Author: Bill

Got to Quartz Creek on Sunday afternoon.   Scott and Tami, with whom we planned to meet with there, had arrived a couple hours before us.   Scott texted that our site was already empty.    Turns out they had an issue with getting their large rig into their reserved site and moved to “an emergency site” that was quite a bit closer to our campsite.   We had site number 10,  which turned out to be perfect for us as the lake was right out our door, with a great view from our patio.

That evening all 6 of us went out to dinner at the Cooper Landing Brewery. The beer was pretty good and the burgers were even better.

I checked out the group pavilion and a large fire pit with seating around it when hiking through the campground one morning.  It was right there, but hadn’t seen it while going around the campground on the roadway.  It was maybe 50′ from the road.

Scott & Tami came by our beachfront site in their kayaks the next morning on their way out to explore that very large lake.  It’s Kenai Lake and is a very beautiful color.  It’s also the source of the Kenai River.  And  just a few miles away is the Kenai Princess Lodge.  Lots of fisherman on that river,  all the way, some 50 miles to Kenai City.

We drove over to that Princess Lodge one afternoon to take a look at their campground.  It was pretty ugly.  We were both glad we didn’t choose to stay there.   Quartz Creek Campground looks like the Taj Mahal compared to that ugly campground.

The next day we took a drive out a small road on the other side of the lake to see where it went and drove all the way to this sign and decided to turn around there.  The fuel gauge was on empty, just prior to the light coming on by then and we needed to fill up the car before heading back.  The prices were pretty steep in Coopers Landing, so I put in a few gallons so we’d have 100-mile range if needed while towing to Wasilla.   While I was there I noticed this electric car Charging Station.  It seemed to be attached to a diesel generator to power it.   It wasn’t on.  My guess is it started up when you started to charge your car.  Had never seen anything like that anywhere in our travels.   The town seemed to have utility poles, but maybe it was a fast charger and needed a lot more amperage than the utility could provide.

We had happy hour on our patio almost every night except the last evening as Tami cooked an incredible brisket dinner for all 6 of us the night before we left for a campground in Wasilla.  We really needed a grocery run and laundry hookup  (sewer) prior to us heading toward Denali and 11 days of dry camping.

I did some diesel fuel price comparisons for the next leg and Costco was way less than all the other places, actually less than every other fuel station in all of Alaska and Canada, and the best part was it was right on our way to the next campground.    We left a bit early the next morning so we wouldn’t get to the Costco fuel station right at the noon rush.   It is an easy in/out if you look at the Google Maps Satellite View before you get there so you know which entrance to use, and which lane to use for diesel, and how to get out of there easily into a big, mostly empty parking lot so the Costco food run can be completed!   We are 40′ long plus an 18′ car and 6′ towbar making us about 54′ bow to stern.  Easy in and out of fuel stations is a must unless I want to unhook the car. (which I prefer not to do unless we are very close to our destination.)

The Glenn Highway was a lot rougher than I remembered it being.  Along the way a guy in a pickup passed us like we where chained to a tree.   Later on, maybe 45 minutes, we came upon a big accident scene.  As we passed, we noticed it was that same pickup at the bottom of a ravine.  There were so many police cars I knew someone hadn’t survived.

We arrived at Mt. View RV after a few long hours on the road. It looked like a big grass field with a few dirt roads between the rows, and it was. They don’t even mow the weeds. They were about a foot tall. And the weeds were hiding very out-of-level sites to boot.  I started thinking about why we didn’t go the few extra miles to Big Bear RV Park.  It is a much nicer place than this.

Kathy took a trip to the Musk Ox farm and also a short excursion to the Reindeer farm.  I went over to Wasilla Home Depot and got a new bug killer racket from Black Flag,  and what a bug killer.   It turned out to be one of the most powerful devices I have ever used!!  Bug Zapper Racket  While I was looking for bug killers, an Alaska State Trooper walked up and apparently was looking for similar equipment.  I had to ask him about the accident the day before on the Glenn Highway.  He said it was a single-car fatality.  I mentioned I had that truck on my dashcam footage where he passed me going at least 80 mph on a bad section of road.  He asked for my cell number and said he would pass it on to the investigating officer, that they may want to add that to the file for some perspective on the case.   It’s been a couple weeks and no call, so I am guessing they didn’t need it to close the case.

We topped off our fuel again at Palmer,  because at that moment they had the cheapest fuel in Alaska.  Not sure why. But I even got to use my Chevron Rewards app to save an extra $25 off the price.  After we filled up, we headed for Williwaw Campground a couple hours away.

The drive down the Tok Cutoff to Glenallen was pretty good. Beautiful scenery the whole way.  We did come upon an older trailer on its top and all smashed in on the side of the road.   May have happened the day before was my guess.  Slow down, people!

We arrived at the lodge early in the afternoon and Andy lead us out to a section of the park that wasn’t there the last time we stayed here.   It was right on the creek that was more like a fast moving river at the moment. Turns out this spring (2023) this place was flooded by an early thaw. We were only here for the night and we went to the lodge for pizza, which turned out to be very good, surprising us all.  We were noticing that a lot of Andy’s projects looked half finished, but he has made a lot of improvements to the park.   The next morning the mosquitoes were ravenous. Kind of glad we were heading out.

We arrived late in the day after what was a grueling drive from Discovery Lodge, only about 150 miles away. We had thought the previous drive was bad, but today’s section was over the top Bad.  It was starting to seem like the Yukon and Alaska Road departments were having a competition for who could make the worst road conditions.   In my opinion Alaska was orders of magnitude better at making awful roads.

AlaskaRoadWork

We were here for 3 nights and that is definitely too long. There is not much to do in Tok. The RV wash is good and Fast Eddies was great. This was also a good spot to buy fuel as it was a buck more expensive in the western Yukon Canada. There is a grocery in town that  was way better than expected for such a podunk place, so we got to stock up a bit.

It had rained a bit on the road getting here, so the mud was pretty extreme and very difficult to get off even with the power washer they provide at the $25 RV wash.   I was working the brush pretty hard to clean what the power washer couldn’t get off.

We walked over to Fast Eddies the second night and the food was better than I remembered.   The next evening we were sitting outside for happy hour when the campground owner’s wife came by on what resembled an old style Good Humor Trike that used to come around our neighborhood when I was a kid.  But this one looked custom made and as most of us were drinking, beer we did not partake of the ice cream.

We were glad we paid a bit extra here to get the better sites. Last time we were here, they stuck us in the back and it was so tight we could barely get our slides deployed due to all the poorly placed trees.  Even getting into the site and out were difficult as you could easily hit the trees they planted right at the end of the sites on both sides.  What were they folks thinking?….

On the way up the ALCAN, we saw some wild horses on the side of the road.  We had not seen that up here last time.   That was usually a Wyoming and Montana thing.

The road was rough in the extreme, much worse than last time.   We eventually pulled into the campground and were led to our site.  It was right on the highway, and I went back into the office to ask for a spot facing the grass airstrip like we had last time.   They led me to a different site but not on the strip.  We stayed here for 3 nights,  which is WAY to long.  This is a one-night place.  Nothing to do here.

The first morning there was a lot of noise outside and what was happening was pretty odd.  They were using a helicopter as a crane to offload a semi-flatbed full of materials.  As I watched for a bit, that was really odd.  They could easily have gotten most of it off by hand.  Instead it took that thing hovering loudly for hours to do it.   Then after that’s done, it came back a lot to ferry those materials to somewhere else.   All day Sunday and now Monday morning starting at 7am they were doing it.   It would have made a lot more sense to just use the helicopter once to pick it up off the flatbed and ferry it to wherever it needed to be.  But instead they took double the time to unload it fully, then come back to ferry each box to the other place.

A single engine small plane that looked to have been a military spotter plane or similar landed Sunday afternoon.  Kathy went over there to get a picture of it and met with the pilot and his wife.

We played a game of Yahtzee inside our bus and it appeared to give me luck as I won the game with a very high score.  I had 5 Yahtzee’s in that game!!!

Fixed the front vent fan lid switch in the kitchen, but the back vent fan only works for inbound air.  Exhaust venting won’t work.  Possibly the rocker switch that controls that has a wire off on the out switch.  But that will require a lot of dismantling, so I am saving that for “some other day”

[WARNING Technical  Info Below]   Read at your own risk!

The afternoon before heading out to St. Elias,  I had finally procured all the parts I needed for a modification we really wanted in the coach this cold summer here in Alaska.   When we have 50 amp shore power, I like to run the fireplace and also a second portable electric heater we procured while in Grand Prairie this trip up.   It helps us not to use propane we will need when dry camping, which we are doing quite a bit on this trip, 7 weeks this time up here.

Turns out all the 120v outlets inside our coach are on the inverter, which is great for us.  But there is one drawback.  The inverter is actually on a 30 amp breaker.  So running two 1500 watt heaters (25amps) doesn’t allow much head room, really any headroom, to run a toaster, coffee pot or microwave at the same time as the heaters are on high.   We had to turn one of them off to run any of them, especially the microwave as it draws about 14 amps.

I started thinking about a better way to do this so we didn’t need to remember to turn off one of the heaters first.    50 amp service consists of two 50 amp legs of power.  (L1 & L2) The inverter is on L1 in my bus, so my thought was to tap into L2 for a new outlet in the living room area.  Then I remembered there was a second outlet behind the fridge that wasn’t on the inverter, so I proceeded to make an extension cord to utilize it.

What I built is fairly overkill so as not to have an issue.  I used 10/3 SO cord.  I could have used 14/3, but I figured 12/3 would be better, and I ended up with 10/3 as that was all that was available in Kenai at the time.  First I tested the outlet to see what leg it was on, and of course it wasn’t on L2, but was on L1 also.   But when I thought about it, that was fine due to each leg being 50 amps.  The heater I would plug in would be ~13 amps, so that, plus a maxed-out inverter (in pass-thru mode)  would not be a problem at 43 amps max.  It still had some headroom available for something not considered.

I had purchased a second special outlet that fits into a round hole to use for the new heated toilet seat modification, a different project that was a nice to have; but this modification was needed as soon as possible, so I repurposed that Journeyman-Pro 5279 15 Amp 120-125 Volt, NEMA 5-15 Flanged Outlet   for this.   This is the angled plug I used to make it stay plugged in during all the shaking the motorhome goes thru.  Leviton 5266-CA 15 Amp, 125 Volt, Angle Plug

I pulled off the louvered cover that’s to the right of the fridge that gives you access to all the wires behind the circuit breaker panel.  I checked to make sure nothing was in the way of the new cords so I wouldn’t be drilling thru something critical.    I drilled the hole, made sure my outlet fit it, then went back outside and built the cord and put the male end on it.  I then fished it down and under the fridge close to the opening where I had taken the louvers off.  (Come to think of it, I should probably block off those louvers as they are not really needed now that I have a residential fridge instead of the old Propane/Electric Nevercold that was in there when I bought the bus.)   Then I went back inside and pushed the wire thru the newly drilled hole, and then striped the wires and installed it on the new outlet.

Once that was done, I put the outlet into the hole and screwed it in after a short test of the circuit first.

All done!   Now we can run the second portable heater while on 50 amp shore power and not have to play “checkers” with the on/off switches so we could run other things in the mornings.   And it will let us go longer before having to go thru the hassle of getting the propane refilled!

We decided to skip Pine Lake Campground and instead head for Congdon Creek Campground, another Yukon Provincial Park about an hour further along our route toward Alaska.

It turned out it was a great choice!   We got there and what I thought was the best site was in the process of being taken when we arrived.  We had to wait for those folks to detach their car so he could back up and pull into the site as we could not get past them.  If only we hadn’t stopped at a rest area, that coach wouldn’t have passed us and gotten there first.   But later we figured out it really wasn’t the best site.  Turns out we got the best site in the campground (#9)  But I will get to that later on..

I saw Campsite 9 and it looked good to me, so I needed to turn around and pull into it.  But at the end of the sites, the turnaround was about 5 feet short of allowing that, so I had to detach the car to get back out of there.  I then pulled the bus into the site so we were facing the lake.

The folks in the site left us a stack of “split” firewood which was nice of them.  Yukon Government sites offer free firewood in large bins around the campgrounds but they aren’t split yet.

We set up our chairs and reveled in the warmth of the sun right then.  Later on we brought them down to the water’s edge and it wasn’t long before the sun went behind a cloud and it got cold pretty fast!  Luckily the clouds moved and it came back out a little bit later.  The wind here was really icy cold!  But what a beautiful place.  God’s handiwork for sure.

This campground, like most other Provincial parks in Canada, is dry camping.  There were no utilities or dump station at almost all that we have been to in the past.

As we were only here for two nights, the following morning we drove over to the Soldier Summit Trailhead to hike to the original Alcan route where the opening ceremonies occurred on November 20th, 1942.  I cannot imagine how cold it would have been out here on that date.

It was an easy hike, less than a mile and only about 300′ in elevation change, but the mosquitos were horrendous!   There were American and Canadian flags along with a large wooden platform with signs about that historic event and subsequent events, like the 50th anniversary back in ’92.  No mention of the 75th anniversary though.  This is grizzly country, so we all had our bear spray, and all were probably wondering the same thing as I was:  will it help in the event a grizzly wanted to get up close and personal?  And to our surprise there were the classic Parks Canada Red Adirondack chairs at the top! 

Here is a pic of our traveling companions at the top of the hill.   After an uneventful hike, we drove over to the visitor center, which was pretty small.  And while we were there, we watched some Dahl Sheep way up on the mountainside thru telescopes positioned around the building.   As we were heading back to the car, we saw a motorhome stop on the roadway, about half a mile from us, where a bunch of sheep were crossing the highway.   By the time we got over there, the sheep were about 40 feet up the cliff wall, somehow clinging to the side.  It sure would have been nice to see how they got up there, but we missed it.   And my pictures of the cliff face somehow didn’t include the actual sheep of which there were about 8 of, a couple were very young.

If that wasn’t enough animal sightings for the day, about 8 miles down the road toward our campground we spotted a grizzly on the side of the road eating the shrubs.  Turned out it was a mamma and a cub.  As we watched, they wandered down the road toward us.  To our excitement, they crossed the road right in front of our car!!  I got a great shot of the cub looking at us, but the mamma bear never looked our way.   It was funny, no one got out of their cars to get a closer look :).  Apparently, not everyone is stupid…

After the bears crossed and headed into the tall stuff, we drove the couple miles to our campground,    I know I was thinking how wonderful it was we hadn’t encountered them on the trail a few minutes prior.

The following morning as we got ready to move a guy walked up and asked if we were leaving.  I told him yes.  He then told me this was the best site in the campground and that he lives in Whitehorse and comes here many times a year.

A bit later we drove to Discovery Yukon Lodgings less than two hours away according to google maps, but the drive was so rough it took us 4 hours to get there.  Yikes!