On to Seward
July 15-19, 2008
The route from the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park to Seward takes you
on the Glenn Highway to Anchorage. The highway passes through some
magnificent mountain scenery. This is the Nelchina glacier in the
Chugach Mountains. Wouldn't be great to have a house here with a view
like this to look at every morning?
In Palmer we stopped at the Musk Ox Farm, which is an interesting
nonprofit enterprise. The farm is raising musk oxen and harvesting
their underwool, which is then shipped to cooperatives for native
Americans, where the wool is woven or knitted into products for sale.
It is an effort to provide jobs in remote Alaskan villages. These are
two-month old baby musk oxen. After they are weaned from their mothers,
the trainers work with them to get them used to being handled by people.
An adult female musk ox. The females can weigh several hundred pounds
and the bulls get to be as large as 1000 pounds. Musk oxen are
native to the region above the arctic circle but became extinct in
Alaska; they were reintroduced from herds in Scandinavia and Russia.
They are believed to have descended from the last ice age.
After Palmer we headed for Anchorage to replenish food, have a nice
dinner out, and get some repair work done. After a trip to a hardware
store for screws, we got the microwave oven back into its rightful
place. We also got some "dings" in the windshield repaired. On our
earlier trip to Alaska we didn't get any dings at all, but we have
gotten three on this trip so far; they were all gotten on paved roads,
so we can't blame gravel roads for it.
After Anchorage we headed for the Portage valley with the intent of
taking a day cruise out of Whittier, which is nearby. But the rains
came so we postponed our cruise plans. With it raining all day, we
hunkered down in the Roadtrek. Actually, it was nice to have a day of
laying around, after driving so much. It also gave me a change to do
some research for the university.
But a second day of raining was too much, so we headed further south to
Seward, where the weather improved. We found a campsite in the Seward
City campground right on Resurrection Bay, where we can see gorgeous
mountains and watch boats and cruise ships come and go. When we got
here there was a sea otter swimming in the bay, but he was too far out
for me to get a decent picture. Maybe he will come back. In a couple of
days we will take a three-day sailing/kayaking cruise from Seward to
Ailik bay, which is in the Kenai Fjords National Park just south of
here.