(Alaska, USA)...The most beautiful camping spot I have ever seen was 60 kilometres along the Dinali Highway in Alaska. The Denali Highway goes west-east across Alaska from the main south-north highway that also to its left (that is, east-west) and a few miles farther north leads to Denali National Park and Mount McKinley, also known as Denali, just to confuse the issue.
Along the highway I did not see another car for 12 hours, and the only traffic seen were the swans, megansers and divers that swam silently across the lake; a ptarmigan that flitted through the brush, and on the other side of the dust road, which leads for 216 kilometres etween Cantwell and Paxson, beavers, scaup and Semipalmated plovers.
Alaska in June is glorious. From the tent, I could see the sun go from east to west and back again but never disappear from view. Snowy mountains stand resplendent among the purple hills and blue lakes. Built in 1957, the road itself is full of potholes and makes for slow going — I should not have been on it with a rented car (40 kilometres per hour proved my top speed), but I had seen so many recreational vehicles heading towards the national Park, the attraction of instead taking this lonely road was too much. Halfway along is the only place to eat and sleep, the Maclaren River Lodge.
They will also tow your broken-down car or fix your puncture, but anything of that nature in Alaska proves very expensive. Someone told me that $2,000 was the minimum fee, but he probably said this to impress me. It did not scare me off. Later on, I also went up the Dalton Highway, which leads from just above Fairbanks to the Arctic Sea at Deadhorse, 663 kilometres to the north (I stopped at the Arctic Circle, which is at 204 kilometres). Another wonderful spot in Alaska is the island of Kodiak, the United States’ largest island. The ferry takes about 12 hours from Seward on the mainland, and it is really the only way to get there apart from expensive, small jets.
There is a Russian Orthodox church there, and in the town, I saw people of Russian descent who live remote lives, come to town only perhaps once a month and speak only an old Russian. The first of these people came to the island in 1784, in a group led by fur trader Gregory Shelikhov. Now, elsewhere in Alaska, there are small communities of Russian Old Believers, who escaped persecution in Russia by coming here in the 1960s. These villages, with names such as Kachemak-Selo, Nikolaevsk, Razdolna and Voznesenka, are hard to reach and do not encourage visitors. I stayed at a campsite in Fort Abercrombie State Park, about six kilometers northeast of Kodiak. It is idyllic. A carpet of soft moss grows between the tall, widely separated pine trees. A beach borders one side of a small lake, and a group of friendly people shared with me their recently caught salmon. The site does have a military history, the U.S. Army constructing fortifications and armaments in 1939 against a possible Japanese attack.
The area was silent, and at the edges of the woodland are lush meadows with orchids and chocolate lilies. Looking over the cliff in the morning, I saw sea otters bobbing on their backs and breaking open seafood. Also, Harlequin ducks; Bald eagles flew overhead. A nearby walk is to Termination Point, which begins at the end of Monashka Bay Road, one of only a few roads on the island. Here, too, is a meadow, and in the distance one can see the island of Ouzinkie, which was home to St. Herman, the first canonized Russian Orthodox saint in North America.