Glen Highway

I will write about places other than Alaska at some point, but I may as well stay on the subject until I finish it. From Paxson, we headed south on the Richardson Hwy toward Glen Allen, stopping along the way at road houses and campgrounds. There was absolutely nothing but road and scenery from Paxon to Sourdough. The scenery in Alaska is spectacular. You can be driving down a road and see green mountains on one side and snow covered mountains on the other. It is more vast than I could ever hope to describe.  There are beautiful clear rivers and rivers with gray glacier water. Sometimes they merge, creating a really cool effect. There are a number of restored road houses along the highways, which are remnants from the gold rush days. We stopped at the Sourdough Roadhouse for a soda. There  was a married couple working there for the summer. They lived in South Carolina the rest of the year. She is a retired engineer for the power company, and he is a project manager turned Presbyterian minister. It sounded like a great life. It is so worthwhile to take the time to talk to people along the way when you travel. After listening to their advice about various campgrounds,  we continued on our way. We discovered a campground in the Caribou Creek State Recreation Mining Area. It was free, empty, had secluded campsites, and plenty of leftover firewood. What a find! There were gorgeous wildflowers, tall rock faces, a river, and mountain views. Paradise! It was obvious that there were many moose in the area by the amount of droppings we saw, and we came across some enormous moose footprints. One thing we learned quickly during our trip to Alaska was that we had to constantly be alert and on the watch for wild animals. After hiking and investigating the area, we built a really big campfire, parked ourselves in the folding chairs, and did some reading and relaxing.
The next morning was another cold and drizzly morning. We packed up and headed for Matanuska Glacier. The weather cleared and the temperature rose into the 50's (yes, it was still June). We hiked around on the Glacier for 2 hours. We didn't spend the money to go with a tour guide and wear crampons, so we carefully picked our way around the less treacherous parts of the glacier. It was awesome! I can really appreciate the color referred to as glacier blue now. In some areas, we had to jump across narrow streams of melting glacier water. At one point, the gray mud was so soft and sticky that we were sinking down to our ankles in it. That was a bit scary for my taste. We made it safely back to the car and continued down Glen Hwy.
Glen Hwy is a gorgeous drive, with beautiful mountain views and plenty of birch to look at. We stopped at a secluded little lake called Wiener Lake, which was right down the road from Long Lake. I am not kidding!  Of course we both reverted to childhood and giggled over the names of the lakes. They were really beautiful. We stopped at a strange little roadside place and had vanilla cream soda. It was like a general store with RV sites on one side, llamas and alpacas out front, chickens and ducks out back, and all kinds of farm equipment on display. Very odd. They sold items that the owner's wife had knitted out of the wool from the animals.
There are just so many cool and unpopulated places along the roads in Alaska. We pulled off to investigate many times a day. Sometimes the trail heads for the trails that we planned to hike seemed to have vanished. We usually found some other cool place instead, so we were never disappointed.