Dear friends and blog followers,
This is a special edition of our blog. In this entry, we take some lesser known side roads well off the normal routes in Alaska. Much of the next 10 days will be in an area with no cell or wifi service, therefore we will be dark during that time. Much of this entry is devoted to old towns and mining old, either gold or copper. We get a touch of gold fever while camped at the Little Nelchina. I detail our adventures along the McCarthy road leading us to the Kennecott Copper Mine in the southern Wrangell-St. Elias national Park. After leaving there, we travel the west and north park boundary to the Nabesna Road that takes us to the old Nabesna Gold mine, still in the Wrangell-St. Elias national park.
08/14/2011
Today is a travel day east and north along what is called the Glenn Highway (Alaska route 1) and is the most direct way from Anchorage to the Tok Junction and the Alaska highway (Alcan) . It connects Anchorage to Glennallen where there is the Richardson Highway to either the north or south. The south will take you to Valdez or Tok to the north.
We traveled to the 137.6 mile post on the Glenn and stopped for the night in the Little Nelchina State Recreation area (abandoned for 10 years) and found it to be just right for us. Description is 9 campsites, 15 day limit, no fee, no drinking water, with fire pits, and grayling fishing. Enough camping wood was stacked at the fire pit for a few days. I even hooked up the electric water pump to pump water from the river to the RV
We liked our site and decided to extend a few days.
08/15/2011
We found that it had gold in the river and this is a mini gold rush era in Alaska. Two longtime local guys , Alan and Dennis, from up the road came to do a little panning for gold. They came back the next day and brought the equipment to do mining using a gasoline lake pump with a special suction device along with a sleuth type separator box that they had constructed. Of course they knew how this all works and within 2 hours they had vacuumed up and separated a few flakes of gold. They plan to take this equipment up the river about 20 miles where there is a larger concentration. Both of them have studied prospecting for gold in this area and I believe they will have good success. Good luck to them. Alan is the owner of the Slide RV and lodge and Dennis is and retired engineer that worked in power generation field.
08/16/2011 - 08/17/2011
I checked the wheel bearings and adjusted the brakes on the trailer. I changed the oil on the Honda generator. I have an hour meter and the recommended 50 hour change intervals come more quickly than I would have ever thought. I have all the water I want, therefore the car and trailer gets a good wash job. It is nice to see them clean for a day or two. We spend a lot of time in and around the park. There are some hiking trails along the Little Nilchina, so I hiked a few of them. This place is packed with mining history. At the turn of the century, there was a mule pack train that moved along this river delivering supplies to the town of Nelchina, now just a ghost town with little trace of the past.
We meet more Bob and his wife, Kahren, who were out cutting wood for the winter. They are nice and give us some salmon nicely vacuumed packed. We gave them some of Jack Reed's good Lubbock grown pecans.
The day light hours are giving way to the season change and we have dark nights and much shorter days. A few leaves are starting to fall.
08/18/2011
The time has come again, and it’s time to travel. We are heading east into Glennallen with plans to turn south and head to Chitna, AK. This will take us to the end of the pavement and a campsite where we will leave the RV for a long day trip to towns of McCarthy and Kennecott.
We find a Dept of Transportation campground called the Copper River DOT campground that will work just perfect. We meet up with Alan and his wife Liz that are traveling with Dick and Nancy. We had met Alan and Liz earlier near the Yak ranch on the Edgerton Highway. Be sure to check the Yak picture, because you may not know yak crap.
08/19/2011
We all have the same travel plans to McCarthy and Kennecott so we caravan together. The distance is 59 miles one way and it will be nice to travel with someone on this really bad gravel stretch of road. Described by the Milepost editor as
“The McCarthy road is a gravel road built along the old Copper River & Northwestern railway bed. Watch for old rails and railroad ties embedded in the road or lying along the roadside. The McCarthy road ends at the Kennicott River, 59.3 miles west of the town of Chitna, AK. There is no gas or diesel available on the McCarthy road.”
To make matters worse, it looks as if it will rain all day. We are eager to get there, so at 8AM we are off to a long day of adventure. The 60 miles takes us 4 hours to complete and we had no problems, just a few scenic stop along the way.
At the end of the road we get to walk a ¼ mile gravel road and a bridge to the town of McCarthy where we will catch a local shuttle into Kennecott and the Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark located in the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. This is the largest of the US national parks, it is larger than 11 Yellowstone parks. It is larger than some of the states in the lower 48.
We tour the Kennecott Copper Mine and see the remains of the Mill house and most of the infrastructure building still standing. The mine closed in 1938 after mining and concentrating at least $200 million worth of ore. It had the best grade of copper ever found and supplied the copper for the world for many years
After visiting the mine we took the shuttle back to McCarty and spent some time at the Museum, store, and the historic Golden Saloon. McCarthy has no electricity, paved streets, and nothing except a foot bridge to cross the Kennecott river. There are a few generators running behind the stories. Supplies are brought in when the river is frozen or carried across the footbridge.
We were able to make the 60 miles in less time, but it still took about 3 hours to get back to the campground. Alan made a big fire and we had a good time around the fire telling stories. A little later we had smores using mints, that worked really good.
A little about Alan and Liz Johnson… Alan and Liz work for Honeywell Avionics as software engineers in the “fly by wire” control systems of the new age airplanes. They write programs that control and then furnish feedback to the computers onboard. They work for a while and then go home to a 38’ catamaran sailboat anchored on the eastern coast of Panama. This is their home. There blog at http://svkopelli.blogspot.com
A little about Dick and Nancy Maynard… Dick is a retired mechanical engineer with professional license and sometimes does church construction. He spent his working career as a field superintendent at job sites around the US. Nancy is a retired office manager.
08/20/2011
We say goodbye to our friends at the Copper River DOT campground and turn north to Glennallen and than toward Tok Junction. However, as I said early in this post, we got a touch of gold fever. On the north side of Wrangell-St. Elias NP we decide to take the Nebesna road that takes us some 42 miles into the park to the Nebesna Gold Mine that was abandoned in the late ‘40s. It is also the road to the Rambler Gold mine that I will hike up to. We set up camp at mile 16.6 in a site with a view to the southwest over Kettle Lake toward Mount Wrangell. Tomorrow we will drive to the end of the Nebesna road.
We did the dump station thing at Glennallen as we traveled through.
08/21/2011
Our Nebesna road adventure started about 10AM with us driving about 44 miles into the very scenic Wrangell St.Elias NP. The 55 degree weather was clearing with a lot of open blue sky giving us a perfect view of the mountains. The road for the first 20 miles is fair, but the next 20 are potholed and sometimes very rocky. There are a few areas that still have the corduroy road that used wooden timbers for the surface. We will ford several water crossings along the way, but these are not a problem as they are gravel and the water was not over a foot deep. In all directions the views are very scenic with some of the most impressive mountains in the world. To each side of the road the wild flowers grace the landscape.
This is hunting season in Alaska and this is a favorite for subsistence hunter and sport hunters. They hunt moose, dall sheep, and caribou. This is a national park that in 1983 opened it to land grants that brought people in to get free land. They are still a few private owners along the Nebesna road. Most of these folks have left and headed for warmer areas.
We drove to the end of the road and I walked another few miles to the trailhead to the abandoned Rambler Gold Mine. The trail was 1 mile each way, but the trail to the mine was up a steep mountain side. I made the mile, but had to stop for many rest stops along the way. The effort was rewarding as the views were great and I got to the mine to take pictures. It is somewhat scary walking into an abandoned mine, what if there is a bear in there. I took a few pics with flash. The return hike was easy as it was downhill all the way. I estimate that I walked about 7 miles today.
On the way back to the camp, we meet Alan and Liz as they were traveling toward the end of the road. We talked for a while and then we drove on to a water crossing to wash the truck of the mud we got on the McCarthy road. That worked out nicely. I use the Honda generator to power the small pump so Barbara can rinse as I used the soap and brush. On the way back, we got a few pictures of the mountains as the sun set in the west. A very good day
8/22/2011
We are leaving today and heading for Tok or Haines Junction , but are not sure because of the weather.
Therefore, this is house cleaning and blog writing. We are getting some rain and I have some concern about the road condition because of the rain falling.
That is all at the moment
John and Barbara on the road
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