Well, vacationing got in the way of documentation, and it’s been fantastic. I have all the photos but few words. But that’s good because I’ve been super wordy recently. In short, we got up in Canada and drove to the United States! The border crossing was uneventful, thankfully. The border guard was so excited to get to use his Texas joke — which he admitted to pulling from a comment on a Native communities tour he once took — welcoming Texan motorists to “the largest state” in the Union.
We made a few scenic stops on the way to Delta Junction for lunch, partially to see the beautiful scenery, and partially because George needed a break from how much the Tracker is damaging his spine. The scenery grew increasingly dramatic through the day.
After we had lunch (which had to double-count for dinner), we decided to run through a carwash. This may seem strange given how much further we had to go, including unpaved roads, but the flies and mosquitoes in Canada were so unbelievably bad that our front bumpers were each emanating an odor that could not only overpower any scalding petrochemicals but also attract their own flies.
Cleaned up, we got back on the road, joining the Richardson Highway headed south from Delta Junction toward tonight’s stop in Paxson.
Also George discovered that he’s missing a lug nut. Not sure how long that’s been the case…
After an hour or so of thrilling scenery, we hit the only scenic stop I had marked for today — the cave on Castner Glacier Trail. The trailhead was off an unmarked, unpaved, unimproved two-track that the Xterra would have made quick work of but the Celica only survived about 1000 feet. Evan knew the feeling, so he graciously parked alongside me in a clearing as George forced us into being passengers in the Tracker. Mercifully, the Tracker only made it another quarter mile until it, too, had to be parked because George bonked its differential on a pretty stout rock in the road and feared (rightly) that the road condition was only going to get worse. We continued on foot, not entirely sure what we were supposed to be on the lookout for until, suddenly, with a blast of cold wind, we found it.
We played around there until we had to leave in order to make the check-in cut off at the cabin rental in Paxson. The drive in was lovely, through another valley pass between mountains, along a river and a few small lakes. We arrived with just enough twilight to wander around for a few minutes before darkness set in. But what we all really wanted to do was make that segment of drive again.
Tomorrow, we set off for our overnight in Denali State Park by way of the Denali Highway, a mostly unpaved (but major?) roadway westbound which terminates at the Parks Highway that runs from Fairbanks through the State Park and Anchorage to Seward, our finish line.
