Alaska trip summary (finally)

Posted by brette at 09:50 AM in disjointed . | 7 Comments

For those of you who don’t know, Green Tortoise is a bus tour company that runs tours to the national parks, cross country, Mexico, Costa Rica and Alaska. It’s a cheep way to see a lot of North America, but you have to be ok with being on a bus with 30 other people, infrequent showering, and lack of communication from the drivers about where you’re going. I went to Alaska.

The bus started in San Francisco, I got on in Portland, and we drove through the night into British Columbia. We were supposed to spend a few days in BC, but due to a ferry accident we had to rush to catch an earlier ferry. We did a bit of hiking, saw some totem poles and slept on the bus three consecutive nights. By the time we reached the ferry, it felt like we had always been on the bus.

The inside passage is the east tail of Alaska along BC (look at a map). Most towns in the inside passage can only be reached by ferry or sea plane. We took the inside passage in three legs, with an average ferry ride of 20 hours each. I spent most of the time on the ferry laying on the upper deck, taking in the view of clear skies, blue water, mountainous islands, and occasional whales. At each place we stopped for two or three days, camping, hiking and swimming all at unbelievably beautiful places.

After the inside passage, I thought, ‘that was great. I’m ready to go home now.’ Being around the same people 24/7 gets tiring. Also, fires started all over Alaska, so it wasn’t as pretty and we couldn’t do as much hiking. Not that I had a bad time in the Yukon or Central Alaska – I remember realizing that we only had Denali National Park and Homer left and being really sad that the trip would end, that I would no longer be a nomad in Alaska with my new friends.

Denali National Park was full of wildlife (I saw moose, caribou, big horn sheep, and a bear) and wildflowers (I identified fireweed, dwarf dogwood, artic lupine, and larkspur and saw even more). We camped near town and met some summer workers took us to parties.

We finally escaped the smoke in Homer and were again able to have campfires. Homer, aside from being on a picturesque bay surrounded on all sides by mountains, reminded me of Austin in that it had and abundance of coffee shops, galleries, and quirky restaurants.