Alaska is an immense land, but it is possible to see a fair sample of the state in a two-week period if you plan carefully and use optimum air, sea and land transportation.
Alaska is unlike destinations where you can casually search for transportation and accommodations. Prudent Alaska travel requires that you have confirmed lodging and transportation before you arrive. There just aren`t any extra lodgings or places on the buses for drop-in visitors during the tourist season, June through August. Moreover, there are hundreds of miles of spruce forests between outposts of civilization.
You can make all the arrangements yourself and travel independently-campers , fishermen and RV owners who have the time do that-but the vast distances and limited accommodations have made the state primarily a tour operators` region. The most prominent of these is Westours, but the full spectrum of operators will be known to travel agents, which you should consult.
A grand tour of Alaska in two weeks might begin with a flight to Anchorage, population 200,000. Then bus west to Denali National Park for a day of viewing the wildlife from the guided Park Service buses.
Bus north to Fairbanks to see the pipeline, the Alaska Museum and the salmon camp of Howard Luke. Then jet south to Juneau, the state capital, then take a small cruise boat up the Lynn Canal to historic Skagway, the gold rush town.
Back in Juneau, take a cruise ship south to Vancouver, with visits to Glacier Bay National Park and Sitka, the original Russian settlement, along the way.
Sounds quick and superficial, doesn`t it? It isn`t. Here`s each stop in more detail:
ANCHORAGE
This is the gateway to the main body of Alaska. In Aleut, ”Alaska”
means ”the great land.”
About half of the state`s total population lives in Anchorage. As you fly in, you`ll see the city framed by mountains, set on a plain a few feet above the ocean, perilously vulnerable to a tsunami (an underwater earthquake). When you taxi down the runway, purple fireweed is the visually dominant wildflower, though the forget-me-not is the state flower.
On your first night in Anchorage, the long summer daylight period will become apparent. At 11 p.m. the twilight continues to persist. The flip side of summer light is winter darkness, which prompts some Alaskans to seek a winter home ”outside,” meaning in the lower 48 states. Short rest-and-recuperation flights to Hawaii recharge the solar energy of those citizens who can afford to be mobile in winter.
Anchorage citizens so appreciate the summer light, as an antidote to seven months of winter and darkness, that they take pride in their lawns, even running a Lawn of the Year contest. Hanging baskets of flowers adorn almost every house. Greenhouses are popular, giving ornamental flowers and vegetables an early start in spring and prolonged growth in autumn.
Ironically, the hours of summer light are so long that the total light falling on plants approximates that found in Illinois or other breadbasket states. However, all the growth must occur in a four-month period from June through September.
The city of Anchorage is spread out; so take a city tour to orient yourself. These tours are offered from all the hotels (The Captain Cook is a main downtown lodging).
At Resolution Park, you`ll find a statue to British Capt. James Cook, who sailed his ships in 1778 into the inlet near Anchorage that now bears his name. Cook was searching for a northwest passage trade route.
Anchorage originated as a camp and transport site in 1912 for the developing Alaska Railroad, at the edge of the Cook Inlet.
Within the city you`ll see salmon spawning in streams. Five types of salmon enter Alaskan streams for their fatal mission to reproduce in the same waters in which they were born. The species are the king or chinook, whose red and oily meat is most highly prized by gourmets; the chum or dog salmon, which was the main food for sled dogs; the fall chum; the silver or coho salmon; and the red or pink salmon. At Anchorage you can see chum salmon swimming upstream in July.
Earthquake Park commemorates the Good Friday quake of 1964. People in the lower 48 states may have forgotten that particular earthquake, but Anchorage citizens remember it well. The quake measured 8.6 on the Richter scale, greater than the devastating San Francisco quake of 1906. Moreover, the duration was impressive, with the earth heaving for a full five minutes.
Anchorage, at the epicenter, was left a shambles, with 10-foot drops in soil level. A hundred people lost their lives, and 4,000 were left homeless. Anchorage citizens now mark the events of their lives as those that happened before and those that happened after the quake.
Earthquake Park attempts to portray for the visitor the force of the quake. However, when vegetation covers the ground, it is difficult for the layman to appreciate fully the impact. The view of the skyline from the park is worth the trip out, however. Anchorage citizens, shaken each summer by a few minor quakes, remain fearful of possible future major quakes.
For information on Anchorage or Alaska in general, write to the Alaska Division of Tourism, P.O. Box E, Juneau, Alaska 98111; 907-465-2010. The Anchorage Visitor Bureau is at 4th Avenue and F Street, Anchorage, Alaska 99501; 907-276-3200.
DENALI NATIONAL PARK
This park`s original name was McKinley National Park. Alaskans favored renaming the park after the Athabascan Indian word for the mountain, denali, meaning ”the great one.” The peak itself retains the name Mt. McKinley, after the American president, William McKinley.
Only after you leave Anchorage and spend most of a day on a bus ride to Denali Park-noting how short the distance is on the map-does the size of Alaska begin to sink in. Alaska is larger than all of California, Oregon and Washington state combined.
Alaskans like to joke, but there is a basis in fact, that if the state of Alaska were cut in two, Texas would be the third largest state.
When Alaska became the 49th state, it added a full fifth more to the land mass of the first 48. Roads penetrate only a small portion of this vast area. The human record in Alaska goes back some 30,000 years to small groups of Athabaskan Indians, Aleuts and Eskimos, whose ancestors originally followed caribou herds across the Bering Sea, when it was frozen, or who crossed from Russia in small boats.
Mt. McKinley, at 20,300 feet, is the tallest mountain in North America. The height of the mountain and its northerly position account for its perpetual snow and glacier appearance, which only a third of the summer visitors are fortunate enough to see because of overcast.
However, the mountain is only the second major attraction of the park. The original reason for creating the park was the preservation of wildlife. Viewing wildlife in a preserved natural environment is the major special experience the park offers.
Most visitors who take the Wildlife Tour, operated in buses by the Park Service, will see the Big Four-grizzly bear, moose, dall sheep and caribou. If you are fortunate, you may even see wolves.
For exploring within the park, cars can`t be used. Shuttle buses and Wildlife Tours operated by the Park Service control all transportation, exactly the opposite approach from Yellowstone, our other great park for wildlife viewing. Denali will never allow a tradition of garbage-fed bears, as Yellowstone did.
The Wildlife Tours amount to six hours on a bus with a naturalist-driver, who interprets the park and assists in wildlife sighting. When wildlife is sighted, you view it from the bus or if you will not disturb the wildlife, from near the bus.
The tour includes a box lunch. Roads are bumpy, and the buses are old school buses; so come prepared for a substantial trip. Tours leave early in the morning and in mid-afternoon to catch the best viewing time. This tour is highly recommended.
Free shuttle buses make the same trip in and out of the park, allowing you to get off at designated points for a hike. The shuttle buses move quickly and don`t stop to view the animals or offer naturalist interpretation.
Distances in the park are vast, and there is only one road in and out. The road is the minimum road required. It takes four hours to go from the park entrance to the final stop, at Wonder Lake, deep in the park.
One of the unusual Park Service interpretive efforts is the daily sled-dog demonstration, which takes place late in the afternoon near the park entrance.
The geological story is a major part of your experience at Denali. Glacier-fed rivers pour forth and twist across sediment beds in a braided pattern through the valleys. In summer the rivers turn gray because of the ground rock, called ”rock flour,” crushed by the weight of the creeping glaciers.
Among the few lodgings at Denali, the rustic but comfortable McKinley Chalets are a good choice. Another hotel is the National Park Inn, which includes relatively inexpensive ex-railroad cars among its lodgings.
For further information on Denali, write to the Superintendent, Denali National Park, P.O. Box 9, Denali Park, Alaska 99755.
FAIRBANKS
Here, in the interior of Alaska, the weather is far more severe than the temperate coastal areas of Anchorage or Juneau-Skagway-Sitka.
At Fairbanks (population about 23,000), winters are cold and dark, and temperatures commonly drop to 45 degrees below, and that`s without adding the wind-chill factor. Such conditions can provoke introspective self-knowledge or cabin fever approaching madness, depending on your temperament.
A sobering detail at the University of Alaska campus is that all the parking lot stalls have electric sockets where you plug in heater cables on your engine to keep the motor from freezing up while you attend classes. The electrical cost to keep a car plugged in overnight is about $5. In Fairbanks, you need to be tough to survive.
Summer in Fairbanks, when most visitors come, offers a more hospitable environment. It is light so long during the day that a famous midnight baseball game played on June 21 required no electric lights. Parents allow their children to play outside long after the usual bedtime, well aware of the need for humans, as well as plants, to absorb as much sunlight as possible in the luxurious but brief sun time.
Fairbanks considers itself the Golden Heart of Alaska because of the substantial gold discoveries here, in the middle of the country, in September, 1900. Typically for Alaska, Fairbanks has been a boom and bust town. If anything, tourism may ultimately reduce more transient cycles in the community. The booms occurred when gold was discovered in 1900, when attention focused on Alaska as a defense post in World War II and when pipeline employees were cashing their $30-an-hour paychecks during the building of the 800-mile pipe from 1973-1977.
Orient yourself by stopping in at the downtown log cabin information center. Next to the log cabin you`ll find a swiveling signpost marker indicating the distances to various places in the U.S. and around the globe. Fairbanks is as far north as most Alaska travelers go, except for those dedicated few who take a charter flight beyond the Arctic Circle, about 230 miles north of the city.
A downtown walk can take you from the Visitor Center to the Cheena River bank. There you`ll see remnants of homes from the era when trader E.T. Barnette, gold discoverer Felix Pedro and legal arranger Judge James J. Wickersham founded the town.
