taste another of her icecreams before leaving Alaska.

Denali National Park

Had we first driven 2.5 hours south, now we were driving the same scenic Seward Highway back up to Anchorage. Then add another 5 hours for driving up further north to get to Denali National Park.

By now we were terrified of bears and if you go to bear country, you better know your bears, so here is what we learned:

Ignoring polar bears for the moment, there are apparently three kind of bears in Alaska, brown bears, black bears and grizzly bears, with the brown bear basically being a super-sized version of the grizzly. The difference between the brown and the black bear is that the black one, although smaller than his brown cousin, is more aggressive (think of it as a hard-core Millwall fan after 10 pints), while the larger brown bear (who can weigh anything between 400kg and 750kg) is slightly more mellow (think of it as a Manchester United fan after five prawn sandwiches). You can occasionally scare off a brown bear by making a bunch of noise and yelling at him (don't try this at home though). Unfortunately this strategy may backfire with a black bear, who can get massively pissed off by the whole ordeal (again think of that same Millwall fan, but now imagine you just told him you slept with his wife and on your way out, drove your car over his dog). To complicate matters further, it is not like a black bear is actually black. It can, wait for it, be brown! You mix up your bears and you are toast.

One of the other things with bears is that you should never run away from them, because instinctively they feel that they will have to chase you. Besides, at speeds of 50 km an hour it is no like it is going to be a fair contest. Isn't that just great?

And last but not least, the worst part is that grizzlies - who also happen to be the dominant bear type in Denali - like to play poker with you. 90% of the time when a grizzly charges you, they are bluffing (i.e. they come to a violent stop a meter or so in front of you). That means you will need some new clean underwear at the end of the day, but you will live. The problem is with that remaining 10%. I bet you will feel pretty stupid just standing there when a grizzly unfamiliar with the statistics just jumped you (or if you are just unlucky enough to run into the one grizzly that got out of bed that morning and said to himself "You know what, let's do something crazy today, I will just jump the next f#cker I run into"). I think it is safe to say that we will never be able to look at a teddy bear in the same way ever again.

So much for bear facts. Back to Denali. The Denali National Park is an awesome piece of wilderness in the middle of Alaska. It is huge, full of wildlife and home to one of the biggest mountains in the world, Mount McKinley (also called "The Big One" by the locals). At least we were told Mount McKinley was there, it is not that we actually saw it, it was hidden in the clouds the whole time we were there.

There is only one road into the park, the 92 mile Park Road, of which only the first 14 mile is accessible by car. The only way to get past mile 14 is either to hike it, bike it or bus it. After our earlier experiences in Juneau, hiking was pretty much out of the question and once we heard the Park Rangers refer to cyclists as "Meals on Wheels" our mind was pretty much made up: the bus it was.

The bus tours into Denali are, let's say, interesting. They use old, green school buses for the trip and your driver is just your driver so he is not obliged to double up as a tour guide. Nevertheless most of them do - despite some of them apparently only bitching about their divorce for the whole journey - and we were lucky as it was the first day of the season and our driver decided to practice all his lines on us (and fortunately he was still happily married as well). There were five people on our bus to Toklat River, and besides the two of us, all the other passengers were about to go camping in the park. One of the campers was a Japanese fellow and when he got off the bus at Igloo Creek campground, clearly not having invested in any bear spray before embarking on his adventure, our bus driver spoke the legendary words: "Oh by the way, those bear bells you have, don't work. Enjoy your camping". The guy had this defeated look on his face while he watched the bus speed off. Definitely not a happy camper.

The bus system is simple but very effective. The driver drives, you watch, and if you see anything you shout: "Stop". At that stage the driver will stop the bus as close to the animal as he can, turn off the engine in order not too scare it off, and you take zillions of pictures through the window. In random order we saw a bear (at quite a distance to be fair, he may as well have been in Russia now I come to think of it), a pack of wolves (up close and personal, a bit too close to our liking), a moose with her two calves (this time we were a bit too close to the moose's liking), a bunch of Dall sheep (they seem to be everywhere), a couple of Ptarmigans (Alaska's hilarious state bird) and a caribou. Not a bad score for a six-hour round trip.

In the evening we went for beers and burgers in the "49th State Brewing Company" which had managed to acquire the actual replica bus used by Sean Penn when he filmed the movie "Into the Wild". The movie is based on Jon Krakauer's book which tells the true story of 24 year old Chris McCandless who gave up all his worldly possessions to go and live in the Alaskan wilderness. To cut a long story short, he failed and starved to death in a deserted bus in the middle of Denali Park. Great book, great movie but a bad way to go.

The other thing we will always remember about Denali is that it just never got dark up there. The sun just didn't seem to go down at all. At 22:00 in the evening, it wouldn't just be light, you would need to wear your sunnies as it was just too bright. A special experience.

Before we left Denali, Terry, our host at Denali Dome Home played a classic practical joke on us. Having spotted some interesting wooden moose works in the living room, we asked Terry were we could buy some. "Go to this moosepoop website and you can order them online there", he told us with a straight face. Having thanked Terry for this great recommendation, we wrote down the address and thought nothing further off it until a couple of days later when we had a look online. And guess what? The website he gave us is solely dedicated to moose shit. Brown shit. Black shit. Any shit, as long as it is moose shit. No trace of any of those wooden moose statues we had wanted to order. We had been had. I can already see Terry standing in the "49th State Brewing Company" on Friday telling his mates: "You won't believe what I told those stupid Dutch tourists I had staying over here a couple of weeks ago...".

Anchorage

On our way back, we stayed in Anchorage for about 16 hours. That is about 15 hours too long. The only good thing about Anchorage is the airport so you can get the hell out of there again.

Alaska: Our verdict

It is huge, it is green, it is beautiful, it is relaxing, it is charming, the people are extremely welcoming and it is full of wildlife. We loved it. It is a bit like a super-sized version of Norway or NZ. And as long as you don't cross paths with one of our poker-playing grizzly friends, you will even survive it.