The Call of the Wild

I should have realised that it was a mistake to allow Brian to negotiate the hire of an RV (ie, recreational vehicle, or motor home) by himself.

We had decided that if we wanted to travel to remote areas in the back country a camper van would offer more flexibility than a rental car and bed & breakfast. I imagined he would find something similar to the old Volkswagen camper we had many years ago, so I was mildly disturbed when he proudly returned with something slightly larger than Rose Cottage. Not that it wasn't comfortable - we enjoyed the luxury of a double bedroom, shower, kitchen with full size oven and microwave, colour tv, etc. We even had our own generator, which meant we didn't have to find an RV park to hook up to services.

After stocking up with a week's supplies (a case of beer, a bottle of Sailor Jerry, a few tins of beans) we set off cautiously to explore this mighty wilderness.

Alaska is big. It is twice as big as Texas, 69 times as big as Wales. There are only approximately 600,000 inhabitants, almost half of whom live in Anchorage, and 15% of whom are Native Americans. In its 570,374 square miles Alaska has 100,000 glaciers, 1,800 named islands, and 13 major volcanoes. 85% of the state lies on frozen ground that never thaws, hence its name, permafrost.

Alaska claims to have an abundance of wildlife species including grizzly bears, wolves, coyotes, lynx, caribou, of which we saw none; moose, of which we saw six; and 27 types of mosquito, all of which we saw and all of which bit Brian.

We spent our first night in the RV at an idyllic campsite by a whitewater creek. We cooked t-bone steaks and Yukon gold potatoes, and made a campfire to sit by and watch the stars come out (the sun didn't set until 11pm).Fabulous.

Duringthe rest of our week in the RV we saw all four seasons. Most nights the rain beat down on our roof for ten hours or more, some days it was so hot we wore only shorts and t-shirts, one morning there was fresh snow on the mountain peaks.

We were disappointed to miss seeing Mount McKinley, which at 20,320 feet is the biggest mountain in North America. This moody mountain, being so high, creates its own weather system, and was permanently shrouded in fog, totally invisible, all the time we were anywhere near it. Apparently it refuses to show itself to all but about 20% of visitors who travel to Denali National Park, as we did, in the hope of gazing on it in awe.

However, one mountain does not an amazing vista make. Whilst driving the 1,000 miles we clocked up we were visually stunned daily by huge, wild ranges of snow-covered peaks, tumbling white water rivers and creeks, blue glaciers, stark tundra plains, and vast forests of dark and light spruce mingled with dwarf willows and elder. Because of the permafrost, the trees in Alaska are mostly modest in height, unlike the soaring Douglas firs and cedars we saw in Western Canada.

In a week of ogling incredible scenery - mountain, forest, coast, river, valley - our most wonderful experience was walking on woodland trails to a glacier where we were the only two people for miles, then actually walking on the glacier. The same day we walked a trail along a riverbank where we watched spawning salmon of every variety (sockeye, king, silver, cohoe, chinook) swimming upstream in their annual quest to reproduce. Again, we noted the bear activity warnings, and although we didn't encounter any bears, we saw the bodies of fish they had discarded (when salmon are so plentiful the bears will often eat only their favourite part, that is, the head, and leave the rest). We also saw with our own eyes that they do indeed thit in the woodth.