Our time in Whitehorse proved to be quite busy, catching up on odds and ends, making good use of the wi-fi, doing oil changes, buying the ingredients for Ben’s shower project, that sort of thing. But we also found time to take in a few of the local sights.
Not satisfied with one trip above the Arctic Circle. Who would be? We decided it was time to investigate the Canadian Arctic and find out the Northwest Territories had to offer (or at least the small part of it that we could afford to visit—both financially and in terms of time). It seemed like the logical thing to do while we were in the neighbourhood at any rate.
Visiting Dawson City is like travelling back in time to the gold rush era. The dirt streets are lined with wooden boardwalks all leading to buildings that cause you to believe you have accidentally hit 88mph and travelled back to the wild west.
The time had finally come to drive the Dalton Highway up to Deadhorse to officially ‘start’ our journey. While we had been camping in Fairbanks, we had met a couple from Texas who had just completed the drive themselves. They spoke of lots of mud, roadsides teeming with wildlife and dipping their feet in the ice-filled Arctic Ocean. Sounds like our kind of road trip!
But you’ve already written a post on bears! Look closer, there is a bear in this photo, but it isn’t him that we are afraid of.
Since we were taking so long to get to the official ‘start’ of our journey in Deadhorse, Alaska, it made sense to delay a bit longer. The starting point of our trip South is also the starting point for the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline. This pipeline finishes in Valdez, in Prince William Sound. So we thought it sounded like a plan to start where the oil finishes and then drive to the source. Confused?
The wildlife of Alaska. In contrast to New Zealand where the native wildlife consists almost entirely of birds, it is a bit of a change to spend some time in a part of the world where the wildlife is large enough to trample and/or eat you.
We ended up in Kennecott because a lady in Homer mentioned it to us once, she said we’d probably like Kennecott and McCarthy, but didn’t really elaborate too much. We weren’t really sure why we were going there: It was quite out-of-the-way It was down a dirt road, that as a former railway track had a bit of a reputation for shredding tyres A bit of reading informed us that we couldn’t actually drive all the way there and would have to park the car 5 miles away, just outside McCarthy and walk or catch a shuttle We started the […]
One of the best things about Alaska is how convenient all the glaciers are. Sure there are plenty of inaccessible ones, and thousands we would never see without a plane and a lot of time on our hands, but the fact is, there are some that are downright easy to get to. After travelling around Alaska for a few weeks, we have to report that we became so jaded about glaciers that we stopped bothering to do all the walks to go look at them. To understand how people can become so blasé about such incredible ancient rivers of ice […]
We can’t by any means claim to be experts on small town Alaska, we’ve only visited a few. But the ones we have visited have all been pretty unique and fun. Three of our favourites in the Alaska so far have been Hope, Whittier and Kennecott. Kennecott will be the subject of its very own blog post due to the large quantity of accompanying photographs that it will involve. But for now, allow us to familiarise you with the two very different towns of Hope and Whittier.