Travels with Yukon Jack and Sky Pilot Larry
You can tell you’ve left Kansas, Dorothy, when the road signs mark caribou crossings, moose crash zones or Watch for Bison markers. We’ve seen bear and moose and buffalo and mountain goats up here in the Yukon and Alaska interiors. Mountains taller than Mt. Rainier aren’t even given mention on the roadside markers — instead we get prose on the heroic efforts of road builders with no identification of Mt. Logan dominating the background just shy of 20,000 feet and only 700 feet short of being the tallest mountain in North America. I guess there’s so many, another Big One just doesn’t pique their interest, probably the way Minnesotans yawn over that 9767th lake.
One in 60 Alaskans owns a bush plane. Not surprising when you see the mountain ranges on every side and glaciers carving huge valleys toward vast river basins. There are three — count em — highways basically that traverse the state. To reach the capital, Juneau, you have to come in by boat or by plane. Now add a little snow, arctic fronts, temperatures far below zero, 40 or 50 degrees below, plunge the state into seasonal darkness, what I might call eternal night, and you have a world almost lunar if we ever build the Sea of Tranquillity Highway. Think frontier. Vast spaces of wilderness so remote no one goes there, not even the Inuits, not even the bush pilots, not even the gas and oil conglomerates. Superimpose Alaska on a map of the continental United States and it covers all of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska and half of North and South Dakota plus Oklahoma. It would stretch from South Carolina at the Panhandle to the Pacific at the end of the Aleutians. The bugger is big!!
Me and Larry are going to drive all the highways before we leave. Thousands of miles from the southern Kenai Peninsula to the Arctic Ocean up at Prudeau Bay. Like the South End, history’s pretty much gone to rot and ruin. Nature’s a little too harsh to afford saving old cabins and frontier stores for future tourists. Alaska’s a wilderness. Maybe in a hundred years the historic motels and gift shops on the Al/Can, preserved and restored, will serve as vicarious treks for stalwart sightseers on their virtual internet travelogues. If nothing else, they’ll burn a lot less fuel than we’re burning.
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