When a picture is worth 1,000 words….
For your viewing pleasure.

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Two faint skid marks and a tattered yard of neon-pink plastic were all that differentiated the airstrip from the vast gray-green tundra of the Wrangell Plateau. How our pilots spotted them from a couple hundred feet in the air, I have no idea. Our first plane, a waspish, yellow and red, 4-seater Cessna 185 came in low and landed smoothly, rolling to a stop on the uphill track. The Cessna turned quickly, taxied onto a shoulder and parked. Our second plane, a slightly larger, 5-seater de Havilland Beaver swooped down in a low arc and headed toward the airstrip. Bill, the pilot, warned us to brace for a bump. “This old plane is reliable,” he said, “but it isn’t smooth.” It took three good bounces on balloon tires before we settled to the ground and stopped. John and Jed jumped from the Cessna. Bob, Robin, our guide, Peyton, and I emerged from the Beaver. Within five minutes, all our gear and provisions were in a pile. The pilots waved, called “Bye, see you in four days,” and took off. We were on our own in an immense, pristine, wilderness.

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[A brief note: We have been off the Alcan for over a week but without an internet connection. Alaska wild is Alaska WILD. More coming.]

The Alcan Highway connects Dawson Creek, British Columbia with Delta Junction, Alaska. It was constructed during WWII to allow troops and material to be transported to Alaska to combat a possible invasion by the Japanese. When it was completed, it was 1,700 miles long (It’s shorter now). Started March 9, 1942, the Alaska and Canadian Highway was completed October 28 the same year (That’s just seven months). It was considered the largest engineering/construction project since the Panama Canal. The US Army assigned more than 10,000 men to the project.

I first heard of the Alcan highway in the 60’s. My father often spoke of driving it. He never did. Of course, at that time it was a huge challenge, 1700 miles of mostly unpaved roads with service stations and supplies few and far between. Average speeds couldn’t have been more than 30-40 miles per hour. Cars and trucks were not nearly as dependable as they are now. So, for Dad driving the Alcan Highway was a huge BHAG (Big Harry Audacious Goal). With six kids to raise and a family to support he could never seriously consider making the trek. For him it remained a distant dream.

Anne and I have one remaining National Park in Alaska to visit, Wrangell-Saint Elias. We could have flown to Anchorage, rented a car, driven to McCarthy and visited the park. But somehow that didn’t seem right to me. I’m getting up in years and our visits to Alaska are probably numbered. This might be the last chance I have to pay homage to my father, Leland Mattice Knapp, and fulfill what he never had the time or resources to do. Drive to Alaska. The challenges aren’t as great now, the roads are paved (actually they are pretty good), fuel and services are easily available, the speeds are faster, but it is still a long way. And I could still see what my father would have seen. The scenery is still there, and animals still come out to graze or play by the roadside as you pass. So, this trip is for you dad, you would have loved it.

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If Banff is Canada’s Yosemite, a stunning combination of grand vistas, soaring mountains, azure lakes, and dramatic waterfalls, where throngs of tourists clog every attraction and hip commercial development provides visitors with high end retailers, craft beers, upscale restaurants, and expensive hotels, Jasper National Park is Canada’s Glacier. Bigger, higher, rawer, as beautiful, with fewer people and more modest services. Both should be on your must-see list. They are, quite literally, breathtaking.

After a couple nights in Banff, we headed north to Jasper on the Ice Fields Parkway, a 147-mile two-lane road that winds its way along the Continental Divide between the two parks. Conde Nast rates it as “one of the top drives in the world.” I’d never heard of it, so I had few expectations as we turned off Canada Route 1 and onto the Parkway. While the sun shone and the clouds hovered above the peaks, we were treated to an unending spectacle of snow-capped ridges, broad forested valleys, and sparkling lakes. It didn’t last long.

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We are sitting by a campfire in Banff National Park, Alberta Canada, Tunnel Mountain Village Campground #2, campsite 41 A. It’s an interesting campground. There are three large camp loops (A, B, & C), each consisting of five parallel roads about 3/8th of a mile long. The roads are connected on the ends by a U-shaped turn around, and an access road runs across the middle. The roads are about fifty feet apart. Picnic tables, fire rings, and electrical hook-ups, also spaced about 50 feet apart, line each side of the roads.

When we arrived, we drove down the correct road, found 41 A, swung over to the gravel shoulder in front of our picnic table, fire ring, and power station. We parallel parked, plugged in and we were there. While there is room to put up a tent, no one has. This part of the campground is clearly designed for RV’s. It is easy access, easy setup, high density, and compact. In a small area there are sites for over 200 RV’s. Some as long as forty-five feet.

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On long road trips you have a couple of options. The fast one, where you hop on the Interstate, set your cruise control at 5 miles over the speed limit, and fly. Or the meandering one, the one where you head out on State Highway or County Road such and such, the one where you cruise close to the fields, up and down rolling hills, across train tracks, past barns and silos, and within smelling distance of livestock and fertilizer. The one where the speed limit never exceeds 60 mph and every 15 miles or so you need to throttle down to 45 and then 35 as you pass through one small town after another. Most of our trips have been of the fast variety. Get from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible, see the sights, take a hike, move on. This time we’re slowing down, travelling on two lane roads, staying off the Interstates.

We are enjoying it. The roads are surprisingly good, well maintained with decent shoulders. The traffic as sparce as the population, no wrangling with an endless line of 18-wheelers. Whatever there is to see is near at hand. When John is driving and I am free to do whatever I want – read, knit, play games on my phone – what I mostly do is look out the window, watch the world go by, and think about what I’m seeing. What is the land telling me about where I am, about the people and animals that inhabit that place, the terrain and geology, the economy and the ecology? Whenever we stop for fuel or to stretch our legs, it is easy to make a human connection with the people we meet. Ask directions or wonder about a landscape feature and people are welcoming and happy to talk. It is good to be reminded that, red state or blue, most people are just people.
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It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly 5 years since our last Tencenturies entry. A week ago, we set out on another adventure – a six-week trek from Minneapolis to Alaska and back – and are firing up Tencenturies to communicate with anyone who is interested in the journey. So, if you are interested, here goes…

Background:

National Parks: At a party in 2015, our friend Bob Appel mentioned that he was on a quest to visit all (at that time) 59 US National Parks. What a wonderful idea, I thought. I want to do that. I’d never met a National Park I didn’t like and setting up a goal to see all of them seemed like a great organizing principal for our domestic travel. Thanks to my parents and our annual summer migrations from Los Angeles to New England to visit relatives, by the time I reached adulthood, I’d visited 16 National Parks. Travels with John and the kids between 1974 and 2015 had added another 16. I had a good start.

Fast forward to 2022. There are now 63 National Parks (NPs), the most recent one, New River Gorge added in December 2020. I have visited 57 of them. Six more to go. One of the remaining parks is Wrangel-St. Elias National Park and Preserve – an enormous wilderness area just north of the Canadian border in Alaska. At 13.2 million acres, Wrangell is the largest US National Park, over twice as big as Denali and almost 6 times the size of Yellowstone. Of the 8 NPs in Alaska, it is the only one we haven’t visited. That is where we are headed.

The Alcan Highway: John has always wanted to drive the Alcan Highway – the storied 1,387-mile road from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, through the Yukon to Delta Junction, Alaska. John’s an explorer at heart. The distance, the remoteness, and the unknowns intrigue him. In the olden days the Alcan was a dirt highway with few services, many potholes, copious wildlife, and plenty of opportunities for solo problem solving. Today it is much civilized. It is paved and we don’t have to worry about carrying extra fuel to get us from one gas station to the next. Nevertheless, it is a long drive into remote territory with much to see and experience. The entire trip, with the need to get from Minneapolis to the start at Dawson Creek, return from Delta Junction, and experience Wrangel St. Elias, will exceed 8,000 miles.
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We’ve been back in the United States — in Brooksville, Maine — for two weeks. Every day of those two weeks has been packed with people and activity; a wedding, a birthday, my father’s interment, the annual family meeting. We’ve had 7 adults and 5 kids in our house. Another score or so were staying across the street at the family’s summer compound, Sea Winds. That crowd created a lot of conversation, a lot of kid chasing, a lot of meals, a lot of laundry and no time to write. The house cleared out yesterday.

About a half hour ago I took my lunch out to the workshop to spend a few minutes chatting with John and watching him do whatever it was he was doing. He was repairing a large window screen that two 4-year-old boys ripped last week while experimenting with a long, galvanized framing nail they’d found in the bushes. The boys discovered that raking a nail across a window screen yields three results; long slashes in the screen (very satisfying), a stern scolding from parents and grandparents (to be expected) and no chocolate cake for desert (serious remorse). Today, as I perched on a chair and ate my yoghurt and blueberries, John bent over the damaged screen and used a skinny plastic roller to press new netting into a channel that ran along the edge of the frame. John worked with his back toward me. It’s a very familiar view and one that I like. As I watched John move, I was reminded of a thought I’d had on one of our hikes in Norway, and of a blog I wanted to write.

There is something very sexy about competent and active old men.

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Ride day number 8, 4 pm. We crested our last hill and looked down on Kharakhorum, once the capital of Chenggis Khan’s global empire, now a typical confetti-roofed Mongolian jigsaw of a frontier town. In 15 minutes, our ride across Mongolia would be over. We could see the yurt camp where our motley group of 12 would spend its last night together.

I don’t know what I expected to feel; relief that we’d all made it safely, the bone-deep weariness that takes over after extended physical exertion, an overwhelming desire for a beer, a shower and 600 mg of ibuprofen. Indeed, all those feelings were there. But what surprised me was the presence of another sensation; that of a container under pressure whose relief valve or compression bindings had just been released. I felt my chest loosen and tears well behind my eyes. Over the past 12 days there had been so many new experiences, so many things to learn, so many times I’d been pushed out of my comfort zone, that I hadn’t had the bandwidth to think about any of it. I’d lived strictly in the moment, flowing from one event to the next, simply being and simply doing. My container was now stuffed to busting with unprocessed emotions and simmering impressions of new skills and insights into life.
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