It rained all night. Morning was socked in, our hopes of seeing Denali all but gone. We dawdled a bit. Dave decided to get up and make ME breakfast in bed — blueberry pancakes again because our blueberries are starting to look a little worse for the wear.
We got to the main highway in Cantwell, got some cell service and learned our halibut charter scheduled for 8/14 was canceled so we had to do some calling and rebooking, blah blah blah. It’s all sorted now — presuming the ferry to Kodiak Island is on time… but we will cross that fjord when we come to it.
On to Denali!
This is another national park, so we braced ourselves for the crowds…
But once in the park, it actually wasn’t bad at all. We stopped at the campground registration to see if, on the outside chance, they had any openings. They didn’t, which was fine. The exercise of standing in line for Dave proved to be one of his biggest challenges in several days.
It was a long wait. The girl working was cheerful and chatty almost to a fault, describing the rules (and believe me: they are long and legitimately complicated) anew to each person who eventually ended up in front of her in the line. Wanna know about the weather? Just a minute! She’ll check for you! And so on. It was adorable and maddening all at the same time.
Dave made it to being the second person in line and bailed. He waited over 15 minutes and when she launched into the rules for like the tenth time — every one of which he heard and understood, but apparently not one other person proceding him did, he couldn’t take it anymore.
I no longer say anything. I keep my head down. And we drive.
In this case, toward the trailhead.
I eventually tentatively asked, “Were we supposed to pay somewhere?” (Trying my hardest not to sound judgmental…) He said “I’m sure there will be a toll booth just like at every other national park we’ve been at.
Nope.
I still don’t quite get that! But I hastily went online while I still had a signal from the visitor center and paid for two adult passes. No one ever asked for them. There was no pay booth. Odd.
And the clouds were miraculously lifting!
We got to see the mountain. Denali looked, honestly, fake. It was hard to see the mountain from the clouds around it. In fact, in the one super-fast picture I took you literally cannot see the mountain from the clouds. But we did see it. And it was gone in an instant, not to be seen again for the rest of the day. I kid you not. I was sad but also grateful for that chance.
We did a nice point-to-point hike from Savage River to Mountain Vista, called the Savage River Alpine Loop. It was awesome because you didn’t have to BACKTRACK! You got to take the free shuttle bus back to the starting point. Most of the people in the park are on the buses, which makes such a huge difference — even though we weren’t one of them. #hypocrites
We met a few people who stopped to gawp at our rig. Seriously. If I had a buck for every man (aka little boy) who has stopped in his tracks at the All Show/No Go, tricked-out Bronco pulling the bad-ass Topo 2 camper, I’d be rich. Not kidding. But the phenomenon HAS been the conduit to many interesting conversations with people. The two latest instances being people from Colorado. There are LOTS of people from Colorado visiting Alaska, it seems.
So, women: guys have it figured out. If THEY want to meet WOMEN, they get a puppy and walk it through the park. Likewise, here is my tip for women wanting to meet MEN: get a tricked out bronco and pod and drive it through Alaska. I can’t guarantee they’ll all have a full set of teeth, but the odds are in your favor.
After our hike (which was great) we went back down to the campground store to do some laundry, take a shower and catch up on emails. (I mean, c’mon, we paid our fee!). The laundry was a very popular place. They call it Combat Fishing when a river is so crowded you have to jockey for position to find a spot to fish. This was Combat LAUNDRY.
I did eventually secure two washing machines but, alas, I failed completely at the dryer stage. Earlier in the day, in Cantwell, we had stopped for gas at a place HIGHLY TOUTED in The Milepost as having “clean bathrooms, friendly staff and nice laundry facilities.” In fact, I had been COUNTING on the rest room for *cough cough* … I promised not to talk about this anymore. But… I had timed it JUST RIGHT. Only to walk confidently up to the door to the gas station to read the sign taped to the door: “Bathrooms closed.”
I have never seen a sign at a gas station such as that.
“Bathrooms closed,” I asked?
“Yes.”
“You have zero bathrooms available,” I continued?
“Our septic is broken. There are woods out back.”
So I went out back.
And I did NOT have the best memories of the might Vitrus gas station stop.
However, they DID have laundry — that was also closed, because – duh – broken septic. But would they let us use the dryers?
Why, yes, they would!
So we bundled two wet loads of laundry back into our bag and hit the road.
We got everything dried. I worked on, you guessed it: this damn blog. Dave grudgingly agreed to try to find someplace to stay for the night. It was already 8pm, hadn’t even eaten.
About 30 minutes later we pulled off the highway onto a short paved road thinking we were at a spot described in The Milepost as being a good overnight place for RVers with toilet, picnic tables, etc. But we turned too early. It was clearly a place people used to stop, but it was on Ahtna, Inc. land. I tried googling Ahtna the first time I saw it and it’s still a bit of a mystery. It own TONS of land in this area, including on the Denali Highway. From best I can tell, it’s an indigenous people company charging a fee to use its land. It seems to butt up to BLM and national forest land, but you have to pay a fee.
So, we paid $20 to park a few hundred yards off the highway in a gravel turn out. Which seemed a little crazy, but that’s what you do when you are tired.
At least we were legal.
I made Dave another jalapeño cheddar bread grilled ham and cheese and tucked him into bed happy.
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