Into The Park
It was time to leave Valdez and start the slow trip homeward. From this point we would be heading mostly south. Today's destination, however, was the Nabesa Road, along the northwestern edge of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. It would be our only foray into the park itself and a minor one at that, since the park is over 13 million acres and we'd be going only about 20 miles into it.
We had good good weather toady but a bad road. There was much roadwork going on including three areas where we had to wait for pilot cars. One of those waits was about a half hour.
Our first stop was the main Wrangell-St. Elias Visitor center. While we had stopped on our trip out to Chitina, It was closed when Harry and Sally passed by on their way to Valdez. We had a great view of Mount Wrangell and the adjacent Wrangell Mountains just before we arrived at the visitor center. We had lunch, visited the exhibits, saw the film again and visited Atna cultural center which was not open when we were here last Sunday.
Then it was on to Nabesa Road. The road and the construction slowed us down so much that we just missed closing time at the Slana Ranger Station but talked with a passing law enforcement ranger about road. It certainly sounded passable by Speedy. This first ten miles or so were paved and the potholes weren't too bad and when we got to the unpaved section we saw that it had been graded fairly recently. We ended our drive at the Dead Dog Hill rest area to park for night. It had a great overlook of the mountains.
Shortly after we arrived, two young men also stopped in their pickup truck. They got out spotting scopes and started looking up at the mountain range. I stopped by and asked them about what they were looking for. They were hunting for Dall Sheep. It is sheep season here for another week. They had found had two in their scopes about 15 miles away on mountainside. They were staying the night at the rest area and would look again in morning to decide whether to pursue them. They are only allowed to take older rams with full curl on horns. By the time the horns get that big they are near the end of their life span.
We had dinner with our mountain backdrop and called it a day.
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