Chapter 5: The Second Most Magical Place On Earth
We discovered that Valdez wasn’t the most friendly of towns. It’s largely populated by fishermen, and I guess I’d be grumpy too if I was covered in fish guts and their smell all day long. Julie went out for an early morning jog and said she got the stinkeye from several residents along the way. She tried to say hi or wave to passers-by, but only one made any acknowledgement.
Our reputation must have preceded us.
We got the hint and packed up the van, heading out just after breakfast at the hotel. Knowing we had a long drive ahead of us, I made sure to fill up the gas tank at a station on the edge of town. The mountain pass was still fairly cloudy as we climbed, but on the other side it appeared that we had more visibility, so we had hope that the scenery would be better.
After driving for about an hour or so, we reached a pull-off where we could get a view of the Wrangell Mountains, part of
Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. On the prior day, they’d been completely covered in clouds.
Today…the Good Lord was smiling on us once again.
The mountain on the left is Mount Drum, which stands 12,010 feet (3661 m) high. Just to the right of that is Mount Zanetti, which is 13,009 ft (3965 m). And the sloping, rounded mountain on the far right is Mount Wrangell, which is the tallest of the three at 14,163 ft (4317 m). And if you’re scratching your head and wondering how that mountain on the right could possibly be the tallest of the three, just do yourself a favor and Google the term “forced perspective”. Mount Drum is much closer to the overlook than the other two peaks.
Once again, we were grateful that we got to see the mountain peaks completely clear. We were really hitting the tourist lottery here.
Just a bit further up the road was the visitor center for the national park, located near the town of Copper Center. There weren’t too many visitors at this time of the morning. Maybe one other family. The Alaska national parks are routinely some of the least-visited parks in the American system.
The main visitor center was closed due to COVID (they had an information window open), but the theater was open so we could watch a 15-minute park video. Because when there’s a pandemic, you don’t want people circulating and looking at exhibits, but it’s fine to sit everyone in rows close together in a dark room.
Again, we were thankful that there was hardly anyone there.
We got a nice pre-screening talk from a ranger who just loved her park and couldn’t wait to share it with us. She was older and her tone seemed to indicate that she was excited to have visitors to talk to. That was the tone of her speech as well, as she spoke about how the park saw relatively few visitors each year, and yet it is actually the largest national park in the country. At over 20,000 square miles (53,320 sq.km.), it’s six times the size of Yellowstone National Park, and 25% larger than the entire country of Switzerland. The park contains the second-highest mountain in North America—Mount St. Elias, which sits right on the border with Canada at 18,008 ft (5489 m).
Here’s a map showing the size of the park. We were at the “park headquarters” on the far east side of the park border. As you can see, we barely got to see 1% of this park.
The ranger finished her talk by showing us a sticker (conveniently available in the gift shop)—one of those black-and-white ovals with an abbreviation for some location that people stick to their car windows. It read “WRST” for Wrangell-St. Elias. But in this case, she said, “WRST” is the best.
She even thanked us for laughing politely.
We let Drew work on his Junior Ranger activities while we wandered the paths and checked out a few exhibits along the way. They had another overlook with a nice view of Mount Drum nearby.
And in relatively short order, Drew finished his ranger booklet and was sworn in via a grand ceremony by the flagpole.
The ranger who performed this swearing-in ceremony was one of the native Alaskans of this region, whose family had actually fought for the preservation of the lands.
We celebrated Andrew’s achievement with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the parking lot.
And then we left for Fairbanks.
The drive was approximately five hours, taking the Richardson Highway (state route 4) up to the junction with State Route 2 (also the Richardson Highway) and then following that into the city. We didn’t get off to a great start, due to about 20 miles of road construction we encountered shortly after leaving.
There wasn’t really any road for that stretch, just a lot of dust and gravel. I imagine road construction season is very short in Alaska.
Thankfully, most of the drive was gorgeous, especially as we crossed the Alaska Range. We routinely got views like this:
And this:
We even got our first glimpse of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which was really impressive to see in person.
More on that later.
As we were nearing both Fairbanks and the end of everyone’s patience with bouncing a minivan on frost-heaved roads, we entered the North Pole.
Yep, I said the North Pole. Must’ve taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque.
North Pole, Alaska is a tiny town about twenty miles southwest of Fairbanks. There are just over 2,000 people living here, and the community receives hundreds of thousands of letters to Santa Claus each year. Even though it’s technically 1,700 miles south of the geographic north pole, this is the place.
This is where Santa Claus lives.
If you get off the highway and backtrack a bit on a frontage road, you too can
visit this magical home, where Santa himself invites you to walk right on in.
Strangely, I didn’t see Santa inside (probably vacationing in Florida) but there were quite a few teens manning cash registers and ready to sell me ornaments, stockings, fudge, and/or crappy t-shirts.
Outside, we could wander over and visit the enchanted park where Santa’s majestic reindeer live. Ignore the chicken wire.
When I say “majestic”, I of course mean “forlorn”.
The piece de resistance, of course, was the 30-ft. tall statue of Santa himself, which was a warm welcome to all of his guests. Ignore the chicken wire.
And when I say “warm welcome”, I of course mean “creepy psychotic nightmare fuel”.
This was basically an excuse to get out of the car and stretch our legs. Now I can’t sleep at night.
Fishtailing out of the parking lot, we got back on the highway in no time and finished our journey to Fairbanks. We stayed at a Hyatt Place just north of downtown and had a nice suite there where everyone could stretch out and avoid sleeping on the floor.
It was here that I began to encounter difficulties with my restaurant plans. I’d originally planned to go for a local diner called
The Cookie Jar, where we could enjoy one of our favorites: breakfast for dinner. It was not lost on me that they also served cinnamon rolls as big as your head. Sign me up!
But when we got to Fairbanks, a quick check of their website told me that they were suffering from employee shortages due to COVID, and were therefore going to be closing a couple of days a week. Sadly, that included the day we were there.
So, we had to improvise. After a quick check of Trip Advisor, we ended up at
Big Daddy’s Bar-B-Q in downtown Fairbanks.
Yep, we’re visiting all the classy joints around here.
It had once been featured on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, so I figured it couldn’t be all bad. And we had a nice hearty meal here. Sarah and Scotty split a rack of ribs:
I went for my customary brisket.
It was ok. Mine is better.
We also continued our peanut butter pie tour, because why not?
Again, not bad. But the pizza place in Anchorage was better.
Overall, we’d rate this meal as “decent”. It fit the bill, but I kinda wished the diner had been open.
There was a part of me that had wanted to figure out a way to cross the Arctic Circle while we were in Alaska. But in order to do that, we would have had to drive the Dalton Highway for a couple hundred miles north (forbidden for rental cars) or hire a tour group, which became pricy rather quickly. As it turned out, this is as far north as we would get.
Coming Up Next: Fossils and Fossil fuel.