Top-of-the-World Highway

24 June 2010
Thursday

Woke up to some major fog and decided to go for the road anyway: it's steep, narrow, gravel, mushy after yesterday's rain, washboardy and has no guardrails. Glad we did because once we broke out of the fog the views were incredible. We just could not get enough of them. Lots and lots of pictures later we are 190 miles from Anchorage in a campground that is surrounded on three sides by wilderness and our site is next to another babbling stream. We are going to miss that when we get home.

The road is not only the main road, it is the only road. The trip over the top was unreal. Never have we experienced so much weather in such a short time: fog, glaring sunshine, heat [70-degree temps], then cold [in the 40s], followed by rain and SNOW and then it all repeated itself again. We were stopping constantly to try to capture the view. The "top" was a short hike up to a large cairn just before the border. It is a grand 4,500 ft. up. But we enjoyed it anyway.

We crossed the border without incident and then it was all downhill from there--and then back up and down and up and down: well, you get the idea. The roads in the Yukon make the roads in Alaska look like we are in a third world country. Apparently the permafrost takes no prisoners and the roads are like a roller coaster. Just watching the big rigs tackle them made us wince. We were glad we just have the van; it was bouncy enough. In the Yukon, they grade the asphalt right off and replace it with gravel so it is dusty but relatively smooth. In Alaska the rollers are just there and you get to bounce around a lot.

On a high note we started to see really tall mountains: 12,000 - 16,000 feet tall. They were all covered with snow and for the most part obscured by the clouds that were making the snow and sleet and rain that we were experiencing at a lower altitude. We are at an altitude of about 1,200 ft. here and will be steadily going down as we approach Anchorage which is at sea level.

And so the babbling brook rushes by the "dining room" and with the windows open tonight it will lull us to sleep.

Then it's off to the big city: Anchorage.