North to Fairbanks

McKinley Express – Whittier to McKinley Lodge

Our cruise ended in Whittier, a small port on the lower Kenai Peninsula. Both freight and passenger traffic is landed on the Vancouver side of the peninsula, rather than sailing the long way round all the way to Anchorage. There is some great scenery on the overland hop to Anchorage.

All the experts – tour books, guides, even our bus drivers – told us, “The weather is always shittier in Whittier”. We disagree. We disembarked in bright sun to board the ARR’s McKinley Express. It was the beginning of a record-breaking heat wave that gave us cloudless skies every day we were inland.

As we left the ship, we could see one trainset on hand in the yard, presumably for the Whittier to Anchorage Airport Shuttle. Our train, the McKinley Express, arrived around 07:00 and backed into the cruise ship platform. The equipment is labelled Alaska Railroad, but the train is chartered to Princess Cruises, who handle the on board service as well. As we waited for departure, a second trainset of Princess-owned bilevel cars arrived.

The trainsets dedicated to cruise traffic are made up of cruise line-owned railcars, plus one ARR bilevel which serves as the rider car for the Conductor. That must be the most luxurious caboose on any railroad, anywhere in the world!

The McKinley Express trainset was single-level equipment, spliced by a cafe lounge car converted from a bilevel commuter car from the lower 48.

On boarding, we found that we were sharing a quad with Carl and Miss Debbie, from Houston – a delightful couple with whom we traded stories and observations over the next four days all the way north to Fairbanks.

Whittier sits at the end of a 12 mile spur. We ran westward to the main line junction at Portage, and then another 161 miles north to Talkeetna. For the first lap to Anchorage, the tracks sit on the shoreline of Turnagain Arm. Then the line turns inland, following the Susitna River northwards into the Talkeetna mountains.

We met the southbound Coastal Classic trainset at Girdwood. It’s an ARR only train, handling non-cruise travel south of Anchorage to Seward and Whittier. In total, on the day of our arrival there were – count ’em – eight passenger trainsets in action on the Alaska Railroad, which is roughly the size of the Toronto-Moosonee line. A very classy operation that hauls thousands of tourists and plenty of locals each year.

Passing through Anchorage, we passed two unit freight trains and some local power in the yards. Another short passenger trainset, likely the outbound Glacier Discovery, sat at the depot.

Further north, we met another southbound passenger train, a cruise train charter run bringing folks to our ship for the southward cruise. A busy main line.

McKinley Park Lodge

At Talkeetna station, we disembarked onto highway coaches for the short bus transfer north to the Princess McKinley Lodge.

It was Father’s Day, so I called my Dad in Toronto to wish him the best for the day. My father spent his wartime RCAF service up this way, as a radioman on the Alaska-Russia lend lease air shuttle. My being up in his old stomping ground had special meaning for him. And I heard from both my sons, too. All by cellphone – yep, five bars.

The McKinley Lodge is a nice resort but doesn’t really have any diversions on site. But it does have scenery: a spectacular view of the Denali. We passed up the expensive excursions, and spent the day poing around, doing some short hiking trails. listening to nature presentations, etc.  Were we bored? Not a bit.

We even broke out His Worship the Fridge Magnet for a chuckle……has he ever been higher than this?

Denali Park Lodge – Denali National Park

After a night at McKinley, we rode north by bus to another Princess Lodge, at Denali National Park. Here’s where the pretty scenery turned into the wilderness adventure thing.

The Lodge sits on George Parks Highway, one of only eleven intercity highways in the state. It’s the only road from Anchorage north to Fairbanks and beyond to the Arctic Ocean. The highway is all business, but tourism vies with oil exploration and coal mining for the “number one business” spot up that way. Just down the road is the Park Entrance. Denali Park is 3.5 times the size of Algonquin Park.

If I had to pick one must-see highlight of the whole vacation, it would be the Denali Park Tundra Wilderness Tour. This is an all-day bus excursion. It’s the only way to travel to the interior of the park; cars are banned on the Park Road from about Mile 13 onwards. Our bus took us 62 miles into the park; the bus service runs a further 30 miles to some small communities where there are a couple of adventure resorts….and trailheads that run even further into the wilderness.

You can get off the bus at any point to hike or camp…but only after a substantial pre job brief given by the park rangers. There are very strict rules about food and waste, aimed at keeping the animals from becoming dependent on human visitors. All the buses stop at rest areas, and whenever wildlife presents itself.

What looks like gentle grassland is actually dense taiga forest – a tangle of small trees. In summer, the foliage creates a thick, dense bush just high enough to hide everything on two or four legs. The undergrowth conceals the wildlife until you get close up…..at which point you are eye to eye with a very large animal. No wonder there are so many precautions and warnings protecting against human contact with bear and moose.

The ratio of wild animals to tourists is pretty favourable. It turns out there aren’t that many animals per square mile of land, but those that are there aren’t afraid of people. Grizzly Bear, Caribou, Dalls Sheep, you name it…. we tourists were greeted and stared at.

We also learned about permafrost. The terrain is very boggy. Hiking and skiing in the woods is actually best in winter and early spring, because the ground is frozen and the wide “braided” rivers are bridged by ice. Once the snow begins to melt, the lowlands flood and the rivers become impassible until fall.  June is still spring by Alaskan standards. We saw plenty of evidence that the spring thaw was far from complete.

The first caribou we spotted were flushed out of a stand of trees by an inbound grizzly. It was amusing to watch Grizz amble into the trees, and all the lesser animals immediately rush out. One of the Caribou had a tracking beacon around his neck…..more five bar signals in the wilderness.

Try to find the Dalls Sheep….while we encountered a few close up, they mostly looked like fluffy little grains of rice way up on the mountainsides.

These caribou are hanging out on the unmelted snow, where they aren’t bothered by the otherwise maddening flies and mosquito. We left a lot of ourselves back in the woods thanks to the bugs.

Fairbanks

After Denali, it was back on the bus and on to Fairbanks.

The highway north is rugged but well travelled. Cars and trucks move right along. In Alaska, slower vehicles get a traffic ticket if they hold up a specified number of faster vehicles on two lane roads. Even the tour buses pull over as necessary to let other vehicles pass.

At Healey, Just up the road from Denali, we passed the junction with Mile 0 of the Stampede Trail. One disappointment was the discovery that (contrary to claims on the internet) the infamous Magic Bus is still out on the trail at Mile 25.  At the junction, the trail just looks like a modest paved road heading up into the wilds. More on that later.

Arriving at Fairbanks, our tour bus headed straight to the river dock for a paddlewheel cruise. I had expected a schlocky tourist trap, but the cruise gave us a good appreciation for life in Fairbanks and the importance of the original river based transportation system. We did spot some original paddlewheeler river boats, and got an explanation of how they work with such minimal draft. And we watched a sled dog demonstration. These had to be the most eager canines in the world – they are happiest when they are working hard. The word “musher” is now firmly imprinted in my vocabulary, and I can’t wait to follow next year’s Iditarod.

Fairbanks reminded me of Timmins Ontario – a functional, not particularly pretty place, with all the contrasts and extremes of a town which is the kickoff point to northern wilderness. There was hard living, and civilization, and enterprise, and street people. I would never have expected such a well built bicycle trail system in a place that sees such a long winter and short summer. The main drag, home of Soapy Smith’s saloon, still looked like it must have back in the goldrush days.

Southwards on the Denali Star

(Watch for trains, and wildlife too)

Bright and early, we took a cab to the ARR Fairbanks Depot to board the Denali Star.

We were riding Goldstar class, which put us in one of those wonderful Colorado Railcar double deckers. ARR’s version of these cars, with its open porch on the top level, is my favourite. We were assigned seats 1 and 2, at the very front of the car, giving us a more private space, and a little more leg and laydown room to boot. Jan was content to lounge in her seat, observing and reading, while I hung out most of the time on the porch. The trip to Anchorage takes about 12 hours.

The service is excellent. There is a bar service right in the coach (soft drinks and coffee are complementary) and the dining room is downstairs. A cafe lounge car serves take out food and drinks.

In addition to the ARR operated segment of the train, the Star hauls charter cars owned and operated by the various cruise lines. It’s a long train with a real variety of equipment.

We were riding on June 19th – almost the longest day of the year. Sunset the night before was at 00:28 and sunrise was at 0257. In between, there was never any dark, just light sky. By boarding time at 08:00, the sun was high in the sky and scorching hot. Most of Alaska was experiencing record-setting heat under cloudless skies.

On departure, the train looped around the rail yard and past the diesel shop, giving lots of viewing of ARR power. The yard was stuffed with freight cars that had been brought north from the mainland, including CN 188336 as of that day, the most northerly car on the CN rail system. As we passed the freight yard, an oil train was preparing for departure northwards to the end of the line at Eilesen. This was one heft railroad – they don’t run SD70 MAC’s to Moosonee! We got a PK from the yardmen and we were on our way.

We crossed the Nenana River at the town of, well, Nenana, and started to climb towards the Nenana River Canyon. The first part of the run felt a lot like westward on CP out of Calgary…..pacing a gorgeous river as it changes from a wide, peaceful waterway to a faster, fresher mountain stream. The difference is scale – the Nenana River valley is much broader than the Bow Valley, and the mountains rise more slowly proceeding south.

Just before lunchtime, the heart of the mountain scenery began as the train neared the Canyon. The Mountains started to close in, and the river became narrower and faster.

Back in the depot in Fairbanks, there was a big HO model railway, with a cute bit of scenery where the train passed over rafters in a raging river. We came upon the prototype just north of Denali, just as advertised. The gorge became deeper and twister. And then, we were back at Denali, looking down at the lodge we had left just a day previously.

At Denali, we met the previous night’s northbound freight, which was running a little behind schedule. It was a three way meet….the Denali airfield is next to the train station, and a bush plane was departing as we arrived. The Denali stop was a busy one – the cruise lines and individual travellers keep the trains full, with a large proportion of the seats turning over at each stop as people break the journey into multiple legs, taking advantages of the lodges and motels in Denali and Talkeetna.

Railroaders down here would likely be envious of the technique used to come to spot the train precisely at station stops and meets. AC power and traction control must make power braking fun. Lots of squeal from the brakes, and further squeal from the engine wheels as the traction control kicks in.

After Denali, the tracks continue to climb, but the river vanishes. The summit for both the railway and Highway 3, which parallels through the Canyon, is at Mile 312.

A little further down,  at Broad Pass, the northbound and southbound trains meet and exchange crews. The whole crew, including all the dining car servers, cooks, and bartenders, swap trains so everyone ends their day in their home terminals. It was entertaining watching two crews pour past each other. It was apparent that these trains are well crewed….for a moment the space between the trains looked like the TTC Subway at rush hour.

Are you sick of trains pictures? We saw lots of wildlife from the train…..a couple of black bears, and many moose. On a couple of occasions mother and calf sets appeared along the tracks.

We enjoyed a late lunch – a delicious Salmon Chowder…..it came in a hollowed out bread bowl., followed by Almond Crusted Alaskan  Cod. Amtrak or VIA just don’t do food this well. After lunch, there was more scenery, more animals, and a new river to follow downhill towards Anchorage. The final bar of the trip was in fact the ARR’s bar service, with one last Alaskan Wheat to sample.

At 18:36, we made a station stop at Wasilla (home town of you-know-who…..we could see the fence around her property from the train). The track felt smoother, and the freight train activity picked up.  We began to see level crossings, and paralled roads…… and we knew we were on the last lap. Even then, there were mountains to admire as we closed in on Anchorage as the train found its way around the last few curves.

The last notable sight we saw as the train rolled into Anchorage was a moose, just north of the depot, right in the middle of town, serenely munching on a leafy tree.

Between the heat, the noise out the open hotel window (AC is hit and miss in Alaska) and the sun’s stubborn refusal to set, it wasn’t a restful night. All the same, it was the end to a stunning day.

Anchorage, and on to reality

The next morning, we drew back the motel curtains to find the overnight southbound putting its power away. We did a quick walking tour around Anchorage’s downtown, reclaimed our bags at the motel, and headed for the airport. It was raining in Vancouver, as is the norm. We were back in civilization.

Reflections

The takeaway? After returning to Toronto, I went straight to the library and chewed through two books – Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.

The former is the well known tale of adventure that lured a generation or two onto the open road.

The latter is the story of Christopher McCandless, who perished in the Denali on an ill=advised attempt to “live off the land”. It’s a cautionary tale:  Stampede Trail is not Algonquin Park. McCandless had the knowledge and tools to live rough in the lower 48, but he was overwhelmed by Alaskan wilderness.

The “Magic Bus” where McCandless’ body was found sits only a dozen miles to the right of where this picture was taken. The river looks calm in early June, but as summer progresses, it rises. One fan of the book has since perished just trying to reach the spot.

The two stories were remarkably similar: wanderlust, a need to know one’s self, a desire to push beyond limits and conventions, a reverence for the open sky.

If I were today’s Kerouac, I would be writing about Alaska. It felt further from home than my travels ever took me. There is a grandeur to the mountains that exceeds Yellowhead or Kicking Horse. The animals come out to confront you, or walk right into town in search of eats. It is clearly a place of challenge and risk.

Alaska is where people bicycle down the highway with their camping gear, just as you are looking around for bears…..while talking on your cellphone. It’s rough-hewn and beautiful, compelling and intimidating.

Since my return, I’ve become addicted to the Denali Park Webcam. Google ‘Alaska Railroad Depot Webcam’ and you will find it – or click here. If I were a few decades younger, it might be a scene I’d be trying to spend time in. Instead, I’m watching the clouds slide across the peaks on the internet. There are trains at noon, and at 4PM, Alaska time. I will see a moose o the camera, it’s just a matter of time.

The Last Frontier? That’s it, all right, with wireless too.