Tundra colors and the Alaska Range
Two flats today, but only one of them was ours. More on that later. It was very cold in the night, and the inside of the fly was covered with frost when we awoke. Even after it had hung in the sun for an hour, there was still some frost on it which I shook off.
We drove back as far into the park as you can drive a private vehicle looking for moose, but saw nothing at all. However the colors on the hills and tundra
were again beautiful with red, oranges and yellows, and we could see the top of Denali this morning, as there were few clouds. Later on we got a great view back to Denali as we drove east along the Denali Highway. This road which goes between Cantwell and Paxson is hardly a highway, though it is as good a gravel road as we’ve been on, though quite rough where they were doing some construction.
We stopped at the Nenana River put in, which is where they launch canoes to float down the 18 miles to the highway. A short while later we stopped at a pullout, and climbed up the hills to the south for great views both north and south into the Alaska Range. The colours of fall are just spectacular on the tundra.
It was not much farther down the road that we came upon two vehicles pulled off into a gravel pullout. A woman was standing waving her arms, so we stopped. They had had a flat tire on their rented half ton truck, and they could not figure out how to lower the spare tire from the winch that held it up under the truck box. The other people that had stopped to help them out weren’t able to get it to work either, though the man had slid under the truck and was trying to loosen the spare with the jack. I tried too with the mechanism, but you couldn’t see it, and it was not very easy to tell how it should work. There were no clear instructions in the owner’s manual. Finally I pounded it on with the hammer, and was then able to winch it down some, and we got the tire part way down. When we had done that, we could push the tire aside enough to see the winch, and I realized that we were trying to use the bars provided backwards. By turning it around it fit well on the winch and then we were able to get the tire down. After that the other couple left, but I stayed and completed the tire change for the man and his wife. They were from Florida, extremely appreciative of our help, wanted to pay us, but of course we refused that. However we did exchange email addresses, and they invited us to stay with them sometime in the future in St. Augustine. Who knows, perhaps in our travels we will take them up on their invitation.
So that was tire change number one. It took us at least half an hour. We continued on the Denali Highway, and by now the clear morning had become quite cloudy. There were some very large thunderstorms building up to the north of us. We stopped to take some pictures of some trumpeter swans on a tundra lake, and there was a tremendously loud crack of thunder as I was getting back into the Yukon. We saw no lightning at all, so it must have been sheet lightning above us. At 21 miles from Paxson the road is paved, so I felt that we had weathered the gravel road ok. No sign of a flat tire. That was not the case, as about 50 miles up the Richardson Highway the “Check Tire Pressure” warning light came on; we pulled off the highway, and had our third flat in the rear passenger side tire. It was quite cold and windy as we unloaded the back of the Yukon, including the large supply of wood we’d picked up from a free camping area, and proceeded to change the tire. I no longer trust this tire so plan to get it removed tomorrow in Delta Junction, and put on the best of our two spares in its place.
There was a major rain storm that hit us just after Paxson as we drove by Summit Lake. Fortunately it had cleared by the time we got the flat, and as we got farther north the weather continued to improve. Again we had talked about getting a room in Delta Junction if it was raining, but because it was so nice as we arrived here we thought it would be ok to camp. In fact we put up a clothes line and everything is nice and dry again as there was both sun and a breeze.
We are on the east bank of the wide Delta River. It is at least a mile wide here, but really is just a bunch of braided streams. All along the way up this highway there was creek after creek, each one grey with glacial silt. Either the creek, or the branch of the river closest to our campsite is very clear water though, so we got water from the river to replace the terrible chlorinated water that we got in Denali.
Alaska Range across the Delta River
There are many glaciers in these mountains, and across the river you can see the high snow-capped peaks of Mt. Moffit, Mt. Stroud, and McGinnis Peak in the Alaska Range. It will probably be quite cold again tonight, as there are so many glaciers around us, and it never got very warm today, just about 15 degrees Celsius when we drove in here tonight which was the warmest part of the day.