Into Alaska - Alaska and Points North: Tips and Tales from the Road - page 86

Tok and the Cut-Off
Spent an uneventful night in Beaver Flats sleeping in an RV Park that looked like a gravel
parking lot. Never mind. For $16 we were hooked up to electricity and there was a clean
restroom block with unlimited hot water. Considering we normally pay $12-15 for a parking
space at a State Park with nothing but pit toilets, I guess $16 for hot showers is okay. Not
much of a view though!
We see lots of rigs pulled off to the side of the road at night, dry camping. Apparently that is
actually encouraged in Alaska. The major roads all have waysides, what we would call rest
areas, with pit toilets. Later in the trip we used these pull-offs a few times.
Today we are traveling up the Alaska Hwy to Tok. There is an excellent Visitor's Centre at
Tok - very helpful and the ladies load you down with a couple of pounds of publications. It
is a struggle - balancing one's appetite for colourful info with concern about the numbers of
trees used to make them. Then again, there are a LOT of trees up here.
There is also an excellent place to buy souvenirs here - the All Alaska Gift Store.
Everything from fine art to ceramic mugs at what seemed to be reasonable prices to me. I
bought some Ulu knives. These are the locally-designed curve-bladed knives that are really
useful for scraping blubber off whale hide. When you are finished doing that they are also
very useful for chopping vegetables.
The shop has a computer set up for customers to use and also provides WIFI at no charge.
We found this accessibility to WIFI everywhere, even in some of the most remote places.
One day we were sitting on Atlin Lake, literally on the edge of nowhere. I pulled out my
laptop to make some notes. After a few moments there was the small “ting” that lets me
know I'm connected to the internet and sure enough, I was.
AtTokweleavetheAlaskaHwy,takingthe“TokCut-off”(Hwy#1)headedforValdez.This
route travels alongside the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. It's an area of rugged granite
summits with grandiose glaciers sweeping down the peaks into expansive valleys below.
Mount Wrangell comes into view and I read that the ice is one kilometre thick on the sum-
mit. But Mt Wrangell is also Alaska's largest active volcano with a pool of boiling sulphuric
acid just a meter below the crater's surface. So there is a pot of hot bubbling acid topped by
a one meter crust frosted with a kilometre of ice. I wonder if that is where the name “Baked