From The Coast, Avoiding The Rain
It was still raining when we woke up today and the forecast was for continued rain. After showering and dumping and filling our tanks it was off to Valdez. After we got into town, we stopped at Latte Dah for breakfast and coffee. They had fairly good breakfast sandwiches and very good coffee. Ellen asked the women running the cafe about somewhere to get a haircut. They suggested two places, which were the only two in town, but thought they might not be open as it was the day of the women's silver salmon derby. Sure enough, they weren't open.
We decided to try to get somewhere without rain, so after a bit of grocery shopping and fueling Speedy, we headed north towards Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. We thought we'd go to Chitina at the beginning of the McCarthy Road and see if the gravel road was passable for Speedy.
It was rainy and very foggy all the way out of town and up to the top of the Thompson Pass and Worthington Glacier. After stopping for lunch at the glacier (we didn't walk the trail to the glacier as it was still raining), we started down the other side. As soon as we cleared the top the fog cleared and the rain stopped. It wasn't long before we were on dry roads. The Richadson Highway is not a very smooth road and it was much nicer when we turned onto the Edgerton Highway towards Chitina. It was a new smooth road...but it only lasted until the first river crossing. Then it was back to narrow lumpy chipseal with occasional gravel breaks. With only a stop to watch a moose and her two calves feeding at small lake we made our way to Chitina and the Chitina Ranger Station.
The ranger there was quite enthusiastic about McCarthy and the Kennecott mine site and indicated that the road wasn't all that bad. It was chipseal for the first part and the gravel road had a few potholes. It was promising, but it was getting late and we decided to find a place to camp locally and decide in the morning.
There was a free camping area just across the bridge over the Copper River at the start of the McCarthy Road and we set out for it. We stopped to watch the fishing on the way.The river at that point is a popular dip-net fishing area.
Dip netting is a method for catching salmon with a big circular net on a long pole. The dipnetter extends the net into the river and sweeps it about and hopefully nets a fish coming upstream. It can only by used to fish by native Alaskcans and is only used in silty rivers where the nets cannot be seen by the fish. They can't really be seen by the fisher either, but are supposed to be very effective. Before large scale commercial fishing offshore, the salmon were so thick in the rivers that a good native dip netter could catch 500 salmon a day. The local Athna would take about 3000 salmon in the summer and dry them. That's what it took to feed a family over the winter.
When we reached the free campground we found that it was nearly full with families that were there to fish. We felt we might be a little out of place and went back past Chitina to a state recreation area a few miles up the road. It was really small with only 10 sites, mostly tent sites. There were only couple of small drive-in sites and they were taken. Ellen remembered passing an RV park sign on the way back, it was back towards Chitina where we found the Wrangell View RV Park. It was down a side road shared with the local health center and airport.
It was a small place owned by the local Chitna Native Corporation, consisting of about a dozen full hookup sites, but the pricing seemed to be a la carte. A full site was $35, electric only was $22, but a tent site was only $15. Since all the sites were identical, with electric, water and sewer. We interpreted the rates as "pay only for what you use". We took the $15 option. That was even less thant the state campground. The only thing missing was a toilet facility.
As we were setting up we met two older women who we'd seen earlier at our moose stop. They were traveling in Alaska in a small Class-C RV. They were from Virginia and had bought the van from someone in Colorado and then headed off to Alaska. One of the women had worked at Denali NP for the concessionaire twenty years ago and this was a trip back to Alaska for her. They were doing a similar trip to ours, going everywhere where there was a road.
We settled into our quiet site and called it a day.
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