Fantasy Caravan Day 44 -- Palmer to Valdez

Sunday was a travel day from Palmer to Valdez -- 263 miles -- one of our longer driving days.

A photo at a fuel station near our campground in Palmer -- we've seen a number of these, where there is a Dog Wash and a Car Wash in the same facility. Carl thinks you just tie the leash to the antenna, put the dog on the roof, and let the car go through the wash!

A construction area on the Glenn Highway -- but the scenery is beautiful!

More scenery

Apologies for the filthy windshield, but The Milepost said about this point:
"Glenn Highway alignment passes through an enormous road cut. Crews moved over 2.4 million cubic yards of material and finished blasting through this solid rock hill in 2008, as part of the Hicks Creek Road Project, which rerouted this stretch of the Glenn Highway."

We stopped to see the Matanuska Glacier. It feeds the river that we had been traveling alongside on the way from Palmer.

A view of mountains across the river

One of our fellow travelers, Carolyn, offered to take our picture with the glacier and directed us to get on either side of it for the picture!

Fall colors are starting to appear - yellows and golds

Mount Drum seemingly directly ahead of us

After a stop for fuel in Glennallen, we headed south on the Richardson Highway toward Valdez.

A side note: One of our bus drivers (the one who drove us to Cabin Night in Denali a few weeks ago) told us that, for all of its huge size, Alaska has only 11 highways. 

I took a picture of a page in The Milepost, and it appears to me that there may be more like 18 highways, but some of these might be fully in Canada (like Top of the World Highway and Dempster Highway). Even though they all have numbers associated with them, they are referenced by their names rather than numbers.

A short distance along the Richardson Highway (after having gone through a construction area with a pilot car), we decided to stop to see some of the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. On the left side of this picture it shows an overlay of the outline of the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and preserve (in blue) with the outline of the states of Vermont and New Hampshire to give an appreciation of how huge this Park and Preserve is.

This shows the parts that are National Park and the parts that are National Preserve. I had noticed, when we were in Denali, that Denali is called a National Park and Preserve. I had not heard of that terminology previously -- I knew of National Monuments and National Historic Sites in the National Park System, but I had not heard of Preserves. I couldn't easily find a definition online, so I asked a ranger at Wrangell-St. Elias when we stopped there. She said, at least for Wrangell-St. Elias, it was based on hunting privileges. In the Preserve, hunting is permitted to individuals with a hunting license; in the park, it is not; however, since this was only made a National Park in 1980, there are some folks who have grandfathered-in privileges to hunt in the National Park -- but it isn't something that you can get a license for, it has to have been granted due to prior rights to the land.

I mentioned a few days ago about the roots of trees being very close to the surface (https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2024/08/fantasy-caravan-day-38-part-2-ranch.html). This display illustrated the impact of a tree growing a regular root system and one impacted by permafrost - notice the relative sizes of the cross=section on this picture...

Information about the larger cross-section...

Information about the smaller cross-section

Mount Drum

Mount Drum (to the left 12,010 feet) and Mount Wrangell (the flatter looking one to the right, 14,163 feet). Mount Wrangell is an active volcano, erupting as recently as the late 1800s. We read that, on a clear day, steam can be seen emitting from its vent.

Movie Crown of the Continent shows at the Visitor Center -- it is also available for viewing on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGTK6nS-y-o

We took the 1/2 mile loop trail through the Boreal Forest -- a mixture of balsam poplar, quaking aspen, and white spruce trees.

A delicate aster along the trail

One of the information boards talked about the challenges of roadway building -- we thought this picture of a car equipped with skies and tracks was pretty interesting!

There was a fish wheel on display... by the push of the river's current, it would scoop up fish ...

... and deposit them in the container in the foreground in this picture. Our friend from VO, Bill, that we visited in Palmer, indicated that he has rights to access a fish wheel -- we think that we remember that he said that they could get 150 fish collected by the fish wheel overnight.

As we continued on the Richardson Highway, the rain moved in...

The area in Keystone Canyon was still beautiful, even in the rain!

We stopped for pictures at two falls:

Bridal Veil Falls

Horsetail Falls

It was about 5:30pm when we finally arrived at the campground in Valdez -- we were the last of our caravan to arrive! We had left before 9am, and felt like we had not made many stops, but it seemed everyone else arrived a couple of hours earlier than we had! Oh well, we had a nice, but tiring, driving day.