The Yukon Territory and beyond

Leaving British Columbia was quite a milestone of the trip. If you are not familiar with Canadian geography British Columbia is similar in shape to California and twice the size. Our journey through the province had covered over 1,200 miles and the better part of three days travel and now we’re entering the Yukon Territory. The further north you go, the more rustic things become and isolation increases. We are seeing more wildlife of all sorts and sizes. Beavers, Eagles, Moose and we watched a herd of Caribou cross the highway just to name a few we’d seen recently. The magnificence of the country and the beauty are a sight to behold and the day is nearly 24 hours long as we are now approaching the Arctic Circle. All day and almost no night takes some adaptation. Good sleep had become problematic as we are accustomed to adjusting our sleep cycle with the sun rise and sunset. Here the sun was setting around 2 AM and rising around 4:30 AM. One thing we noted in our overnight stay in Whitehorse, YT, was BLACKOUT SHADES. Pull down the window shades, instant night. We added blackout shades to our shopping list of items to buy when we moved in to Post Quarters in Alaska.

One thing we found in Whitehorse that we did not expect was a Dairy Queen. You were never exactly sure what you would find as you entered any town in the northern regions as things can be very eclectic in more remote areas. It had never occurred to me that people in the north might be interested in ice cream but as it turns out that is a misnomer. Alaska for example has often been quoted as the state where the most ice cream per capita is consumed, so I guess a Dairy Queen in the Yukon should have been a big surprise. We stayed in the Gold Nugget Inn than night and how could we deny our kids dinner at Dairy Queen? Well, that would just have been cruel. The next morning was the start of a momentous day, this was the day we would finally arrive in Alaska.

The drive from Whitehorse, YT to Anchorage, AK is 700 miles and there are some quirks about this part of the trip, like so many others we encountered that I had not anticipated and we encountered the next one around noon when we approached the Yukon – Alaska border. The Canadian Customs checkpoint is in Beaver Creek, YT is twenty miles from the Alaska border and at least at that time (it may be different now) there wasn’t a lot of incentive for the Canadians to do a lot of road maintenance on that last twenty miles. I can honestly say that was the worst stretch of road we encountered the entire trip and portions more resembled a moonscape than a road. Here I am in a Ford F-150 Supercab and I am navigating around potholes larger than the truck. Again, I really couldn’t blame the Canadians for not doing a lot on that road but really? It took over forty minutes to drive that twenty miles. In most of the Yukon, if you were doing less than ninety on a rural road, you were impeding traffic, what little there was. With a mild celebration and urgent need for plumbing we finally arrived at the US Customs checkpoint and our first encounter with Alaska.

Having refreshed ourselves at the checkpoint, we continued our final approach to Anchorage. The first town of any size we encountered was Tok. Tok at that time had a population of less than 500 people making it a fair size Alaskan town. It is at the intersection of Highway 2 and Highway 1 of the Alaskan highway system. In most places, a highway in Alaska is like a county road in the lower 48 states. A two-lane asphalt highway. Alaska, is the only US State that does not have an Interstate Highway (Yes, Hawaii has Interstates). Here we turned south (After 2,500 of driving generally north this was a change) on to Highway 1 and we headed to Glennallen. We had dinner in Glennallen and we got our first look at the Trans-Alaska pipeline as we crossed it on our journey to Anchorage. This is also the portion of Highway 1 known as the Glenn Highway that passes through the Matanuska valley, the fertile crescent of Alaska. One of the more interesting items we observed during our drive down through the valley was about a mile stretch of the road that was uncharacteristically straight. In the curve at each end of the straight you would see some traffic cones off to the side of the road, which I found a tad unusual. I was puzzled by their presence until I noted some rather odd looking garages and very wide gravel driveways on several of the houses along the road. It wasn’t until I spied one of these garages with the door open that it all came together. These garages were hangars and the road was the runway. You guessed it, when they needed to take off or land, someone goes out and blocks the road and they use the highway as the runway.

As we emerged from the valley into the Matanuska River basin we started to enter the more suburban areas of Alaska, such as Palmer and Wasilla. I had to adjust to driving in traffic for a few minutes, but that was oddly reassuring that we were emerging form the wilderness. We passed through one last town (Eagle River) before we arrived at our destination; Anchorage, AK. Our lodging for the next couple of weeks was the Mush Inn. At the time it was the first fairly large motel as you arrived into Anchorage and it had the added benefit of being one of the closest ones to Fort Richardson, where I had to in process before I was sent to my ultimate assignment in Fairbank at Fort Wainwright. My sons were excited about the Mush Inn because it sets across the highway from Merrell Field, where 400+ bush planes are based in Anchorage. Like me my sons can watch planes takeoff and land all day long. They readily approved of our lodging without even seeing the inside of the room.

I expected to be in Anchorage just a couple days and then spend another day long drive back north to Fairbanks, but I encountered change 1 the first day of in processing when I discovered I was being diverted to Fort Richardson as a permanent assignment. (Change 1 is a reference to the Army Manual update process, where they would publish incremental change documents to update errata in manuals, and these would be annotated Change 1, Change 2 etc.) so I was given amended orders changing my assignment to from some Infantry unit in Fairbanks to an Artillery unit in Anchorage. There were some other odd things about in processing into the 172nd Light Infantry Brigade (Arctic), like being asked if I played an instrument and if I’d like to try out for the band. Official Army Bands are a Table of Organization and Equipment (TO & E) organization at Division level and above in the Army. But the Brigade Commander had decided they needed a band so they assembled one using On the Job Training (OJT) and getting the 20 or so personnel needed from the Brigade authorized strength. (Within limits, a General can customize his organization as he desires, this one wanted a band. I said what the heck, I played drums in high school, I’ll try out. This got me shuffled off to a very bored Specialist 4 drummer who quickly decided my meager talents as a concert drummer were not needed and I went back to being processed as a mechanic.

This last-minute reassignment to Fort Richardson was nice because we were near the largest city in Alaska, but troubling because I knew that all our furniture was shipped to Fort Wainwright and our original housing assignment was on-base housing at Wainwright too. At a minimum, this meant delays in getting our furniture and I was unsure if they had any quarters available at Richardson. The Transportation division assured me that this happened a lot and they were used to dealing with the changes and the Housing office also assured me that they had a place for us to live. To understand my concern, a three-bedroom apartment off post started at about $1,500 a month in 1985. My housing allowance was $350. The Army has cost of living allowances (COLA) for high cost areas but they historically limited off post authorizations to Sergeants and above and I was an E-4 Specialist. The first quarters we were taken to turned out to be occupied and I was concerned that these people might not have their act together, but the second set of quarters was empty and quite acceptable. It was part of an eight-unit town house on Beluga Avenue. We arraigned for temporary furniture and moved out of the Mush Inn and into our Alaskan home, trip completed.