I am currently sitting in Maggie’s mostly empty apartment while she’s at her first class at APU tonight. I’ll be back in Provo tomorrow morning, but the battery on my camera was dead the entire trip and I lost my jump drive, so I’m posting now since Maggie has all the pictures on her computer and I don’t know when she’ll be able to upload them to Facebook.
This trip has been a lot of fun. It didn’t start out that way, since actually meeting up with Maggie was a total pain. On Friday, I flew from SLC to Denver and then got on a flight from Denver to Jackson and was going to meet her there. About 3/4 of the way through the flight, the plane did a 180 and flew back to Denver. The crew said there was an electrical issue with the right engine and that they couldn’t fix it in Jackson. But we were able to fly all the way back to Denver and land safely, so I don’t really think safety was the issue here…just convenience for them. So I was back in Denver at about 7 pm and raced everybody else on the plane to the customer service desk so we could figure out what to do. I was able to get a flight the next morning to Bozeman, Montana where I could meet Maggie after she drove about 4 hours from Jackson. They put me up in a pretty nice hotel for the night and gave me a $100 credit towards another flight (thanks, Frontier) and everything was really fine, it was just super frustrating to get almost there and then go back to almost where I started.
Anyway, I finally joined the drive about noon last Saturday, and we managed to make it to Nanton, Alberta where we camped for the night. They didn’t stamp my passport at the border. Sad face. The next day we drove through Calgary and Edmonton and camped near Fort St. John in British Columbia, at a place right on Beatton Lake. This campsite was gorgeous and secluded, and really made me thankful that there are still places like that in the world. Little did I know that was just the first of several gorgeous places we would pass through. The drive along the Alaska Highway is beautiful. On the third day, we drove through British Columbia (where we saw all kinds of animals pretty much just standing on the side of the road) and stopped at the Liard Hot Springs for a little relaxation/rejuvenation before going on to Watson Lake in the Yukon Territory. We slept in the car, and I’m glad we did because it poured that night and was really cold. The fourth day we drove to Tok, Alaska (but missed the sourdough pancake toss they do at the campground we stayed at…another sad face) and on the fifth day we made it to Anchorage and found Maggie’s apartment.
I’ve never seen so much wildlife (including moose, caribou, deer, bison, swans, and even a bear) just hanging out on the side of the road like that. It was amazing to see all those animals there…but a little bit dangerous too. We almost hit a deer and passed by a van that had hit and killed a bison and then went off the side of the road with most of its front bumper ripped off and the hood smashed in. Yikes.
We also stopped to see some pretty exciting things along the way, like the biggest beaver statue in the world, a sundial shaped like a grain elevator, the largest weathervane in the world (it’s an airplane), Sasquatch himself, the largest goldpan in the world, replicas of wooly mammoths, the sign post forest in Watson Lake (there was a Fallbrook sign there!), the sign for Suicide Hill, and a giant lumberjack without an axe, and parts of the original Alaska Highway from before they started renovating it. Fun.
Since it’s late August, the trees are already starting to change colors this far north. While going through the mountains in Canada and Alaska, the hillsides were covered in green spruce and aspen, some of the aspens already having started to change to yellow and a bright pinkish-orange. There was a kind of red flower plant that was prevalent on the hills as well, so the mountains were basically a rainbow of colors. Add to that the green grasses and white glaciers and snow-covered peaks and the sky that went between being vivid blue with puffs of white and then full of grey rainclouds…it was beautiful. And when the sun set over the lakes and streams and mountains in Canada, I pretty much thought I had died and gone to heaven. Gorgeous.
I love it here. I’ll be glad to get back to Provo, especially to be with Eric again, but I’ll miss how green and rainy and cool it is here. I want to live in a place like this.
