Alaska, Part !!!

From Chicken we made our way south and west to the Denali Highway, another curious name for a road made of dirt but it was an extremely pleasant way to traverse the east/west expanse of a state with a limited highway system. We followed the road as it snaked through berry patches, where we spent three hours one day collecting as many wild blueberries as possible, which served to make yummy pancakes and a great lemon-blueberry bread once down to Anchorage. Parallel to this road is a good chunk of the TransAlaskan Pipeline that brings oil from the Arctic North down to Valdez on the southern tip of the state. This was an eerie mix of futuristic, apocalyptic piping making its own home in the nature that it uses to bring oil out and down. At one point we even inadvertantly were driving on one of the buried parts of the pipeline, only to figure out why that gravel road was so well taken care of later. Oops.

It also served as our home for two nights as we pulled off and found free camping in the BLM land, once on Fielding Lake where a nice fellow abandoned his fire for us before we listened to the stream all night long. The second night we found a hidden road that led down a steep embankment to Fifty Mile Lake, so named for its placement at Mile Post 50 of the highway, where we were hidden from the road, took baths in the lake and shared our space only with a pair of swans who lazily moved about for hours.


This is Fifty Mile Lake at sunset where the reflections somehow doubled giving three orbs of sun next to the mountains in the background, that's our tent down in the lower left.


Wonderful Lemon-Blueberry bread cooked with wild, hand-picked Alaskan berries and baked at my friend Kate's house in Anchorage. Thanks Kate for the visit and the cake and the fun.