Nana's Sew Shoppe: Arctic Circle Drive

June 22, Sunday

Beautiful morning!! The sun is shining and the clouds are missing! We are cleaning up and closing the RV up to head north to the Arctic Circle. Will be leaving the RV at the half way spot, then when the road turns to gravel, head north with just the truck. Don’t want to break anything else on the RV. (lets see our total so far is: 1 Washer-had to buy a new one, 2, Water leak under Refrig- easy fix. 3 Step broke-was pretty easy fix with bolts, 4 Furnace wires broke, new circuit board, 5 Chest Freezer plug burned up, still working to get that one fixed completely. )

We still have this "snow" coming down and building up on the roads. Some people call it cottonwood pollen.

We can see the mountains to our south as we head out of the base, the first time this week we’ve been able to see them due to all the rain. They are beautiful.

The Dalton Highway goes all the way from North of Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay/Deadhorse, AK on the Artic Ocean. We are only going to drive the first 115 miles to the Circle itself, not the whole 415 miles. They keep telling us its 10miles of paved road, then the rest is dirt and gravel. We’ll see!!

June 23, Monday

Found a pretty nice turnout last evening to park for the night. Up early this am, got the RVs all buttoned up, locked and pulled together so no one will bother them while we are gone all day.

North to the Arctic Circle!! The tundra is the first thing that we notice is different than the areas we have been in. We cross the Yukon River, the

Longest river in Alaska, flowing 1979 miles from Canada to the Bering Sea.

You can see a few of the tugs here.

The Alaska Pipeline parallels the highway for most of the highway, but you can only see it at certain pullouts. It goes thru a few mountains, we crossed over it a few times and then it zig-zags!!

Finger Mountain was interesting, at least for a photo-op, but the more interesting site was a “pile” of clothes and a bicycle in the parking lot. We walked over and the pile of clothes moved…it was a person who is biking the highway. He said for the last 8 weeks and is going back? Not sure where back is? But he definitely had been on the road for a long time as evidenced by beard and “smell”.

Well, we made it to the Circle and the roads were not bad at all. Paved for about 10-12 miles, then dirt, but it was packed hard as the truckers use this route daily. We actually drove almost 55mph the whole way. Lots of others are getting their pics taken here.

The interpretive panels explain the summer/fall/winter/spring movement of the earth and why the sun doesn’t set in the summer and is not visible in the winter. Now it makes sense. I would have read more, but the mosquitos were about to take us away.

Heading back, we stopped at the HotSpot Café, which says they have the best hamburgers in Alaska, but we had already had lunch that we brought so maybe next time. We did look at them and they were huge!

Back over the Yukon River, a better pic this time of the bridge.

The Milepost book says it is a wood-decked bridge, completed in 1975 and is 2290 ft long. Largest privately funded construction project in US history.

We saw these antique cars lined up by the turnout on the bridge and had to snap a few. On the way back, we saw several more on the highway going north, I guess to meet up with the others.

All this way in Alaska, and we keep saying where is all the wildlife? Really thought we would have seen more on the road today, but finally a black bear crossed the road in front of us. Got a quick pic of him before he got into the woods.

We stopped at the cutest shop called Arctic Circle Trading Post. Couple owns it, Carlson’s who settled here with their 23 children!! (18 were adopted she told me) She said, that the others were her “home-grown” and they adopted the others from people that had adopted children from overseas and then for some reason didn’t want them anymore. How sad is that? They have children from 6-7 different countries. One of the daughters wrote a book, “The Homestead Kid”, of course I had to have that and have her sign it for me. As we were leaving, the sign over the door says, “Not a single mosquito at Joy…they are all married with large families. ” I can believe that!!