Stoneage Ramblings

By John R. Stone

Alaska is huge, like really, really big.

Most of us know that Alaska is this nation’s largest state in terms of area. It is more than twice as big as Texas, more than twice as big as Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota and South Dakota put together and over seven times larger than Minnesota by itself, and Minnesota is this nation’s 12th largest state.

 We got a taste of that earlier this month on a cruise-tour of Alaska. We left Vancouver, B.C. on a Holland America cruise and three days later left the boat in Skagway, Alaska for a tour through parts of the Yukon Territory and Fairbanks, Denali National Park and Anchorage, Alaska.

We traveled some 1,300 miles on the land portion of the tour. When I looked at a map afterwards we were just in a small portion of southeast Alaska. We were still more than 500 miles from the Beaufort Sea to the north or the Bering What did we see? Trees, lots of trees. I don’t think I have ever seen so many trees in undisturbed forests. We also saw swift moving rivers, really wide rivers in some spots. And in this huge space we didn’t see very many people, in fact Minnesota’s population is about seven times that of Alaska, which has fewer than 800,000 people. Anchorage, the largest city, is about the same population size as St. Paul.

Of course all this scenery was spectacular to view on a sunny day, and we had quite a few of them. We got to see Denali, the largest peak in North America, which only about a third of visitors get to see due to weather issues. And we saw it for three days.

In the park we saw caribou, a grizzly bear from a distance and other wildlife but not as much as one sees in Yellowstone. The park is so big that wildlife has lots of room to spread out.

We saw part of the 800-mile Alaska pipeline that has been delivering oil from Prudhoe Bat in Alaska to Valdez where it is put into tankers to ply the seas for delivery.

It was interesting to see the zig-zag route for the pipe, it was done on purpose to allow for expansion and contraction of the metal piping in Alaska’s wide range of temperatures.  

We saw how gold was once mined with dredges and that was tied in with a little gold panning, a skill that takes some practice.

We traveled through Yukon Territory which has a population of about 45,000 people, 33,000 of which live in or near Whitehorse near it’s southern border. The Yukon is one of the Canadian provinces north of the row we are familiar with, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia.

In Dawson City the streets are not paved due to permafrost. There are no concrete sidewalks for the same reason and that is a different look from what most of us are used to seeing. The city, once a gold mining town, is moving to tourism for survival and Parks Canada has fixed up many buildings to look like they did around 1900, the peak of the gold rush. Many of those are empty. But in looking into what was the Daily News building I did see some old printing equipment, including an old manual paper cutter like we used to have in the basement of the Pope County Tribune when it was on Franklin Street. There is no daily paper in Dawson City (a town of 2,200) anymore.

We didn’t get down to Seward or the Kenai Peninsula which are also very beautiful areas and that might be an excuse for another trip.

But our greatest impression from this trip was how huge Alaska really is. And you get a lot of time to see it, the sun rose about 5:30 a.m. and didn’t set until 10:30 p.m.

We did get experience going through customs. We did it multiple times, first in Vancouver, then again in the woods north of Skagway when we entered British Columbia for a few miles and again entering into Fairbanks after leaving Yukon.

It is a pretty amazing place, Alaska.