Cumulative miles: 130 (!)
The last day of packing was, as expected, more time consuming than expected! Ruthless separation of needs and not-needs spawned piles of items for Fairbanks’ re-use sites: covered areas to leave give-away stuff at the trash dumps. The efficiency of those sites is amazing; some items were gone the next day, and on our final trip the stuff was snatched up right from the trunk of Chris’s car! We enjoyed a final drink on the deck of Pike’s over the Chena River with Chris—we owe Rhiannon and him MUCHO for allowing us to trash their cabin for two days and of course tie up a couple of loose ends for us—> Thanks guys! We will miss our Fairbanks friends lots, we promise to be back for many cool trips in the future.
Fairbanks: Ty saying goodbye to Chris after a beer at Pike’s
Fairbanks farewells: Chris, Marielle and Ty
Our 9:30pm departure from Fairbanks was about 12hrs later than originally planned, which has unfortunately precluded any spontaneous river floats along the Al-Can Highway so far. It’s been heart-wrenching to drive past such breathtaking scenery, spectacular hiking, and ideal packrafting rivers, but we’ve planned to spend more time in Washington and California, so we’ll have to return to this vast and beautiful country for future epic trips. We’ve been scoping out and making notes of every good river, and on the Alaskan side, drawing possible routes on our Topo! software.
Between Fairbanks and Canada we saw two large moose, and those have been the only charismatic macrofauna we’ve seen so far. That wonderful northern latitude low-angle sun painted lingering pink skies mirrored by droves of flowering fireweed as we pulled into a gravel pit at midnight for our first camp, having covered just 130 miles for day 1 (gravel pits make excellent free camp sites along Alaskan roads!). Teeth were brushed ‘on the hoof’ as a caribou might do while plagued by the blood thirsty hoards (mosquitoes). We thanked modern civilization for the invention of lightweight tents so we could sleep peacefully without concern of massive blood loss (for those of you who don’t know Alaska, we consider the mosquito our State Bird).
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