Valdez and More
VALDEZ TRIP
Steve and I were hoping that Lisa and Charlie would be able to go with us to Valdez, but they had too many things to tend to in preparation for their big move to the Lower 48. So, instead of spending Steve’s entire 7 days off in Valdez, we decided to just go for four days. The weather forecast for Valdez didn’t look very good anyway, and I didn’t want to spend a week getting rained on.
We left home on Thursday morning, under sunny skies. We both felt a little bad that we were leaving such pretty North Pole weather to drive 365 miles to a rainy place, but Steve was itching to catch some silver salmon, and he didn’t care if there were typhoon warnings!
The foliage as we headed south on the Richardson Hwy was absolutely stunning. With the sun low in the sky, the trees glowed with a colorful light - almost as if they were lit from within. With only slightly hazy skies, the Alaska Range was brightly visible on the horizon; the sun highlighting the crags, and dropping shadows in the crevices. I’ve driven this route countless times before, but I never tire of seeing the mountains. We stopped at Midway Lodge (the halfway point between Fairbanks and Delta) for a leisurely breakfast.
Even though Steve brings five cans of fuel with us when we make these long drives, it is customary to top off the gas tank in Delta - where the gas isn’t priced too much higher than it is here in Fairbanks/North Pole. (By the way, gas here in North Pole is $3.51/gallon - we’re being robbed! But I digress…)
As we approached Donnelly Dome, I noticed a flock of birds in the sky overhead. At first I thought they were geese, but when I looked at them through my zoom lens I realized they were sandhill cranes. And then I saw more large groups of cranes coming into view. There were thousands of them; flying in groups of several hundred. It reminded me of the time we saw the skies darken with cranes over Nenana several years ago - at about this same time of year. We stopped the truck and watched them through the binoculars for a little while. We weren’t the only ones to pull off the road. It was quite a sight to see!
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