Living Large Though Tiny

We are taking some time off here in Healy, Alaska. We really wanted to camp at one of the campgrounds inside Denali National Park but those spots are hard to get. We got lucky and got a spot for two nights later this week. But we have a few days until then and with the weather turning colder and snow threatening, we decided to treat ourselves to a couple of nights in a motel (our first since Juneau) until we can camp in the park.

This motel doubles as an RV park and this afternoon as we cooked our lunch outside at a picnic table we were treated to the nonstop entertainment of watching the full-sized RVs trying to navigate their way in and out of the cramped and tightly packed campground.

I am sure I don’t need to describe to you the size and mass of these things. We’ve all seen the bus length campers motoring down the interstate either under their own power or being towed by a truck. Now imagine trying to back one of those up into a space perhaps the size of a normal driveway with your partner screaming, whistling, and gesturing in your mirrors all the while.

Once docked, the work truly begins. The RVers must connect the water, sewage, and electric power, slide out the extra rooms, crank up the awnings, and who knows what else? But once done, you have, well, a house, your very own house with all your stuff that you can take with you everywhere you go. I’m not going to claim that I don’t understand the appeal.

At the other end of the visible spectrum are the Sprinter Vans and Roadtreks, full sized vans that contain a bed, a kitchen, maybe even a bathroom with a shower.  You can live fully inside but still drive and park with relative ease. My cousin Brian and his wife Karen have one of these and it is wicked cool.

And then below the end of the visible spectrum, down somewhere near infrared, you have us.

We have always been tent-campers but in the fall of 2020 just having retired and with lots of road trips on the horizon, I was ready to get off the ground. Even if sleeping on the ground were comfortable (hint, it isn’t), there isn’t a tent made that won’t leak if it rains long and hard enough. I should know, having slept many a night in a puddle of cold water.

A big RV was out of the question. The big vans were tempting but they are not inexpensive and they are not great on fuel. Finally, we considered a teardrop trailer. For a long time, I thought these would be the way to go. We even visited a company that hand-crafts beautiful teardrops campers in Grand Junction, Colorado before concluding it was not for us.

First of all, we would have had to buy a new car to tow the thing. Our Honda Civic is not up to the task of towing even an ultra-light trailer. Second, I didn’t like the idea of towing something up and down narrow mountain passes, though I am sure I could have grown comfortable with it with practice.

Where, we wondered, were today’s VW Westphalia Campervans?

That’s when we found Oasis Campervans located in Broomfield, Colo. They will take your off-the-shelf minivan and turn it into a habitat on wheels.

Our ‘rig’ is a plain ole Toyota Sienna minivan, the quintessential soccer mom car with all the rear seats removed. In their place, Oasis constructed a bed platform, a pivoting table, and a teardrop style galley kitchen under the rear hatch. The kitchen holds our stoves (yes, we have more than one), two pans, three pots, various cutlery, utensils, spices, and cooking basics (olive oil, vinegar, soy sauce, Tabasco, even a jar of hoisin sauce).

We have a 500-Watt mobile battery that recharges when we drive and can easily power the phones, the computers, the electric kettle, and the coffee grinder for days on a single charge. A 5-gallon jug supplies all the water we need for a day or two and can be refilled wherever there is a spigot.

Each of us has our own compartment for our clothes and personal items, and two other compartments house the bedding and a pantry for food stuffs. A near full-sized mattress (with the emphasis on ‘near’) folds away during the day.

For things used less often there are panels that offer access to the area where the third-row seats formerly folded down. We call this the “down under.” This is where we keep things like the tent, backpacks, hiking books, and my down jacket, which I pulled out of its stuff sack for the first time yesterday as the temperature dropped to near freezing.

Panorama from an alpine hiking trail. Today was the first time in a week that it was clear enough to see Denali, North America’s Highest Peak.

There are blackout curtains for privacy and for blocking out the sunlight, essential when the sun wasn’t setting until close to midnight.

We have a pop-up screen room that has proven invaluable when it was raining or the mosquitoes were fierce.

And yes, we’ve been living in this thing full-time for the last two months.

The advantages of such a set up are numerable.

When we are not camping in it, the Sienna functions as a second car, albeit one with a seat for just one passenger. It drives like a car, which is basically what it is. Not as nimble, to be sure, as the 6-speed manual transmission Civic, which is the daily driver at home, but still quick to accelerate, easy to change lanes, and a breeze to parallel park anywhere even with the bikes on the back. It’s V-6 engine is frugal, with fuel getting 28 mpg on the highway, not insignificant when we were paying close to $7 per gallon in Canada. And it is a Toyota and thus far has been virtually trouble free throughout the more than 10,000 kilometers we’ve driven thus far.

It is cheaper to camp. Most campgrounds charge less for sites that don’t include power, water, or sewage hook-ups. We can camp anywhere a tent can go. Even campgrounds that are full will usually find a spot for us.

It is absolutely stealth. From the outside, it is a boring, silver minivan and nothing else. Though we have not done so, I have no doubt we could camp on a residential street or in a parking lot and no one would suspect that people were sleeping inside. Only the bikes on the back suggest any kind of frivolity.

But as with everything there are tradeoffs.

It is small. This is not a house. It is a tent on wheels. At night when sleeping in my preferred position, on my stomach with my hands under the pillow in front of me, my feet hang off the end of the mattress. I can almost sit up straight when in bed, but not quite. When in day mode, you can sit comfortably in the back of the van but it is not possible to stand up.

One must be very disciplined about what one brings along. With three multi-week trial runs before the Alaska trip, we had a chance to refine the ‘must bring’ list. Yet I still brought things I have yet to use. I haven’t worn my hiking boots once so far (my everyday shoes are trail shoes and have been sufficient for all the hiking we have done). I brought several pairs of shorts, I haven’t needed and have more socks and t-shirts than required. I was prepared to go up to ten days without washing clothes but we’ve been able to do laundry every week.  

Unlike with an RV, we are basically living outside, albeit with a dry, pretty comfy place to sleep. Cooking is outside too, though I have been known to use the single burner Coleman stove under the open hatch when it was raining or very windy.

There is no black water tank to empty because there is no bathroom. This means that if I need to go in the middle of the night (I am 60 years old, I always need to go in the middle of the night), I am trekking down to the washroom sometimes in the rain. On the plus side, I have seen some astonishing skies during these middle-of-the-night promenades.

It is a process to change the van from day mode to night mode taking perhaps 10 to 15 minutes to complete. The big RVs, of course, can leave the bed set up all the time. Then again it appears to me that they can often take up to 30 minutes just to park and hook-up those things.

On our next trip, no doubt, we will tweak the equipment list a little, leaving a few items behind and bringing one or two others we could have used. But I don’t see us changing to another vehicle anytime soon.

Fragile alpine wild flowers are rare and exotic.

For one thing, other than hitchhiking, this mode of travel may be among the most frugal possible, and frugal means longer trips.  I am, of course, tracking all of our expenses meticulously. Once we are home, I’ll enumerate the exact costs in excruciating detail for your consideration.

After we leave Denali, we head to Fairbanks to get the oil changed and the tires rotated and then sometime the following week, we will turn south and begin the long journey back along the Alaska Canada Highway through Yukon, British Columbia, and across the Western U.S. toward home.

I don’t think it will happen but we were planning stopping by the snowy woods of North and South Dakota on the way back to tick off the final two states I haven’t visited. It’s tempting…

but I have promises to keep

and miles to go before I sleep

I mean kilometers to go before I sleep

in a real bed. 

When Copper Was Copious and Butterhorns Scant

Glennallen, Alaska doesn’t have a whole lot going for it. An IGA grocery store, a gas station, and the pretty decent Northern Nights Campground round out the amenities. It is, however, on the way to the ghostly towns of McCarthy and Kennecott, which are accessed via 100 kms of unpaved road through the Alaskan wilderness.

With just one ‘doughnut’ spare tire we decided to leave the driving to the Greyhound and pay someone to drive us to McCarthy. That someone turned out to be Maine woods transplant Jeff, who pulled up at our campground at 7:00 sharp in a beat up 15 passenger van. The van was covered in thick dust, and the windshield had several long cracks, but the vehicle seemed roadworthy overall, at least by Alaskan standards. We were the first to be picked up, but in short order, Jeff drove around to various cabins and motels, even to the nearby tiny airport, to pick up our fellow passengers, and soon we were on our way.

As he drove Jeff shared his story of growing up in Maine, spending up to 100 days at a time in his remote cabin with just his dog for company who, after enough days of solitude, began to hold up his end of the conversation quite nicely.

He (Jeff, not the dog) came out to visit Alaska 18 years ago and before he went home, he bought a cabin here.  The following year, he returned to stay, meeting his “missus” who hailed from Minnesota and had already preceded him in Alaska by more than a decade.

Jeff lives what he calls a subsistence life, hunting (moose, elk, bear, mountain sheep and goats) and fishing (salmon what else?), building his own home and, oh yeah, driving tourists a few days a week and operating a lodge with cabins to rent. Like all other permanent Alaska residents, he also collects his share of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend which in 2021 was $1,114 per person according to Wikipedia (Jeff said $3,600 per person so…). This payment is just what it sounds like: the State of Alaska pays you to live here.

The Road to McCarthy

As we turned off the paved road, the wisdom of not bringing our own van became readily apparent. The ‘road’ is a ribbon of gravel over some kind of washboard textured packed dirt. By driving at precisely 42 miles per hour, Jeff was able to ‘float’ over the surface of the road, saving time and wear and tear on the vehicle if not on us. Float was his word; it wouldn’t have been the word I would have chosen. There were frequent potholes that rattled our teeth and threatened to shake loose a kidney or two, not to mention the times that we would pass another vehicle on that narrow road and come perilously close to that 100 foot drop off at the edge. I never would have had the nerve to go that fast and even if we hadn’t gotten a flat or wrecked the suspension on the van, it would have taken me three times as long to drive that 100 kms. Jeff did it in about 90 minutes. Along the way we saw a moose and smelled the acrid scent of a grizzly bear. But the bear chose not to make an appearance, much to our disappointment.

At McCarthy we walked across a footbridge where Dan was waiting on the other side in a little school bus to take us the remaining 6 miles to Kennecott. Suffice it to say that this road made the previous thoroughfare seem glassy smooth by comparison.

The town of Kennecott is a National Historic Landmark within the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. From 1909-1938 the town was the site of the Kennecott Copper mine. It was located on one of the richest copper deposits in the world.

The timing couldn’t have been better. The electrification of North America was in full swing and copper for wiring fetched a high price. Then in 1938 as the vein began to give out, the price of copper plummeted and the mine and its host town were abandoned.

Crumbling Mill Buildings in Kennecott

Given the harshness of the climate, a surprising number of buildings remain. Most of them are unsafe to enter (they look like they could collapse at any moment) but the Park Service is trying to preserve and stabilize them.

One building you can enter is the lodge. It is not original but it is a replica of the original and it has more than 40 rooms available for guests. It also has a restaurant where we proceeded to take our lunch. The tuna melt and caprese sandwiches we shared may not have been authentic to the mining days (see below), but they were tasty and reasonably priced considering there was only one other restaurant, a food truck, in town.

After lunch we visited the museum which gave me more of an appreciation for what the men who labored here had to contend with. To say that conditions were harsh and the pay poor would be to understate the case. On display was a document adopted by the men, which was sent to the company to demand better food.  There was no information about how the company responded to these demands but as I mentioned the mine was shut down the following year. Sound familiar?

I thought the letter was worth reproducing in whole at the end of this post.

The area around the mill is a sand river a kilometer wide full of tailings of many colors. This harmless looking gritty material is full of arsenic, lead, and mercury, delightful chemicals left over after the valuable stuff has been taken.  The park service helpfully suggests that after walking around, you wash your hands before touching food or your mouth. They also suggest washing your shoes. It goes without saying you shouldn’t eat your shoes after visiting Kennecott.

After exhausting the museums and enjoying a short hike, we took the shuttle back to McCarthy in time to check out the famous restaurant called Potato where we had a couple of IPAs and (appropriately) some garlic rosemary curly fries. They were very tasty.  Then it was time to cross the foot bridge and find Jeff for the roller coaster ride back to Glennallen.

It was after 8 pm by the time we got back though still many hours until sunset.  We planned to set out early the next day for Seward on the Kenai Peninsula to try our luck with another cruise.

Barbara hoped to see a few more glaciers and to add a few more species to our list. I aspired more simply to get through the day with my breakfast inside me and not in the sea.

May 18, 1937

A meeting has been called by the undersigned group of men to discus and demand better food at the Bonanza Camp.

Moved and seconded that floor be thrown open for discussion.

Carried

Moved and seconded that discussion be closed.

Carried

(Demands)

1)    That there be more fresh fruits, such as pear, bananas, grapefruit, etc., in season,

2)    That the eggs be fresh,

3)    That there be fresh greens three times weekly,

4)    That there be more varieties of fresh meats,

5)    That there be Worcestershire sauce, catsup, and jam or jelly on the table at all times and that the sour, tainted, mouldy or spoiled foods be thrown out,

6)    That there be fresh fish and clams occasionally, when these are in season,

7)    That there be a bigger variety of, pastries, such as cinnamon rolls, butterhorns*, etc,

8)    That the meat be sent up to this camp in such a way that it can be served in some other way than in the form of hamburger or stew,

9)    That there be more of a variety of food on the breakfast table, such as buckwheat cakes or French toast, and that the bacon alternate with ham and pork sausage, and

10) That a sufficiency of foods be prepared at each meal to do away with the remark, "They ain't no more".

 We also wish to know why two sacks of mouldy bones, stripped of meat were sent to this camp.

 We give the company reasonable time to meet these demands and request an answer within 48 hours.

Nels Konnerup

Adolph Peterson

Don Canske

Egan Petrokov

Louis Mason

Rudolf Hokanson

Steve Worbel

Fred Algren

Harold Johnson

Jack Butorac

Baio Olen

Ed Rennie

Roy Hill

W. Lahikaine

Joe Kelly

J. Billios

H. Carlson

Emil Norman

William Fullerton

Chas. Klemole

Chas. Newman

Jas. Borgen

Karl Anderson

Geo. Marhaffer

Anton Johmson

John Nedkoff

Theo. Peterson

Edward Wilber

John M. Larsen

Matt Majander

Tom Driscoll

Tom Pastovich

Warren Kimber

Andrew Phillips

John Krpon

*I had to know up what butterhorns were so I looked it up. Surprise!

Wild Wonder

With its staggering beauty everywhere you turn, Alaska is a wonder renewal machine. Of course, wherever you live or travel there are plenty of wonders. Just opening one’s eyes in the the morning should be a call to wonder. But the truth is that when we have seen a thing as wonderous as the view out our window a few times, we begin to forget just how incredible the world is, never mind our astonishing brains that take it in and to some degree make sense of it.

Alaska doesn’t give one a chance to become blasé about its miracles. Its mountains soar in many places more than 5,300 meters (16,000 feet) above sea level. Snowcapped even in mid-summer. Blue-ice glaciers are visible from the road. Curious sea creatures, from humpback whales to playful sea otters swimming on their backs in icy waters with expressions that look to the human eye like mirthful joy. Just as one view threatens to become ‘normal,’ around the bend is the proverbial ‘something completely different.’ A new vista awes and amazes. The weather changes from sunshine to wind and rain and back again multiple times in one day. The humans who live here are also, as you might expect, a unique breed: independent, rugged, and highly, highly opinionated.  As I mentioned previously, traveling as we do is as much work as it is leisure but what a place to conduct business!

After leaving Haines and heading back into Canada, we continued along the Alcan (Alaska-Canada Highway) reentering the U.S. the following day and camping at Tok, Alaska. Tok has a large grocery store called, ‘The Three Bears.’ Didn’t see any bears inside, however half the store is devoted to food and the other half to camping, hunting, and fishing supplies. We picked up some veggies and Alaskan smoked salmon for dinner, a gallon of camping fuel for the stove, 5 kilograms of ice for the cooler, and a six pack of a delicious Alaskan Brewery IPA.

Sunset is still after 10 pm but now nearly six weeks after the summer solstice, it is actually sort of dark for a short time around 2 am though my Apple Watch app tells me that it is still not getting darker than twilight.

The following day, we turned south toward Valdez, following the Richardson Highway through some 200 kilometers of near wilderness. Spruce pine, clear, icy streams, and jagged mountain peaks covered with snow make up the view. The day we drove to Valdez was raining and the mountains were shrouded in mists.

Valdez is a surprisingly pleasant little town that splits its economy among fishing, tourism, and oil. There is lots of evidence of industry yet it makes a great base camp from which to enjoy the outdoors. Located on Prince William Sound, Valdez is surrounded on all sides by mountains, which we were able to see on the two days of sunshine of the five that we were there. While there, we had two bike rides, one to a lake beside a glacier, the other to a salmon hatchery where fat sea lions gorged on the returning pink salmon and hordes of sea gulls gathered to scarf up the fish guts that the sea lions were too refined to devour.

We also booked a day-long boat tour on the sound led by a salty, old captain who spoke non-stop over a loud speaker for the entire 8 hours of the journey in a way that was oddly both stream of consciousness and at the same time sounded completely rehearsed, as if he were reciting a history of Valdez written by a James Joyce turned right-wing extremist that he had read aloud every day since 1979, all delivered in a kind of sing-song cadence.

I found it most irritating until the swells in the open water of the sound caused me to become so seasick that I dashed to the rails where I dry-heaved while the water coming over the sides of the boat soaked me to the skin with freezing salt water. Then with the help of Barbara’s steady hand (she doesn’t get seasick), I lurched back inside the hold and buried my head in my lap until the waters settled down and I was able to look up again.

After that, I was so grateful not to be feeling violently ill, that the incessant diatribe which included mocking vegetarians, ecologists, Democrats, and trans-people didn’t seem as onerous by comparison to being sick as a dog.

I was one of the lucky ones. Some of the other passengers didn’t recover until we were back at the dock that evening.

In spite of the owner’s apparent distain for vegetarians, the little café on board offered (in addition to brownies, muffins, popcorn, and hotdogs) vegetarian chili available for purchase. You can always rely on commerce to trump prejudice in all civilized societies. Given the uneasy state of my stomach, however, I couldn’t hazard the risk and therefore cannot report on how tasty it may have been. 

In spite of the challenges of the rough seas and the unenlightened views of our captain (our captor?), I must admit that we did get incredibly close to the Columbia Glacier (and the large pieces of it that floated by apparently nonplussed by our guide’s insistence that climate change is a hoax). We also saw Bald Eagles, the aforementioned mirthful sea otters, and sea lions loafing at their ease on rock islands and buoys. These were not insignificant recompense for the indignities I suffered on board at the hands of the sea and the breathless rant of Cap’n Salty.

Whatever your views on petroleum and its effect on the planet, there is no doubt that oil has been good to Valdez. Oil revenue has built beautiful schools, surprisingly prosperous suburbs, and even paid for a Tesla in a driveway or two apparently without irony. The roads are in fine repair and there is even a full-sized Safeway in town, the first national chain grocery store we have seen in Alaska so far.

We could have easily spent several more days in Valdez without running out of things to do and see, but with July dwindling down and much more of the state still to cover, this morning saw us packing up and heading back up the road to Glennallen.

From here we booked a day tour to McCarthy which thrived as a copper mining depot until 1938 when the copper deposits were exhausted. Since then it has been mostly a ghost town reporting just 42 residents in the 2000 census. They say it is possible to drive the 158 km from Glennallen to McCarthy over the unpaved road in a regular car, but with just one spare tire and that a ‘doughnut’ we decided to leave the driving to others freeing us to enjoy the wonders sure to be served up without the stress of a blowout on a deserted road miles from cell phone service, never mind the towing service.

Alaska is a wonder renewal machine but it also reminds me that wonders and astonishment are everywhere. You don’t need to travel 8,000 km to be astonished. You just need to remember to see and not allow yourself to become jaded by the miracles the world presents every day. I am thinking about the fox that trots across our lawn at home every day, the wren that nested and hatched its young under the lid of our propane tank this spring, the little snake our neighbor Kitty found in our basement on her periodic inspection during our absence, and the owl that calls at night from the trees in our little town in suburban Maryland.

Wild and wonders are everywhere.