It was quite cold during the night. My feet were chilly last night, so tonight I’m going to wear socks. This morning though was a perfectly clear blue sky. The tent fly was the driest it’s been for quite some time. After breaking camp we drove to the start of the Skookum Volcano trail, just a little over a mile down the road from our campsite.
At first the trail was quite good, deceptively so it turns out. There is a bit of rock sticking up making the beginning a bit rough, but then it turned into very easy walking, with a good trail and not too steep. The first couple of kilometres are like that, almost as if you were walking in a park, with occasional large spruce trees, but mostly just tall willows. As we got higher the willows got shorter, and soon we could hear the creek, although there was no water flowing on top at this point. All the water must have been running beneath the rocks. Not far after this the creek began to show, and soon there was quite a bit of water in it. We waded across the creek, and that was the end of the good trail. There were some rock cairns to mark where to go as you followed up the creek bed, but it was very rough and quite steep. At almost three kilometres in the trail seemed to go up more steeply to the left side, and we followed that, but eventually it just petered out, and we never did find where the summit of the pass is. We turned back at this point, ate our lunch, and then walked out. If the trail continued, we could not locate it.
By this time it was starting to get cloudy. We drove out of the park then, back to the Tok cutoff highway, and stopped at Glennallen. Now it was almost completely overcast, so that we didn’t get very good views of the Wrangell – St. Elias mountains. At Glennallen Enid was able to contact Colleen Polson (nee Crickett) and we have arranged to meet her at their home in Eagle River on Sunday night. We planned to go to the south end of the Wrangell – St. Elias national park tomorrow in to McArthy, so drove down to Chitina, and as we got closer it started to rain.
We arrived at the Liberty Falls campground in the rain, and it didn’t look very good. There were no level sites where we could set up our tent, though there were some platforms down near the river, but we’d have to carry everything down there. It wasn’t far, but didn’t seem like a great plan in the rain. So we drove another ten miles to the town of Chitina, and stopped at the one and only hotel. It’s a renovated hotel originally built in 1914. It certainly wasn’t fancy, but when we inquired about the price found it far more than we wanted to pay. We drove back to where we had passed an RV park. It didn’t look good, in fact it looked like it was closed. There had been a sign on a building just north of that saying “cabins” but when we turned in we realized it was a hostel. So we drove back to Liberty Falls, and that is where we stayed.
It stopped raining shortly after we arrived for the second time, so we got everything set up without getting it wet. After supper Enid cleaned and cooked the cranberries we picked two days ago, so they will be nice to eat with chicken and pork. We have almost a liter of them. So the food is great, but we really can’t say the same for the weather. It isn’t raining now, but it’s very cool and feels damp. Unless it clears tomorrow morning, we will just be driving back to Glennallen to do some laundry, because we won’t be able to see any of the mountains in the park anyway.