Interior Alaska

A view from the Denali Highway.

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We spent our second night on the Denali Highway camped east of the Tangle Lakes at the edge of a large gravel pull-out. The view north across rolling tundra to the Alaska Range and southeast to the Wrangell Mountains was spectacular, and we enjoyed dinner as the sun set, watching the light change on the peaks. But just after going to bed, we heard human footsteps crunching in the gravel, approaching our unlocked van. Immediately alert, we sat up and peered into the darkness. The footsteps passed close and receded. I locked the van from the inside and moved bear spray from my daypack to a bin beside the bed, more worried about humans than bears. 

Ten minutes later a truck entered the pullout and unloaded several loud guys just far enough away that we couldn’t hear their conversation. They left and then showed up again at the far end of the pullout, piling out of their truck and milling around noisily. There was more loud discussion and more driving around. We contemplated fleeing to another camp spot, but neither of us felt like packing up and driving.

Slowly, it dawned on us that these were moose hunters looking for an overdue buddy, presumably wandering the tundra in the dark trying to find the road. A couple of days earlier, one of the few moose we’d seen in Alaska was splayed beside the highway being converted from an impressive herbivore into someone’s winter meat supply. We knew it was the start of moose season when the ruckus began but, in the unexpected anxiety of darkness and half-sleep, hadn’t put two and two together. Eventually we managed to relax and sleep before continuing to Paxson and Delta Junction the next morning.

It’s presumptuous to title a post “Interior Alaska” after driving tiny corridors through the ten or so percent of the interior that even has roads. North and east of where we traveled is the other ninety percent, a vast landscape, much of it wilderness, that I know little about. To access that deeper interior requires bush pilots, canoes, bushwacking, bear spray, and a lot of time. We had bear spray but otherwise were unprepared, so instead we visited Denali National Park, spent a few days driving the Denali Highway, and returned to the Yukon on the Top-of-the-World Highway that connects Tok to the tiny mining town of Chicken before continuing through a remote U.S.-Canadian border station west of Dawson City. 

We nailed the timing except for camping during moose season. Our route traversed a vast mountainous landscape in full fall color with almost none of the mosquitoes that Alaska is infamous for. It only frosted once or twice, though it rained often, and despite it being berry season, we never encountered grizzly bears, though we looked for them eagerly from the safety of the van and nervously while we hiked. We ate huge cinnamon rolls at Chicken just before the Chicken Creek Cafe closed for the season, and we walked through bright yellow aspens to a river where Klondike miners had toiled to dredge up gold over a hundred years ago when the Alaska outback was utterly different than it is now. The only thing we missed was wildlife, seeing almost none the whole time we were in Alaska. Moose and caribou know better than to stand beside the road in September looking like impressive trophies with their enormous racks glinting in the sun. 

This is as close as we got to a moose while in Alaska--an old skull and rack in Denali National Park.

A local denizen in Talkeetna where we stopped to walk around in the rain. In the background is the office of Talkeetna Air Taxi, the famous flying service that has shuttled climbers in and out of the Alaska Range for more than half a century.

Baked goodies at the Talkeetna Roadhouse.

Ellen hiking in the mist on the Healy Ridge, Denali National Park.

Healy Ridge, Denali National Park.

The foggy crest of Healy Ridge.

A drainage in autumn tundra near the west end of the Denali Highway.

An appealing cabin on the Denali Highway.

The Denali Highway, mostly gravel, was the route used to access Denali National Park before the Parks Highway was built. It traverses a gorgeous tundra landscape and parallels the Alaska Range.

Wood plank bridge over the Susitna River on the Denali Highway.

One of hundreds of small lakes along the Denali Highway. 

Ellen hiking from the MacLaren Summit with our friend Terry. We met Terry and her husband, Bruce, in a laundromat at Denali National Park and ran into them again on the Denali Highway. From there we leapfrogged each other all the way to the ferry at Haines. 

Patterned ground beside a tarn along our hike on the MacLaren Summit.

Lenticular clouds over the Alaska Range. I looked at the forecast for the Denali summit one day while we were in the area: 90-100 mph winds with subzero temperatures and three feet of snow. Not a great time of year for Alaskan mountaineering.

The infamous Alaska Pipeline south of Delta Junction. The pipeline carries oil from the North Slope to Valdez.

Northern lights near Chicken, Alaska. 

The Top-of-the-World Highway crosses rolling mountain ranges from Tok, Alaska to the Yukon border.

Ellen ordering cinnamon rolls at the Chicken Creek Cafe in Chicken, Alaska. Supposedly, miners wanted to name the town "Ptarmigan", but couldn't spell it, so they settled for "Chicken". These cinnamon rolls were huge and delicious.

A floating dredge viewed from a bluff above the Mosquito Fork of the Fortymile River near Chicken. These huge contraptions were used to extract gold from rivers during the gold rush.

Photographing Tundra

 

Tundra plants, lichen, and blueberries along the Denali Highway in Alaska.

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My first trip to Alaska was for a short meeting in Fairbanks in September 2003, but I flew in a couple of days early, rented a car, and drove a big loop that included the Denali Highway, fascinated by my first glimpses of Alaska. It was autumn, and the tundra was spectacularly colorful, bugs were gone, and the weather was warm and sunny. Hunters gutted enormous moose beside the highway. I’ve wanted to return ever since, and this year’s seven-week autumn trip was the realization of that dream but without quite so much sunshine. 

We encountered tundra in Denali National Park, along the Denali Highway, in Tombstone Territorial Park in the Yukon, along the road to Haines, and on hikes into the alpine. I could have spent more time than I did wandering in tiny circles looking down at tundra, exquisite up close and grandly beautiful where it swept across northern landscapes. Even though we covered a lot of ground and were awed by the vast expanses, the close-up photos of tundra are my favorites from the trip, so I’ll share a few here starting with two from my first visit to Alaska in 2003.  

A wolverine skull embedded in tundra that I found during my short visit to Alaska in 2003. This photo was taken with an old film camera, and the contrast between dark moss and the bright white skull was a little too much for the film, but it was an amazing random find on a short walk from my rental car.

One more tundra photo from 2003. This is in Denali National Park.

Healy Ridge in Denali National Park on a rainy hike during our recent trip in 2025. 

Tundra along the Denali Highway.

Ellen identifying tundra plants along the Denali Highway. 

There are lots of mushrooms in the tundra. This is another detail near the Denali Highway.

Tundra detail.

Blueberries were everywhere in the tundra. We picked these on a hike up a peak called Near Point in the Chugach Front Range above Anchorage.

Scheuchzer's Cotton Grass along the Denali Highway.

Willow tundra on a bluff above the Denali Highway.

Lichen along the North Klondike Trail in Tombstone Territorial Park, Yukon Territory, Canada.

Lichen and a woody shrub, North Klondike Trail, in the Yukon.

Lichen and fall leaves, North Klondike Trail, Tombstone Park.

Boulder with tundra vegetation. North Klondike Trail, Tombstone Park, in the Yukon.

Golden willows (probably) in Tombstone Territorial Park.

Our last view of tundra in the Yukon along the road to Haines, Alaska, where we boarded the Alaska Ferry.

The Yukon

Tombstone Territorial Park on the Dempster Highway.

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I’ve read stories of the Canadian far north for much of my life. Explorers, shrouded in ice fog or struggling through blinding snow, battled the elements and ate their shoes, still hungry after finishing their dogs and companions. Less extreme but nearly as harrowing were tales of fur trappers and prospectors scraping out a living (or not) in the face of unimaginable hardship, driven by greed and a thirst for the untamed frontier. I’ve flown over Northeastern Canada on my way to Europe, staring down at the Hudson Bay and vast wetlands south of it where trappers once navigated a maze of rivers in pursuit of beaver, but I’d never set foot there or traveled north of the Icefields Parkway in western Canada. 

The Yukon, Canada’s most northwestern territory, has its own mystique. In the 1960s, when I was a kid, Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer aired every Christmas season. One of the characters, Yukon Cornelius, a goofy, crusty prospector, wandered around pecking at the ice with his pickaxe and licking its tip as if to taste for gold (or silver), declaring: “nothing!”, until he finally discovered a peppermint mine and realized that he’d been searching for it all his life. “Wahoooo!,” he shouted, before setting off to get supplies (cornmeal, hamhocks, gun powder, and guitar strings). Cartoons aside, it's easy to romanticize tales of gold miners and fur trappers living rough in horrible weather with meager supplies and little success, in a place so fierce and beautiful.

The confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers at Dawson City. The Yukon drains much of the Territory. This was the epicenter of mining activity during the Klondike Gold Rush.

So it was with considerable anticipation that I crossed into the Yukon from British Columbia on our way to Alaska, the highway having snaked back and forth between the province and the territory seven times before committing to turning north. Ellen had driven the highway one spring in the 1980s on her way to work in Alaska for a summer, stopping at the still-frozen Kluane Lake, which she remembered as gorgeous. When we camped there, it was early fall and aspens were bright yellow among evergreens and willows on the steep slopes of the spectacular mountains that border the lake. White Dall sheep grazed on cliffs high above willow-choked grizzly bear habitat where we hiked one day. 

One of our camps on the shore of Kluane Lake. Interestingly, the lake is low (exposing all of this gravel shore) because of the rapid retreat of the Kaskawulsh Glacier, which starved the Slims River that supplied water to the lake. Subsequently, the lake's outflow switched from a stream feeding the Yukon River and ultimately the Pacific Ocean to one that drains into to the Gulf of Alaska. More detailed discussion is at this link.

Dall sheep graze above Sheep Creek at Kluane Lake.

Later in our trip, we returned to the Yukon on our way to Haines, reaching Dawson City after crossing the Yukon River by ferry. We’d driven the Top of the World Highway from Tok, Alaska, through the tiny town of Chicken, to a remote U.S-Canadian border station. After showering and resupplying in Dawson City (and eating some pretty good bbq ribs), we continued to the Dempster Highway, following it north to Tombstone Territorial Park, where tundra vegetation in full fall color lay draped over craggy peaks visible during breaks in the rain. The Dempster Highway continues beyond Tombstone for another 400 gravel miles to the Beaufort Sea near the village of Inuvik. Though drawn by the lure of seeing the edge of the Arctic, we didn’t have time for another epic drive. 

The Dempster Highway leading north towards Tombstone Territorial Park. Beyond the park, it's 400 more miles of gravel road to the Beaufort Sea. 

The Yukon Territory occupies just over 186,000 square miles, making it larger than New Mexico but smaller than Texas. Unlike either of those, its population is only about 48,000, roughly 30,000 of whom live in the capital, Whitehorse, meaning that in most of the Yukon, the population density is vanishingly small. Once part of the Northwest Territories, it was split off in 1898 so that the huge influx of gold prospectors swarming into the Klondike could be more easily managed. The Yukon is geographically diverse, extending southward from the Beaufort Sea to the summit of Mt. Logan, at 19,551 feet the highest peak in Canada and the second highest in North America. Between those extremes are vast areas of tundra, boreal forest, obscure mountain ranges, and enormous rivers. We saw little wildlife, but herds of caribou are said to roam the tundra far from roads.

View up the Slims River (now almost dry) towards Kluane National Park and Reserve. Mount Logan, the highest peak in Canada in one of many summits in this glaciated park. 

The Yukon was probably occupied by some of the earliest people to cross the land bridge from Asia to North America. Human-associated material in the Bluefish Caves was dated to 24,000 years before present, though not without controversy. People may have settled there before there was an ice-free corridor allowing migration southward. Today, First Nation people make up 22% of Yukon’s population. Tlingit, Tahltan, and seven Athabascan languages are spoken, though English and French are more common.

Ellen in Dawson City. The stop sign is in English and Han. Han is spoken by the Tr'ondek Hwech'in First Nation people.

The red-haired Yukon Cornelius aside, Europeans began exploiting resources in the Yukon during the 1800s, first collecting furs and then coming in droves starting in 1896 when gold was discovered in the Klondike. Prospectors disembarked from steamships in Skagway and struggled over White Pass with tons of gear to get to the Yukon gold fields east of the coastal mountains with enough supplies to survive a winter. By 1900, when the gold rush was essentially over, roughly 100,000 people had entered the Yukon, many of them finding their way to Dawson City. 

Dawson City.

We visited Dawson City twice during our time in the territory. It was established at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers by entrepreneurs eager to sell goods to miners. During the gold rush, prospectors floated the Yukon River to this frontier town after surmounting White Pass or other routes from the coast. Even today, placer mining is important in the Klondike region, and there are miles of gravel piles along rivers and streams, the detritus of hydraulic mining. Miners regularly unearth Pleistocene fossils buried in river sediment.  

Signs like this one supporting placer mining were all over in Dawson City.

After leaving Tombstone Park, we spent a couple of nights at a hoity-toity hot spring north of Whitehorse on our way to catch the Alaska Ferry at Haines. The Eclipse Nordic Hot Springs was  a little expensive but within our budget, and it seemed like a nice way to relax after a LOT of driving. The resort, once more rustic and inexpensive, has been transformed into a sort of Nordic-Japanese fusion experience, with warm pools, cold plunges, and heated relaxation chairs bathed in calming New Age music. We sat up late in a warm pool one night, chatting quietly with other guests and hoping to see the aurora (not that night). I wonder what Yukon Cornelius would have said had he stumbled upon a resort like this in the Yukon after one of his prospecting forays? "Wahooo!"? or "What the Hell?" In either case, washed, warm, and relaxed, he could have continued on his way to the hamhock and guitar string store, whistling a New Age tune. 

A lake west of Canyon Creek along the Alaska Highway in the Yukon.

The first building we saw after driving off of the Yukon River ferry into Dawson City.

The North Klondike Trail in Tombstone Territorial Park.

Tundra along the North Klondike Trail in Tombstone.

Fall color on a peak in northern Tombstone.

A drainage in Tombstone Park

Ellen hiking up the Grizzly Lake Trail in cold rain at Tombstone Park.

Ellen and our new friends, Terry and Bruce, who we met at Denali, hiking down from Goldensides Mountain in Tombstone.

Ellen looking south from Goldensides into the Ogilvie Mountains.

A stormy day along the road to Haines, which crosses from the Yukon back into Alaska.