Road Scenery in Alaska

Once you get about halfway up Canada the scenery starts to become more of the same. This isn't to say that it isn't lovely because it is. It is some of the most pristine and untouched nature that I have seen near a highway anywhere in the world. I can only guess that this has to do with a number of factors, especially the fact that in winter this part of the world becomes extremely difficult to live in.

Therefore, most of our journey was spent on the road between Banff and our eventual arrival in Alaska, which was our objective from the onset. It's been a long road and I am extremely grateful that the family invited me to come along with them since I am a budget traveler and likely would have never seen these things without their assistance.

From the RV traveling down the road upon entering Alaska, we saw some pretty wild stuff out the windows.

When driving through Alaska you start to get a real feeling for how huge this state is and how few people live in it. When we were traveling down the road it was not uncommon for us to encounter another person only once every couple of minutes or so, yet the highway was extremely well maintained. I wonder how they can pull that off so far up north yet in the populated areas the roads just seem to be a mess.

Not having any traffic is always a welcome thing in an RV though, so I am definitely not complaining.

You do encounter these a great deal though.

Once you get to certain parts of the country, pipelines are all over the place. I can't say for sure, but it looks as though they did a good job of disturbing as little of the nature as possible. Since we actually do need oil in the world and other sources of energy, I think that this is a good thing. Sorry if you are one of those climate protesters but if Alaska used solar panels they would all freeze to death in the first season because there are months where the sun barely shows itself at all this far north. Anyway, I'm not trying to make this a political discussion.

Certain types of food are extremely expensive in Alaska and one of the people on board our road yacht really enjoys fresh fruit. She was astounded that a small bag of cherries can cost $10 but that is just the way it is. This isn't a tourist trap, because there are no tourists where we were, this is just how much things cost here.

Much later on we encountered this absolutely lovely harbor surrounded by mountains. I never knew that places like this existed in USA even though Alaska is one of those parts of USA that very few people actually know anything about. Most of these appear to be pleasure vessels and I found it a bit odd that someone would prefer to keep their boat up here. It would be an extremely long journey from here to any other port in the USA. Maybe we will be able to go on a sailing cruise of some sort while we are up here because who knows? It could be some of the best sailing in the world for all I know.

src

Alaska is an absolutely enormous state, bigger than most countries in the world. From what we have heard from the locals very little of the land is habitable and therefore isn't even used, by human and by a majority of wildlife as well. It simply isn't a place to live for anything. We didn't end up going to any of it but my next chapter will cover the flight that we took to get photos of this untouched wonderland.

Alaska is pretty damn awesome but it's July right now and it was still really cold by my standards especially at night.