World United States Alaska Denali

Our Alaska Adventure

Day of Difficulties Jul 12, 2010

Monday, July 12, 2010 This truly wasn’t our day! We were up early, around 6:15 am. We were having our furnace fixed on this date. I did some cleaning after everything was put away. While vacuuming I wrapped the vacuum cord around my drink of Crystal Lite. This was our first “UGH” of the day. It spilled onto the counter, down the cabinets, and onto the tile and hardwood floors. After getting it all cleaned up and wiped down we went to put our satellite dish down. When pushing the stow button it didn’t do anything. Then I remembered that we had had a problem with this before. When the dish has been up for more than a few days we always needed to turn everything off, wait a few minutes, and then turn all of it back on again. This worked! Maybe by writing this down it will help us to remember. We were sorry to leave Santaland at 9:03 am. It had been a nice place to stay. It was mostly sunny, 67˚, and a bit windy. We didn’t hook-up the car because we would need to unhook it while the furnace was being fixed. We only needed to drive about 12 miles. As we drove past the Santa Claus House we saw that one of their party tents had blown over during the windy night. We stopped at the Tesoro in North Pole for diesel. It only took 24.1 gallons at $3.73 a gallon. Rick followed me straight to Arctic RV in Fairbanks. We were about ½ early but Rick went into their office to see where to park the motorhome. A short time later he came back to the motorhome quite “peeved”. They said they didn’t have an appointment for us. In fact the man he spoke to said they didn’t take appointments. Then he showed Rick a list of names for each day of this week and our name wasn’t there for Mon., Tues., Wed., Thurs., or Fri.! Rick told him he had spoken with a lady and she had said we would have a 10:00 appointment. I even heard Rick repeat the time and date to her when he made the appointment. The man went and had a lady come to the front but she didn’t now anything about it. Rick asked if there was another lady who could have taken his call. The man went and had another lady come to the front desk. After some discussion she finally admitted to having talked with Rick. Then the man tried to tell Rick he must have made the appointment at another service center in Fairbanks. Rick explained that the lady had suggested he call the other place to see if they had a mobile service. He did and they didn’t. He called the Arctic RV back and made the appointment. The lady said she remembered this part of the conversation too. Finally the man said they could “work us in” maybe in 1-½ hours. We did a “work us in” in Minnesota and we were there for 6 hours. We decided we were doing okay with the heater so Rick told them we would be leaving. That’s not all he WANTED to tell them! This was our second UGH!!! They missed out on earning some good money. We had a list of supplies we were also going to buy there. In Wasilla/ Anchorage we would look for someone else to fix it. We drove across the road to the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church parking lot. One of the members of the church came out and said it would be okay to hook up the car. He was very nice and told us of things to look for on our way to Denali. He had been stationed at Fort Lewis. We were on our way once again at 10:13 am. We drove down Alaska Highway 3. We did a lot of climbing and descending but there were several passing lanes. Parts of the drive were curvy. We saw the Skinny Dick’s Halfway Inn that the man told us about at the church parking lot. It was halfway between Fairbanks and Nenana. We came upon one construction stop. We waited about 10 minutes and then followed a pilot car for several miles. The speed was 45 mph on this dirt and loose gravel road. Then we were on a section that had new asphalt. We went 65 mph for many miles. Nice! The scenery kept changing. There were beautiful forests then areas of scraggly trees and then beautiful forests and more scraggly trees. We also drove over many, many frost heaves in different areas. It was 12:49 pm when he drove into Denali Rainbow RV Park after driving 138 miles. The temperature was 70˚ and sunny with wispy clouds. Then came our 3rd UGH!!! Rick went into the office and the lady said she couldn’t find our reservation. Oh, no! She then looked at the reservations for Tuesday and there we were. We had left North Pole one day early!?!?!? We are truly retired when we don’t know what day it is!!! On my “keep track of where we were staying sheet” I had skipped over June 24th. Instead of writing June 24th as Thursday, I put June 25th as Thursday. For each day after that we were behind one day of the week. A couple of examples were I had Saturday for July 4th instead Sunday and Wednesday for July 8th instead of Thursday. At any of the other places where we stayed they didn’t say anything about us being off one day! We were surprised we had gone 17 days before someone said something. Someday we might laugh over this!?!?!? We happened to get lucky. On the way to Denali we saw a fifth wheel on the side of the road. People were looking underneath it. The lady in the Park office said these people had just called and cancelled their reservation because they had a broken axle. We feel sorry that they had this difficulty but also feel fortunate we arrived right after they called. The Park was full and we would have had to find some place to stay on this night. We didn’t get our 50 amp but we had been doing okay on the times we have had to have 30 amps. This was another back into the site Park. Our last UGH of the day!!!! It took about 5 tries to get the motorhome into our site. Our problem was the motorhome across from us was so close we had a hard time getting by his passenger outside mirror. “Native people have lived and traveled in the Denali area for thousands of years. The Athabascan people depended on the land to supply all their needs for food, clothing, and shelter. All of their activities were related to survival. Their success in hunting and fishing depended on their knowledge of the terrain and animal behavior. They would leave their semi-permanent winter dwellings with the spring thaw to hunt the spring moose and caribou. In summer they set up fish camps where they fished for salmon and picked berries. Even though the Russians claimed all of Alaska, few of their explorers went much beyond the coastal areas. However, their trade goods did reach the Denali area. Since the natives’ basic needs were met by their own resources, most of them traded furs for practical items like axes or luxury items such as exotic clothing, beads, and tobacco. Eventually guns, powder, and shot became part of this trade as well. In the late 1890's the discovery of gold in the Klondike area brought thousands of prospectors to Alaska and the Yukon. This discovery came at a time when the United States was in an economic depression and many men were out of work. The news of the gold discovery started a stampede of people to the Klondike looking to get rich. They arrived only to find that miners already there had already staked the profitable claims the year before. Some of the stampeders left when they realized this, some became merchants and suppliers to miners and others left for mining possibilities elsewhere. In 1903 Judge James Wickersham made the first attempt to climb Mt. McKinley and in the process staked four gold claims on Chitsia Creek in the northern Kantishna area. This news brought a small stampede of miners from other areas of Alaska to the Kantishna Hills. The Kantishna stampede ended rather quickly. Thousands of miners left in the spring of 1906 when their claims show little or no gold. Claims would be mined or not depending on whether the market price was high enough to make it profitable at the time. In the 1920's it became typical for prospectors to lease their claims to larger mining operations. This would give them the money to find more claims, which they would also lease out. Since most natives were not allowed to file mining claims leasing gave them the opportunity to mine they otherwise wouldn't have had. Gold was not the only metal mined in the Denali area. The hills also held working deposits of copper, silver, lead, zinc, and antimony. Antimony became an important discovery because it was a necessary ingredient in making munitions and became very profitable during war years. The Stampede antimony mine, owned by Earl Pilgrim, was a large operation during World War II and one of the major suppliers to the U.S. government and was in operation until Pilgrim sold it in 1978. Transportation has always been critical in the history of the park as it still is for most of Interior Alaska. The lack of roads and railroads forced people to rely on the rivers for transportation during the summer and walking or dogsleds during the winter. To this day, winter patrols of Denali National Park and Preserve are done by dogsled and the kennels, constructed in 1930, are considered a cultural resource. The native population has traveled widely over the Denali area mostly by foot or boat. When Euro-Americans first entered this area they traveled the same way. Trails were developed to move the mail and other supplies in the early 1900's often following established trade routes but sometimes over new terrain. Roadhouses were established at intervals for supplies and shelter. The decision by the U.S. government to build a railroad into the Interior was very important. It would mean lower transportation costs for miners trying to get their ore to market and allow tourists to access the park easily for the first time. The route the railroad would take was determined in 1915 and was to cause a number of changes in the Denali area. Athabascan natives living in the village of "Old Denali" moved their village to Cantwell because of the job opportunities they knew the railroad construction would create. As cash became more important to native life, jobs, which could produce cash, became more important to natives. It also brought Pat Lynch and Maurice Morino, an Italian immigrant, who opened the first roadhouses in the McKinley Station area because they knew the railroad was coming. They both catered to the railroad workers and miners but Lynch didn't stay long and his roadhouse was abandoned. In 1923 Morino built a new roadhouse closer to the new railroad bridge over Riley Creek in what he called the “Alaskan-Italian" style. His new roadhouse became the center of the community in the McKinley Station area. He ran this roadhouse, which continued to cater to tourists and railroad workers, until his death in 1937. He is buried in the park. When the Denali highway opened in the 1950's visitors could drive cars and buses to the park for the first time. In 1959 Eielson Visitor Center opened and the park road was upgraded because of increased vehicle traffic. An outcry in 1966, led by Adolph Murie, halted the road upgrades and the final eighteen miles are left in their original state with only bridges being replaced. With Charles Sheldon's visits the region to study Dall sheep the Denali area became attractive for other reasons than mining and hunting. The protection of the wildlife and spectacular scenery became his passion and he worked to make the area a national park. Sheldon working with his friend, Harry Karstens, developed the concept for Mt. McKinley National Park and finally succeeded in convincing Congress to put aside that area as a national park in 1917. In 1910 four miners from Fairbanks and Kantishna (the Sourdough Expedition) decided that the first people to climb Mt. McKinley should be Alaskans. Because of their experience with the area terrain they plotted a route using Muldrow Glacier and were the first to successfully climb Mt. McKinley with two of them reaching the north peak (19,470). Because they had no photos and two of the miners stayed in Kantishna to work their claims nobody believed them. Three years later their story was confirmed by another expedition that reached the higher south peak (20,320). Most of the climbing on Mt. McKinley in the 1930s and 1940s was done by research expeditions. In 1960 Bradford Washington's map of Mt. McKinley, the result of fifteen years of study, was published and is still used by climbers today. Recreational climbing on the mountain slowly increased in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. In recent years, over a thousand climbers a season attempt to make the summit with about 50% of them being successful. With the completion of the railroad in 1923 visitors began arriving at McKinley Park Station. They would get off the train and ride pack horses to the Savage River Tourist Camp run by Dan Kennedy. The camp consisted of tent cabins and a mess hall. Horses were the means of transportation. The park would not have a real hotel for visitors until the McKinley Park Station hotel was finished in 1938. Each improvement in transportation to the Denali area has led to increased visitor traffic with a huge increase when the Parks Highway was finished in the early 1970s. With the area now accessible from paved roads, railroad and airplane the tourist traffic has reached 500,000 visitors a year and most of the economy in the Denali area is based on the tourist trade. A shuttle bus system and restrictions on private vehicles is in place to relieve the congestion on the only road into the park itself Planners are looking to the north and south ends of the park to provide possible additional access routes and accommodations for the increased number of tourists.” After we were all settled we decided to go and check on our reservations and tickets for our Denali tour. Now we weren’t sure if we were going the 13th or 14th with my mix-up of the days of the week. We easily found the Wilderness Access Center and all was well with getting our tickets for Wednesday, July 14th. Rick called Santaland to tell them we had left a day early by mistake. The man who answered the phone said they would give us a refund for the night but that our 7th night was a free night because we had paid for 6 nights. We felt better that we weren’t paying for 2 spaces for one night. It all seems to have worked out because this has given us an extra day to explore Denali. Right behind the motorhome was a row of several shops and eating places. We walked around, looked in some shops, and then decided not to cook on this night. We bought Subway sandwiches and they were pretty good. During the evening we decided on places to stay in Kenai, Seward, and Glacier View. I published a few more entries. Even though we had troubles during the day it felt good to be once again settled.

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