First stop this morning after leaving the motel is gas and a grocery store. The further you get out of Anchorage in either direction, the more expensive things get. And especially, since we are headed north, sometimes things are few and far between! We'll need to pack snacks and a lunch tomorrow for our trip into Denali National Park. We are finding our eating habits are getting goofed up. Due to our schedules and location, by the time we have time or find somewhere to eat, it is late afternoon and then we aren't hungry for dinner. (I guess I should mention "for history" and authenticity that I fell out of motel door as we were leaving and twisted my foot! What a klutz! Not sure what happened but think I was busy talking and forgot there was a step-down even tho this was the 3rd night we had stayed here! Thankfully keeping ice on it while we were driving seemed to take care of it!)
Denali National Park is about a 4 1/2 hour drive from Anchorage without stops. The scenery should be gorgeous and since we have the whole day, we have planned to drive through Hatcher Pass to get there which will add quite a bit of time to day!
Hatcher Pass (3886 ft) is a mountain pass through the southwest part of the Talkeetna Mountains.
It is named after Robert Hatcher, a prospector and miner. Robert Lee Hatcher discovered and staked the first lode gold claim
in the Willow Creek Valley in September 1906, and others soon followed.
But lode mining was expensive for an individual operator; it required
elaborate tunnels and heavy equipment, so companies merged to pool resources
and reduce expenses. We'll be traveling from Palmer, approximately 12 miles to the south and on into Willow, approximately 26 miles to the west of Hatcher Pass.The communities are at an elevation of approximately 250 feet so we'll be doing quite a bit of climbing in between! The road is unpaved and minimally maintained for about 20 miles over the pass. This central portion of the road is usually closed by snow from late September to July. A lot of the rental car places in Alaska don't allow travel on this type of road so we were careful to choose one that did!
Our first stop after leaving Palmer, was the Independence Mine State Historical Park: a huge, abandoned gold mine, an alpine passage that cuts through the Talkeetna Mountains.
A journey above the tree line into a 761-acre Park, Independence Mine was actually two mines until 1938, when the Alaska-Pacific Consolidated Mining Company united the Alaska Free Gold Mine on Skyscraper Mountain and Independence Mine on Granite Mountain to become the second most productive hardrock gold mine in Alaska. At its peak in 1941, the company employed 204 workers, blasted almost 12 miles of tunnels and recovered 34,416 ounces of gold, today worth almost $18 million. At the time, 22 families lived in nearby Boomtown, with eight children attending the territorial school. Although World War II interrupted the mining operation - gold mining was declared a nonessential wartime activity - mining resumed briefly after the war until Independence Mine closed for good in 1951. Independence Mine State Historical Park was established in 1980 and since then the state has steadily worked to restore the buildings and tunnels to give visitors a fascinating look at Alaska lode mining amid spectacular mountain scenery.
 |
| Dynamite shack on top of Granite Mountain |
The picture on the right , about 1/3 way in from the left side where the skyline meets the mt., there is a little white dot..that's the Dynamite Shack! Gotta love a zoom on a digital camera!
The weather was sunny and warm! Yep, Kim and Terry were our good luck weather charms!
The scenery was over the top! Thank you Terry for taking care of the driving on this leg of the trip!
 | |
| You can see how high up we were! Look at the size of the van parked below us! | And I'm using a zoom lens! |
No comments:
Post a Comment