A little driving in Alaska

So far all of our touring has involved little driving. We've driven to things close to Anchorage or in Anchorage, or taken the train for the long haul. Yesterday we took a pretty good drive north east of town to Williams reindeer farm and then on up to the Matanuska glacier. The glacier is roughly 90 miles from Anchorage.

The reindeer farm was interesting. We saw a lot of reindeer, Bruce the moose, and Eddy the Elk. You could feed the reindeer, which everybody did, even Alex. You had to pull grass for Eddy to eat, and not everybody was up for that one, so only Wendy and I fed Eddy. It was very windy while we were there, and there was a lot of glacier dust blowing down the valley, so we didn't stay out with the reindeer too long.

After leaving the reindeer farm we headed east towards the Matanuska glacier. We traveled on Alaska Rt 1, otherwise known as the Glenn highway. The Glenn is a lot of up and down and turning as it follows the Matanuska river through the valley. It's really not a bad drive, until you get one of the locals in their giant pick-up trucks on your ass because 60 on this curvy road is just "too damn slow!"

We hit a construction zone on the road, which means the road is only one lane. No flaggers up here, you follow a pilot car through the construction zone. Basically, the westbound side of the road is held while the eastbound side follows the pilot car. When the pilot car reaches the other side, it turns around and takes the cars headed the other direction through. I'd say it was at least a 4 mile construction zone, maybe more, so if you miss the pilot car you've got a 15 or 20 minute wait on its return.

Once near the glacier, we took Glacier Camp Rd to get closer, but it required crossing a small bridge that a couple occupants of the car didn't really want to cross. (Turns out had we crossed the bridge it was going to cost us $15 per person to continue on...a steep price to see some ice.) We went back up the hill to the main road, and then went about 100 yards and pulled into the Long Rifle Lodge. What a view while you had your burger here, above is what we saw out the window. And the burger was darn good, too. They also had a one-pump gas station, which is a good thing because we needed a little gas to get us back down into Anchorage.

We left around 1 and returned about 7:30, so it was a nice afternoon. Here's the map with some place markers of where we went. Our route took us up the Glenn to the Old Glenn Highway to get to the reindeer farm. after leaving the reindeer farm, we continued on the Old Glenn into Palmer, then north-east to the glacier. Coming home we just stayed on Rt 1 the whole way.