Alaska Highway, Day 5

July 3^rd

Alaska Highway, Day 5

Tok, AK to Portage, AK (south of Anchorage), mile 1628

The roads continue to rock and roll, we are too far north to get Sirius Radio and the roads are too rough to play cds…..hmm….guess Jim will just have to get used to hearing me sing my favorite blue grass tunes. I’ll say this much for Canada, at least they mark the bad spots in the road with red flags or cones. Here you don’t know you’ve hit a bad stretch until you catch air and touch down on the other side.

Along the way we had a great encounter with a cow moose. She very obligingly stood in a pond up to her knees eating grass and posing for us. Lots of rain and grey skies today. In spite of the low clouds the scenery continues to take our breath away.

The Matanuska Valley north of Anchorage on the Richardson Hwy. is especially amazing.  The valley is full of lakes, rivers and the surrounding alpine glaciers are incredible. We kept pulling off to take pictures thinking that was the last view we would get, but farther down the road there is another one. They are much bigger and closer than the ones we passed in Kluane National Park, along the western border of the Yukon. You can actually see where the ice is calving off the glacier as it meets the lower portion of the valley and melts into the rivers. Certainly nothing to rival their grandeur in the lower forty eight. Here is a website to check out more information on the area. The Glenn Highway and the Matanuska Valley, information, history, maps and pictures .

Here is another picture link: Tok to Anchorage pictures

Well we finally got to Anchorage where we planned to overnight only to discover that this particular Wal-Mart art did not allow overnight parking. It’s usually a city ordinance that restricts parking overnight….obviously any retailer welcomes the added revenue that people in RV’s bring. Not only Wal-Mart but many other stores like Fred Meyer, Canadian Tire and so on cater to the RV crowd with overnight parking, free potable water and dump stations. So we’ve no choice but to continue south on Hwy 1, towards Homer until we can find a place to park for the night.

The highway is really beautiful as it goes right along the coastline of the Turnagain Arm, a bay of the Cook Inlet, south of Anchorage. Here is a website to check out more information on the area. Turnagain Arm, information, history and pictures

We can see areas of  real strong current and think that the tide is coming in ….. little did we know! Pretty soon we pulled off into a parking area to take pictures and I saw people out on the water! They were on surf boards riding the crest of the tide! I have never seen water move that fast….it’s called a bore tide and only happens occasionally when there’s a strong minus low tide. You could hear it coming in. Turnagain Arm and bore tide surfing pictures


 YouTube video of surfing 
I did not get a chance to edit it so it is a little rough. 

Evidently the mud flats can be extremely dangerous and the bore tide travels at 15 miles per hour! If we had stayed in Anchorage we would have missed this rare sight...... Our whole trip has been blessed by these serendipitous events.  We watched until all but one lost the curl and continued south and parked alongside the Alaska Railroad station along Portage Creek for the night. 

(The Alaska Railway) We are now officially on the Kenai Peninsula.