Page 29 - Volume 15 Number 12

Rush in the late 1890’s. Before the river boats arrived, the route to Whitehorse was over the Chilkoot pass from Skagway. We rented a car to drive that route.Skagway was a boomtown of saloons and brothels during the Gold rush, and today the brothels are museums, the gold miners are gone, the saloons remain, and they have added T-shirt shops to service the daily influx of cruise ship passengers. Skagway is a fun little town, but what’s truly amazing is the drive. Large, desolate lava flows allow one to imagine what the surface of Mars or some other planet might be like.The next stop was Fairbanks. One of our fears was EAPIS, the US Customs Service border crossing reporting system. It was not an issue departing the United States, because we knew when and where we would cross and would have internet access. Clearly, it’s a pain, and it seems a joke that we’re forced to report, 24 hours in advance, crossing our northern border, to the same organization that is unable to provide any control over the southern one. It was an aggravation, not an issue; internet service was available almost everywhere the entire trip, and we filed our EAPISThe AlCan Highway west of Ft. NelsonJet Boat tour at Talkeetnareport and cleared US Customs in Fairbanks smoothly.Fairbanks is really two airports, connected by a taxiway and served by a common control tower. Customs is at the terminal, and there’s an FBO on the commercial side. They treated us well, with a world class facility, and waived the ramp fee with a fuel purchase at a reasonable price.Fairbanks is a small town with a big Air Force Base. The University of Alaska Museum is an impressive facility that tells amazing stories about the Native population and the pioneers that settled in Alaska, aPhotos by Doug Rozendaalmust-see destination. The Museum sits above the city and looks across the river valley to Mt. McKinley in Denali Park.An open question on the trip was whether we would take the bus tour at Denali Park, an all-day affair. We queried several friends and received mixed reviews. If the weather was good, it was an awesome trip, but the mountain was almost always obscured in the clouds. The weather forecast looked like 10,000 foot overcast skies, so we scrapped Denali Park in favor of a Jet Boat tour in Talkeetna. The ceilings were adequate for the Wind River passDECEMBER 2011TWIN & TURBINE • 27Photo courtesy of Doug Rozendaal