Our Final Week in Alaska...kinda!

Finally the time to move on from Valdez was Tuesday, July 30, 2024 when we travelled to Kenny Lake Mercantile Campground to spend one night. It was just off the road to Chitina, McCarthy and eventually the Kennicott Mines National Historic Landmark.

Kennicott Mines is an abandoned mining camp in the Copper River Census Area in the U.S. state of Alaska that was the center of activity for several copper mines. It is located beside the Kennicott Glacier, northeast of Valdez, inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. The camp and mines are now a National Historic Landmark District administered by the National Park Service. We had hoped to visit but alas the weather wasn't idea for the long trek 60 miles down a rough road to McCarthy. We are making a mental list of things to see on our next vist to Alaska and this was added.

Wednesday morning we drove to the Tazlina Trading Post to visit with our friend Laurie Johnson. She met us with our mail forwarded from Texas and gave us a local tour of the Glennallen area where she and Jay now live. We missed Jay, because he and his brother took a road trip to Prudhoe Bay on their motorcycle for the week. After our tour, we took Laurie to lunch at the Copper River Princess Wilderness Lodge. which features spectacular mountain views and breathtaking scenery of Wrangell–St. Elias National Park. The Copper River Princess Wilderness Lodge is situated on 200 acres near the junction of the Klutina and Copper Rivers.

This premier Princess Alaska Lodge features 85 rooms and a two-level dining area with excellent mountain and valley views. The focal point of the Copper River Princess Wilderness Lodge is the Wrangell Room with a staircase to the mezzanine level where you can relax and enjoy the majestic scenery provided by a two-story wall of windows.

From Glennallen we drove up the Richardson Highway north to stay at the Rest Stop at Mile Post 188 for the night, which is past the Denali Highway turnoff. We had originally planned on stopping to camp at Paxson Lake but couldn't find a suitable site to fit our rig so we just pulled off the highway for the night before finding a camp site for the next two days. We met a departing RV as we arrived and took over their beautiful lake view site.

That next day we drove west on the Denali Highway until the pavement ended at Tangle Lake. This BLM-maintained campground sits amid the Tangle Lakes, a series of long, narrow lakes. This is a designated put-in for the 30-mile-long Delta National Wild and Scenic River float trip. There are moose and caribou in the area; many hunters use this as a base camp during the fall hunting season.The Denali Highway is 135 miles long and connects Paxson on the Richardson Highway with Cantwell Junction on the Parks Highway. Only 30 miles of the road surface is paved. We used this as a base to explore more of the Denali Highway route, without the trailer, and more of the Richardson Highway north to Delta Junction through the Alaska Range.

This area is where the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) spans Alaska, including the trans-Alaska crude-oil pipeline, 12 pump stations, several hundred miles of feeder pipelines, and the Valdez Marine Terminal. TAPS is one of the world's largest pipeline systems. The core pipeline itself, which is commonly called the Alaska pipeline, trans-Alaska pipeline, or Alyeska pipeline, (or The Pipeline as referred to by Alaskan residents), is an 800-mile (1,287 km) long, 48-inch (1.22 m) diameter pipeline that conveys oil from Prudhoe Bay, on Alaska's North Slope, south to Valdez, on the shores of Prince William Sound in southcentral Alaska. The crude oil pipeline is privately owned by the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company.

After two days of on again/off again wet and dreary weather, we concluded that it was indeed time to start thinking about the trip back to the lower forty-eight. We had spent over a month experiencing Alaska and needed to consider the long journey ahead and the travel time to get to Washington state by Labor Day. We didn't want to rush back so we decided on Saturday morning, August 3rd we would depart Tangle Lakes to drive south on the Richardson Higway to the Tok Junction to head north back to the ALCAN. We drove most of that distance and found another pull-out for that night before we reached Tok, Alaska.

Another beautiful Alaska summer gone by, marked by fireweed flowers going to seed as salmon runs shift to Coho and start to dwindle. As the saying goes: “when fireweed turns to cotton, summer will soon be forgotten."

Our time in Alaska has been memorable and extremely rewarding. We leave with a few disapointments. Not being able to experience Denali Ntional Park was the big one, but overall we had some wonderful adventures with friends. And like most trips to new and faraway places, the idea of returning at some future date is definitely going to be on the table. A future trip to Alaska, done in a different manner, at a future time is already in conversation. But for now, the long road back south begins in earnest.

Good bye Alaska...for now.