Soldotna to Whittier

Day 19--Tuesday, August 6, 2002, 48.63 miles

Must add a couple of things re last night. 1) Dick (one of the EMTs—no one ever gave us last names) came in and treated us to an ice cream run. I had a soft swirl cone and it was delicious. 2) We dried our tent fly on the racks in the apparatus bay. 3) Dick and another EMT found us each a mattress to sleep on. "Come to my arms my beamish boy! Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"

I think the other guy sacrificed his mattress and slept on the couch. Over breakfast coffee, I learned that one of the mattresses had come from the bunk of one of the female EMTs. She came in and joked, "Well, I guess I'm not sleeping here tonight. Where's my bed?" I felt pretty guilty, but Dick and I 'fessed up and all was well. Mattress sure made the concrete floor more friendly.

It's an overcast, breezy 56-degree day, but I was up and out early this a.m. looking for a 1-hour photo. Found one at Fred Meyers (a large grocery) but their 1-hour equipment was down. I bought cream cheese, bagels, and a couple of dinner hard rolls for this evening and then cycled back to C.E.S. and was told of another 1-hour photo place.

The little coffee cafe in the parking lot 

Collected Jess, who had slept a little longer, and we dropped our film at the photo shop and then pedaled to the bike store parking lot down the street and had coffee and a bagel at a little picnic table there while waiting for the photos to be developed. So . . . our early start now sounds like 11 a.m. Had to get the film developed, though, because we are now heading into areas where such services are nonexistent.

Returned to the photo shop at 10:30, and they were just beginning our film! We plopped down on a couch and hastily sorted and labeled the photos a roll at a time as they were brought to us. Then we hustled them to the P.O. and mailed them off.

Finally started out of Soldatna at 12:30, but by this time, Jess was hungry, so she stopped at a Mexican restaurant for a burrito. I continued up the hill out of town and waited for her at the top. So. . . we actually got started at 1:05. It was a very darkly cloudy day, but occasionally the sun would peek out.

The road north

Our plan was to pedal back to the Wild Man Laundry just north of our Cooper Landing CG and to hitch over the remainder of the Chugach Mts. to Portage. We wanted a whole day to kayak to the kittiwake rookeries and waterfalls in Whittier.

The farther north we went, the worse the weather got. When we got into the Chugach, with the steep mountains on each side, our mild tailwind turned into a strong, cold headwind. Jess was having trouble with her back brakes dragging on her rim, and we struggled to pedal several "false flats" (places where the road looks flat—or in these cases, downhill— when it is really going uphill).

On these false flats, I'm always sure that BOB is flat or that my bike is, and when I find out that all tires are fine, I then begin to worry that I'm "losing it." The shoulder on this section of road was rough and narrow to nonexistent, but we had our lights on and our flags waving, so traffic was generally considerate. Sweet- smelling logging trucks loaded with spruce zipped down the other side of the highway headed for Homer.

When we got within five miles of The Wild Man, we quit the struggle and decided to hitch. No sooner had Jess stuck out her thumb than a young Russian boy named (appropriately) Ivan stopped in his extended cab truck and picked us up. He was an Old Believer (Russian Orthodox religious group that still adheres to old country dress and customs). He'd been in Homer visiting his girlfriend and was on his way to Anchorage. This was his first year in Alaska. He had grown up in Bolivia after his parents emigrated there from China of all places. It seemed as though they were forced out of China. I'm going to have to check the history of these people when I get home.

Ivan—our ride from Copper Creek to Portage on the way to Whittier—and two of his pals on a horse camp to Clear Slough

Anyhow we rode comfortably and companionably through the mountains listening to Russian CDs, drinking Dr. Peppers, and talking to Ivan. He had found work in construction and was a computer geek. He showed us some photos of himself and five or six of his friends on a horse camping expedition they had taken to Clear Slough earlier in the summer. I saved the one above.

Ivan dropped us at the end of Portage Glacier Road. The wind coming out of the valley was strong (in the winter the Turnagain Arm weather clashes with the Whittier weather and the wind gusts down the valley and through the Whittier Tunnel at up to 120 mph we were later told). Clouds and fog obscured the valley. We set off for our Williwaw CG five miles away. Almost immediately it began to sift and then to rain in earnest—COLD rain verging on sleet.

Drenched and shivering, we pedaled right past the Williwaw CG headed for the Portage Glacier Lodge that a sign told us was further down the road. The lodge turned out to be a gift shop and restaurant that were closing—no hotel accommodations. They let us use their phone, though, and Jess called Whittier to see if there was a hotel on the other side of the tunnel. There was, the Anchor Inn, and they had a room. We missed the 6:30 tunnel run so I had a hot chocolate and Jess had a double latte before the warm fire just before the restaurant closed.

Still soaked to the skin, we made for the tunnel in a driving, freezing rain. Great chunks of beautiful blue glacier ice floated in the lake. I wanted to take a photo but could not bear to stop and dig out my camera. So the photo with this entry is from a previous visit to Alaska.

Bicycles cannot ride through the tunnel, which is a narrow, one-way road that is mostly metal decking on either side of the train tracks. They alternate east/west traffic and car/train traffic. There were very few vehicles lined up to ride through to Whittier, and none suitable for hauling us and our bikes and gear. We holed up next to the building and talked to two tunnel officials: Doug Maliski, the Whittier fire chief, and Steve Wardel Maintenance Foreman/Fire Brigade for the Whittier Tunnel. Both used the Fire Protection/IFSTA products I help develop.

The tunnel from Portage to Whittier; it accommodates both trains and vehicles on an alternate schedule

After a bit, both went inside. Jess and I were despairing of getting through on the 7:30 pass and resigning ourselves to another hour in the cold and rain when Steve returned and told us that he "had business" on the other side and would take us through. Yippee!

We emerged from the tunnel into a world that seemed to have been plucked from industrial Russia or some such. We were in a dirty, muddy, R.R. yard on the waterfront. A tall mustard and salmon colored high rise sat between the tracks and the mountains. That, we were told, is where most of the residents of Whittier lived. At the end of the tracks was another group of seven- or eight-story concrete buildings. These, we were told, were  military barracks that had been deserted since the 1964 earthquake.

Whittier crouched at the foot of the Blackstone Glacier. The big building is apartments, where nearly all of the residents of Whittier live

View from our hotel window

Ditto

Military barracks vacated after 1964 earthquake

Steve drove us to the Anchor Inn—restaurant on the second floor, bar on the third, grocery/all purpose store on one end of the first floor. The bartender and bar served as the registration desk.

Our room, the only non-smoking room left (because they'd left a window wide open to air it), was a rudimentary cinderblock affair, but it was clean and the hot shower delicious. We overturned one of the bureau drawers on a chair and used it as our cook table. Cooked ourselves the halibut that some Dutch Homer campers had given us after their fishing charter, some spicy Thai noodles, and had the rolls I'd bought that morning with vege cream cheese on them. Then had hot peppermint tea as a nightcap. The room is filled with our bikes, gear and drying clothes. Tomorrow we kayak the passage.