Leaving Valdez
Day 7 - 6/05/2021: 56.2 miles (125 total), 3155 feet (4435 total)
12:22 pm (2032)
Flashback:
Yesterday morning we hit what I think of as The Hiccup. During the 5-mile bike ride down to the train, I discovered that the rails connecting my seat to the hike had been snapped. Disaster!
During the train ride to Whittier we reassured each other that we’d be able to find a bike shop in Valdez tomorrow. Once we got to Whittier, though, we were able to fit the rails together in the middle of the clip that holds it to the bike. I then spent 10 minutes riding around, hopping curbs, and generally trying to stress test it. It passed.
However, I’m not insane enough to go up Thompson pass on a saddle could fail at at minute w/ no backup. Eventually, a kind local volunteered to sell me the saddle off a bike languishing in the hotel’s basement. It’s a pretty good saddle, w/ thick rails. It’s not a Brooks, so I’m going to start tomorrow using my broken saddle, but I’m carrying the other one with me. There does not seem to be any way that the saddle breaking again can cause any issues w/ other parts (better not be famous last words), so we’ll see.
So starting out yesterday morning I felt reasonably confident that I wouldn’t end up coasting down from halfway up Thompson Pass back to the ferry. But still.
So we set out in the morning the BearPaw Adult RV park (pictures yesterday), stopped in to The Potato for an absolutely fabulous breakfast burrito, then Safeway for supplies, and headed out to the Richardson Highway.
The plan was to go 28 miles up over Richardson Pass, and then another 20 miles to a Wayside at mile 48. We knew that the climb up to the pass (about 2700 feet, starting from sea level), was mostly towards the end, and that turned out to be the case, with only 400 ft gained in the first 20 miles, with a slight tailwind!
The last 7-8 miles were a different story. Pretty much 4.5% the rest of the way. The route meandered through and around a series of canyons w/ what looked like the alps in front of us. Granted, much lower and smaller, but covered in snow and with glaciers everywhere. We talk about glaciers disappearing a lot, and they are, but on this part of the Richardson Highway we passed many dozen. Many have patches of blue ice showing through as the surface snow melts away.
One of the first we passed (while still on the train) the narrator told us was relatively shallow. The entire glacier was old, but as the glacier oozed down the mountain it lost ice on the bottom as more gets packed on top, resulting in this glacier’s snow averaging only 150 years old.
Coming up the canyon we saw the remains of Alaska’s rough past: mule pack trails high on the mountain side, a rough old track that started as a mule track and eventually was widened to accommodate cars, including a short tunnel. The first car traversed this track on the way to Fairbanks in 1913.
Another tunnel has a sign describing the Railroad Era, when nine companies fought to be the first two run a rail from Valdez to the copper mines on the other side of the pass. Things got so bad that gunfights erupted and the trail was never finished, even after a series of short tunnels were hand-cut through the rock.
Back to the climb: there are times on tours like this where you alternate between complete exhilaration (how the fuck did I get so lucky that I can be out here in the middle of this?) and doubt. I haven’t climbed a hill like this since 2009, but I had no doubt I’d make it up. The only question was the condition of my knees after finished. My biggest single-hill climb since knee replacement in 2018 was probably a couple hundred feet.
The pictures don’t do it justice, and I certainly can’t here, but snow-covered mountain ridge after snow-covered mountain ridge into the distance completely transports you.
Near the top a mountain stream ran right next to the road so we each filtered about a gallon of water, alleviating one of our biggest worries: running out. Luckily it’s spring, there’s water everywhere, and the filters are working great.
I have to mention that early on, the great woodsman Henry said that we could probably drink directly out of the clear running streams because there wouldn’t be any beavers to dam things up and breed ghardia, p. Half a mile later we passed a sign for Beaver Pond Trail Trail, and just over the top of the pass we saw several beaver dams and lodges :-).
Going down the other side was mostly a downhill run. We thought about stopping at a hotel/restaurant on the way down, but we didn’t want to stay at a hotel and hoped that another lodge/tavern would be open 10 miles down.
Alas, it was closed so we proceeded on to the “Billy” Mitchell memorial wayside, which has a paved loop with four covered picnic tables, and two pit toilets, happily outfitted w/ TP and trash bags.
Dinner was freeze-dried spaghetti (so good, I kid you not), and salted cashews, chocolate bar for dessert.
Afterwards we biked back a mile to a bridge, hoping we could get down to river bank to clean up. There wasn’t a good way down, so we ended up filtering more water and then wiping down from a shallow creek running down the side of the Richardson Highway.
I needed to change pants and there wasn’t any place to go, so I just dropped trou right there on the highway. Traffic probably averages a car every three or four minutes. :-)
We set up our tents at one picnic shelter and cooked at another, hanging the bag from the rafters after we were done.
We slept great, though I think temperatures must have been in the 30s, and even though I got up an hour and a half ago, retrieved our food, had a couple servings of oatmeal-coffee, Henry snores still.
5/30/2021 | 8 Comments
