A caribou, just south of the British Columbia border.

Winter scene on the Cassiar Highway. We will be seeing a lot of this!

The clouds clear up for a bit – but we’re still heading south, so infrared is the rule on the day.

The Stikine River. The Cassiar Highway crosses it, on one of its few, very brief dirt sections. Not only is this section dirt, but there are 13% grades on either side of the river!

Ominous yellow clouds in the distance. Yep, we’re going to get hit with snow. [Dan photo.]

The south end of the Cassiar Highway, which we reached just around dusk.

This is a blower. It makes an ominous noise and spits out a lot of flames. If anyone can tell us what it is, we’d be grateful!

Heading east at dawn. We’re almost at Watson Lake, Yukon, having driven quite a ways through the night.

The bridge over the Little Rancheria River.

An age-old question answered: no, caribou are not transparent in infrared. In fact, they look much the same as they do in visible light.

Infrared clouds.

Glowing guardrail in the sunrise.

Even though we’re in Yukon, we get a British Columbia trail signed. Also, the only junction marker in Yukon. (There isn’t one in the opposite direction.)

Doubling back from Watson Lake to the entrance of the 37. We needed gas, thus the detour – and thus, the westbound photo in morning light.

The Cassiar Highway begins here, and is 720 kilometers to its southern end. Click to see details. Note “Rabid Grizzly Rest Area” – just the sort of thing we need to run into when trying to rest! [Dan photo.]

Here, “hours of operation” may mean that it opens in May! As far as we can tell, the gas stations at Junction Alaska Highway and 37, and Meziadin Junction are not in operation – and some others may not be either. We stopped in Watson Lake, Dease Lake, and Bell II. [Dan photo.]

The sign farm in Watson Lake. The Texline sign is very old, and was posted on either US-287, or the road that preceded it between Denver and Fort Worth – the Canada to Gulf Highway. [Dan photo.]

More signs, ranging from a white Tipler town boundary sign to a sign for Finland (not from the country of Finland) to a yellow sign (from the country of Germany) to the hand-painted Hendersonville, North Carolina sign at lower left, with accurate mileage (and plausible direction) from Watson Lake. [Dan photo.]

Rossland is in British Columbia. Ozark is in Missouri. The Folsom sign was, remarkably, green once upon a time, and is from California.

Heading south on the Cassiar Highway.

Dan gets a photo of some moose crossing right in front of us.

This is what happens when caribou run directly away from our car before figuring out that if they head to the side, we’ll all continue without further incident.

Approaching the first mountain pass on the Cassiar Highway. The blue spot on the rocks to the right is a frozen waterfall. Ice shows up as blue in infrared.

Winter in British Columbia.

This isn’t the first 37 reassurance marker, but it is the first one with the old font.

And here is what it looks like in infrared.

Going over some mountain passes.

More frozen waterfalls.

At Dease Lake is this shield with closely spaced narrow digits. And a gas station.

Snow blows across the road as we head out of Dease Lake.

The view to the west from the Stikine River bridge.

And the east view again, but this time in infrared. Also not quite as wide an angle.

One from Dan, significantly more zoomed in.

Did I mention the ominous yellow clouds?

Yep, over the next hill, we’re going to be in trouble. [Dan photo.]

More infrared from Dan.

Panorama of a frozen lake from Dan, best appreciated at full size!

Same lake, different vantage point, different person taking the photo.

I wonder why they felt the need to change a word (likely “gas”) to “fuel”. [Dan photo.]

And it’s overcast!

The bridge over Devil Creek. [Dan photo.]

Getting murkier and murkier. Around here is where I don’t take a single photo for about an hour, as I’m busy keeping us on the road.

A truss bridge, about 100km south of the previous photo.

The sign is being buffeted by a stiff wind. 37A is the spur route to Stewart, BC, and then across the border to Hyder, Alaska, which can be accessed by land only from Canada. [Dan photo.]

The road to Hyder is fairly murky as well, but since we’ve come down a lot in elevation (and a little in latitude), it is more rain than snow.

Downtown Stewart. 37A turns to the north to cross into Hyder. [Dan photo.]

Welcome to Hyder. The best US border patrol station ever, as it is in Invisible and Harmless Mode. Indeed, there is no US border patrol here! There is a Canadian one in the other direction, but they are well aware that one can’t go anywhere from Hyder, so the interrogation there was extremely brief. [Dan photo.]

This odd little sign can be found in downtown Hyder.

There isn’t much to do in Hyder – once you go down the main drag, you can turn around and head back to Canada. [Dan photo.]

Back we go. Meziadin Junction is where 37A splits off from 37. Kitwanga is where 37 hits 16, the Yellowhead Highway. [Dan photo.]

And we’re back at the split. The green sign in the background says “Alaska Hwy” – over 300 miles away. [Dan photo.]

What’s this? A plain route 16 marker. Usually 16 is signed with a pair of signs: one British Columbia cutout with the Yellowhead Highway symbol (with a number 16 on the older shields, but not the newer ones) and one green and white Trans-Canada 16 rectangular shield. [Dan photo.]

End of the Cassiar Highway. The number 37 continues for a while, as it was extended in 1985 down the Yellowhead for a while and then south on its own over the previous route 25.

Correct signage on the Yellowhead highway.

Heading east on the Yellowhead.

Confusing signage at the foot of highway 118. It isn’t one road that goes one way, and one the other. Trans-Canada 16 is the Yellowhead Highway, and it goes in both directions. [Dan photo.]

This is what happens when you have the camera set to a manual exposure length, and add flash on top of that. Extra-squiggly photo of these older route markers courtesy of Dan.

Here is an older Yellowhead shield with the route number. [Dan photo.]

Here is where we close the loop. Prince George – where we were on the night of Day 1. [Dan photo.]

Surprisingly, the only Trans-Canada 16 shield we saw that had the correct font. [Dan photo.]

Last photo of the night. We tried making it across the Rockies (the Alberta line is the Continental Divide), but had to turn back due to the snow getting heavier and heavier. We stopped to wait for the snowplow.

Next up, day 7, on which it snows terrifyingly. Did we survive? Tune in next time to find out!

Mt. McKinley! This is an early morning shot, which is usually the best time to see the mountain, before a mid-level fog tends to vanish it. In fact, several minutes after this photo, the mountain was no longer visible. This is fairly late in the morning, but at this latitude, 8-12 hours of red twilight per day are common. In this photo, the mountain is about 80 miles away.

On the road to Fairbanks. Here is where our trip was the coldest – minus 6 degrees Fahrenheit.

This 16″ state highway 3 marker with a 1962 date stamp survives. The bridge that this sign serves dates to 1968, so they must’ve moved the sign from somewhere in town to the bypass – and hung it on the first available pole.

Completely whitewashed overcast from just outside Fairbanks, all the way to Tok Junction.

The time I was here in 2007, these mountains were in direct sunset light. I tried to get a photo from the exact same spot, but I just couldn’t remember where it was. Close enough!

Yukon after sunset.

Almost at the end of dusk, we stopped at a bridge over a frozen river.

Northern lights! This is about a three-minute exposure, because the lights were quite faint. The road in the foreground is the access road to a garbage dump somewhere to the east of Whitehorse. Note the reflection of the northern lights turning the snow green.

Steadily accumulating miles on the rental car…

Here’s where we joined highway 3 when we headed into Anchorage – now we leave north on it to head to Fairbanks. Interestingly, there is an “END 1″/”BEGIN 3″ shield gantry at this junction. Neither of us got a picture of it, and it is splendidly wrong, as 1 is the signed route that starts way down at Homer, and continues towards Glennallen. Even “begin 3″ is potentially incorrect – its mileage starts in downtown Anchorage, but it is unsigned until this 1/3 split.

Heading towards Mt. McKinley. Those mountains you see are only about 12000 feet high. [Dan photo.]

Dan’s Mt. McKinley shot is somewhat more panoramic than mine.

Heading north past McKinley. Actually, it’s almost due west of us here, but cannot be seen because of the clouds.

Snowplows rule. [Dan photo.]

An infrared photo – with some blown-out yellow skies.

This isn’t an infrared photo – it’s just overcast and snowy.

This one is infrared – we just happen to be breaking through the clouds.

Blue skies and plowed roads. Excellent.

Uh oh, more clouds. Dan took this one out the side window while I was doing about 85.

This is what happens when I try the same thing. Also, I inadvertently punch Dan in the face, sticking the camera that way while attempting to keep us on the road.

The rivers run with … what now? [Dan photo.]

The road to the mountain – and also to the Richardson Highway in the other direction. [Dan photo.]

Dan continues his thorough documentation of snowplows, and other snowplow-like creatures, of the great frozen north.

Blue skies, and converging trees.

Steady progress towards Fairbanks.

About 100 miles to go.

Dan tries his hand at infrared, to excellent results.

More infrared from Dan.

Gotta love how the railroad sign came out almost correctly yellow.

Blue skies and high clouds here – but Fairbanks is going to be overcast.

Shiny bridge is shiny.

Next shiny bridge is … even shinier.

And we’ve reached Fairbanks, where highway 3 ends at highway 2. We turn east (south, as the case may be) on 2 to get to Delta Junction, and restart the Alaska Highway there. [Dan photo.]

End of the line. [Dan photo.]

Down the Richardson Highway to … Anchorage? Indeed, before highway 3 was built as a straight shot between Anchorage and Fairbanks, the way to go was out to Glennallen on highway 1, north to Delta Junction on highway 4, and then northwest on highway 2. It’s about 100 miles longer. Always good to have a set of alternates, in case one is closed for a snow event.

Overcast all the way as we head out of Fairbanks.

Shiny bridge is less shiny in the absence of direct rays.

This is what things look like in visible light. [Dan photo.]

This shield isn’t quite as old as its northbound counterpart.

Somewhere fairly close to mile number 1337.

Yep, it’s possible to shoot directly into the sun under these conditions.

Past Tok now, and it is clearing up in the distance.

Are caribou transparent in infrared? The world will never know.

And we’re back in Canada. The US customs house to the west is immediately at the boundary, but the Canadian one is 20 miles inland. They gave us an average level of hassle, wondering why anyone would want to come out here “in the middle of winter”. We’re not the sharpest bulbs in the galaxy, all right? And besides, it’s early spring.

I think one of their questions was “given that you have told me that you have no contraband, if I were to search your car, would I find any surprises?” “Why no, ma’am, of course not.”

She searched the car anyway. Probably for the best, since Dan had about $500 in a small envelope that was attempting to hide itself under a car seat in a place that only the border patrol would look.

No drugs. Such a shame.

A splash of red, well after the mountains are all dark.

Pink skies, even further past the border.

The last of sunset.

Getting honestly dark now – somehow, still able to make sharp exposures. Gotta love having a VR lens!

Dan takes one from the bridge as well.

This is looking north, off the other side of the bridge.

The most unusual northern lights photo I’ve ever taken. Partly cloudy skies. The green is the aurora, and the red is the reflection of Whitehorse’s municipal lighting.

Lights of Whitehorse. If you look really carefully at the left edge, you can see a bit of the northern lights through the clouds.

A six-minute exposure of the northern lights. Note meteor at left. [Dan freezing his hindquarters off.]

One of only four bridges across the 2100-mile Yukon River. There is one on the Klondike Highway, one on the Alaska Highway, one on the Dalton Highway … and then this one that connects the two halves of Whitehorse together.

Here in downtown Whitehorse is about the only place that Yukon uses stand-alone directional shields. 1A is the old downtown alignment of the Alaska Highway, as opposed to the route that bypasses the town.

Garbage access road, everybody!

Dan takes one final picture as I turn the car on, and the brake lights illuminate the trees.

And that’s day 5. Next up, day 6 – where we return to Watson Lake, then head down the Cassiar Highway (37) to the Yellowhead Highway (16) and run into the storm that nailed us in Anchorage.

Dawn in Yukon. Just past Haines Junction, we hit the final stretch of Alaska Highway.

Close-up of distant purple mountains over Destruction Bay. Yes, that is what it is called! It was named by the troops who were building the road in 1942, and had the wind blow away their new structures.

Making good time to Alaska. It is our understanding that, while there are speed limits in Yukon, they are enforced extremely rarely.

We made it!

Alaska in infrared.

End of the line. 31 1/2 hours to clinch the Alaska highway. [Dan photo.]

Things start to get a little interesting on the road to Anchorage. Around here, we’re reminded that we’re in Alaska. In the middle of winter. Who’s responsible for this brilliant operation?

First photo of the morning. Heading west at a moderate speed.

Highway 3 is the road to Haines, which is in Alaska. The road passes through British Columbia along the way. Although you’d be hard-pressed to tell from this photo, route 3′s symbol is an eagle.

Just a minute or two after the photo I led off with … here, we actually got out of the car for a bit!

Here’s what the scene looks like in infrared. Pretty similar.

The road goes into the hills. [Dan photo.]

A little bit of pink in the sky at dawn.

Approaching Destruction Bay. [Dan photo.]

Clear blue skies over Destruction Bay.

Mountains just west of Destruction Bay.

The famous winds of Destruction Bay blow snow across the road.

The road turns north for a bit.

Signage is helpful and informative.

Traditional Yukon scenery.

Distant mountains. Clouds. Those trees whose name I do not know. Yep, must be Yukon.

The first guide sign in Alaska, just past the border. The border patrol gave us minimal guff for once, and even explained why the red flags go up every time we cross. Apparently, ridiculous things like “drive to Alaska, just because it is there” is what people do when they’re 60, not in their 20s. And they say the government doesn’t profile. Yeah… right. At least, this time, they were upfront about it.

The second guide sign in Alaska. The fancy wooden sign is first, then the distance sign, then this green welcome sign.

Alaska is overcast, so here I switch to the IR camera, as that tends to give better contrast in the clouds most of the time. Alas, not this time. Blown out white skies!

Guide signs appear brown in infrared. Well, they start out blue, but I always swap the blue and red channels when processing IR. Blue ends up corresponding to about a 780nm wavelength of light, and brown is 840 or so. (The threshold between visible red and infrared is about 700nm.)

Bright lights get blown out as yellow.

The first Alaska shields we see. And also, the last Yukon. Alaska 5 turns into Yukon 9. It is the Top of the World Highway, which rejoins the Klondike Highway somewhere well north of Whitehorse. [Dan photo.]

The poor Yukon shield has a foreground that is nearly the same color in infrared as the background.

More IR. Alas, still no cloud definition!

Looking backwards at Tok Junction. Unfortunately, sometime between the last time I was here and now, Alaska switched to Clearview.

The world-famous Tok communication tower.

Only 109 more miles and we finish the Alaska Highway.

This is what happens when you overexpose in infrared.

Everyone’s favorite milepost. [Dan photo.]

Ominous dark skies.

Mile 1371 – about fifty to go to Delta Junction.

Our favorite pointy trees.

For variety’s sake, here’s one from Dan in visible light.

Looking south off that very bridge. Yep, shooting into the sun! It’s doable in infrared.

How to make great time. [Dan photo. I was busy making said time!]

Back to visible light.

A very old reassurance marker. [Dan photo.]

A close-up showing the black falling off the sign. This is the oldest sign on highway 2.

Prepare to lose rear wheel if buffalo looks directly at you.

Driving down the Richardson to Glennallen, where we will hit the Glenn Highway. The infrared does nothing against the low cloud cover.

Here is where we attempt to set some kind of land speed record. I think at one point I didn’t go below 95mph for about 20 miles.

Stratus clouds: the bane of our existence!

Old silver scotchlite shields at the junction of the Richardson and Denali Highways. The Richardson is the other half of route 2, and also route 4. The Denali is closed for the season.

What’s this? Featureful clouds! This is a very short-lasting phenomenon: soon we’ll be lost in the murk again. (By the way, that is an IR photo – the landscape is sufficiently without vegetation that it looks the same as visible light would.)

We reach the junction with highway 1, that’ll take us to Anchorage. [Dan photo.]

Looking backwards at the Tok Cutoff, which is highway 1 to the east of highway 4.

Not to be confused with the Lake Louise in Alberta.

Here, Dan takes all the photos, while I attempt to keep us on the road. This photo has had the contrast blown up 800%. The road wasn’t nearly this visible in real life!

60 miles ’til we get out of this mountain pass. [Dan photo.]

Pick a deity and praise him/her/it/tentacles! Dan processed this photo way better than I could. His photo, he’s the expert.

We made it over the mountains! We’ll visit Sarah Palin on our next day of travel – for now, it’s down to Anchorage to eat solid food and sleep in a legitimately horizontal orientation.

next up – we drive to Fairbanks and then back down to Watson Lake on the Alaska Highway.

A fogbow, just past Tetlin Junction.

Mountains in the fog. Not that far north of Glennallen along highway 1.

On the way to Valdez, along the Copper River.

Worthington Glacier, as seen from the top of Thompson Pass. This panorama takes up about 130 degrees, and thus, the original image is really quite large (5850×3900 pixels, 13 megabytes). I stitched it together from four wide-angle shots.

Mountains to the south of highway 1, between Glennallen and Anchorage.

Sunset over the mountains.

Morning, somewhere around Tetlin Junction.

Distant mountains. They are about 100 miles away in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.

Another view of the fogbow at dawn.

Why is there a goat drinking from a municipal puddle in front of a gas station in Tok Junction? Your guess is as good as mine.

Highway 1 now, just after Tok Junction, heading south to Glennallen.

Note how the highway seems to take a strange angle before disappearing over the hill. That’s not an illusion: thanks to frost heaves, more often than not the road is going in some direction its designers hadn’t quite intended.

Alaska has the coolest truss bridges in the nation. Most were built – and built well – in the 1940s, and, thus they do this job to this day.

Specialization at work.

A lake. South of Glennallen, now, along highway 4 on the way to Chitina and Valdez.

Why look at that, another lake. Lots of ‘em in Alaska, especially in September when there aren’t quite as many ice patches.

Up, then down, then up again. Highway 10 to Chitina.

This is where the road starts to curve.

Another lake, along highway 10.

A little red plant by the shore of a lake. Getting close to Chitina.

Now that is a rock cut. It’s about ten feet wide. Yep, this is one of Alaska’s numbered, primary highways. Just past the town of Chitina on route 10, heading into Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.

Distant mountains, visible as we make it through that rock cut.

Back westward through the rock cut. It’s time to turn around, because the road beyond to the east gets progressively muddier and muddier. At some point, it’s probably some stepping stones across the water, and after that it’s Jesus time.

That sign looks like it’s been there a while.

Remember that long, straight section coming in?

Another cute little bright-leaved plant. Alaska has plenty of these.

Oh dear, it be raining. This happened, off and on, throughout the day.

An airplane, decisively cutting the sun in half. Worthington Glacier in the foreground.

This is how we get back to the airport on time.

About here is when I gave up trying to decide if clouds were ominous, or just strange. These pitch-black ones didn’t yield a single drop of rain.

Distant glaciers. Prince William Sound, with the peaks about eighty miles away, as seen from Highway 1 between Glennallen and Anchorage. Starting to inch towards sunset.

Now these clouds certainly are providing rain.

Why is this road even more demented and frost-hoven than average? Because it’s an old alignment! Pretty recently abandoned – about ten years ago, at most – but an old alignment just the same.

The road to sunset.

Dark road back to Anchorage. One hour to get back to the airport!

Getting back to civilization. Nice high beams, champ.

Get gas, pack, drop off rental car, and back down south we go.

Next up? Maybe some Oklahoma photos from last week. Whatever I decide, they’ll be posted after I return from my upcoming South Dakota trip.

Now 35% less bear feces.

Double rainbow! Actually, we can see at least four rainbows (and maybe a fifth if one jacks up the contrast a bunch). Look inside the inner rainbow – note the repeating red bands; I count two in addition to the primary.

16×16 shield that dates to 1962… Alaska is ripe for the old signs!

Well, that about establishes the absolute lower bound, doesn’t it? Along state highway 2 is this … veritable metropolis, teeming with life. Note the 1970s white signage; for all we know, the population may have, since that time, taken the final decrement towards the ultimate goal of occupancy.

Alaska Highway at sunset.

Tok. One of my favorite sign photos I’ve ever taken – just because the setting sun illuminated this sign perfectly!

Sunset. I took this one across the waters of the most majestic lake I could find: a mud puddle next to Tok’s main drag. Note the light posts. I think my camera was at most five inches above the water.

The northern lights, over the town of Chicken. Most notable in this photo is the purple jet on the left side. Green aurora are the most common, and purple is far more rare.

One more northern lights – my absolute favorite of the bunch. There is the one aspect of the northern lights that no photos can capture: their motion – they really do dance across the sky, and seeing them in person is something else. September 3rd and March 15th are the aurora peaks, due to the Earth’s position in its orbit, relative to the solar wind, which releases the particles that (upon impact with the upper atmosphere) cause the lights. These photos are from September 2nd, 2007 – so just about the fall peak, and I certainly got an impressive display.

Our first photo of the dawn. This is what the bears drink to mitigate their existential crises. It’s about 3.30 in the morning, after having gone to sleep at 1 the night before. Sleep, what is sleep? I can do that at home – while I’m on vacation I will explore!

Someday I’ll take the airplane tour of Mt. McKinley. But not this time, when I pass by it at 4 in the morning.

The early dawn alternates between overcast fog, and these scattered high clouds.

Everpresent low clouds, as the sun barely starts to break over the horizon and illuminate the peaks.

Tall mountains. Wispy fog.

Aaaaaand one more from the same general space and time. Crazy light – Alaska, everybody!

Just a little rainbow… a harbinger of things to come.

A rainbow spoke! The same brief glimmer of sunlight that causes an arc-minute or six of rainbow to appear results in the ray of light extending from it to the point exactly opposite the sun.

The road to the mountains.

A rainbow… or two! Note the subtle second rainbow inside the primary band. That is caused by interference of waves, that was not explicable by the Newtonian physics that correctly described the primary band (a refraction of the light wave within the individual raindrops)… for many centuries people wondered how the extra inner rainbows happened, until a new understanding of light as a wave explained in the 1810s.

Highway 3 and the trees of Central Alaska, and the rainbow of course.

This has to be the brightest rainbow ever seen.

Yes, rainbows show up in infrared. The main IR band is where you’d expect to be: just within the red. Note the multiples of this rainbow … quick, let’s blow up the contrast to see how many there are.

Why, here are five of them! Infrared again, so we get single white bands, which makes the diffraction easier to see… and of course I blew up the contrast in Photoshop by a whole lot, just so we can see all five bands.

Now for some high ninja rocket science. There are two different phenomena at work to generate a sequence of rainbows. The first is the number of reflections within an individual droplet of water, which is called n=1, n=2, etc. One reflection? n=1. Two? n=2. And so on. So when you see a double rainbow (as in the photo I led off with), you see the n=1 and n=2 bands – and they are the easiest to see, because as the number of reflections increases, the brightness fades away…

The third rainbow, n=3, is – thanks to various mathematics that I desire to omit – in a place that you’d never dream to look: on the same side of the sky as the sun, only 43 degrees away, as opposed to the 139 and 153 of our customary first two rainbows. It takes until n=6 (five iterations fainter than the primary!) to get back to the same general area of sky, which is why one never, ever, ever witnesses a true triple rainbow, unless they are in a laboratory… or snacking casually on the radical fungus, as the case may be.

However! – and this is stuff that was so mystical that Newton and Cassini and the rest could never explain it – each band of the rainbow, the #1 and the #2 and the rest, generated multiple prismatic arcs. What was the explanation behind the fact that the #1 arc broke into multiples, each subsequent iteration appearing inside of the previous, three degrees in and half as faint?

No one could understand until Thomas Young, in 1801, applied the newfangled wave theory and realized that the light was interfering with itself. Thus, these new rainbow bands were declared to be a new phenomenon and labelled 1a, 1b, 1c… 1a is the primary one, then 1b is the first inner band as a result of in-band interference, and then 1c and 1d and so forth, all the way down the geometric sequence.

The photo I show above features the 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d, and (barely) 1e bands… how about that!

Another view over highway three. And now we know the science, and can identify the two primary bands as 1a and 2a (and can see the interference-based bands within 1: 1b and maybe 1c if you squint real close.)

What’s at the end of the rainbow? Well, here it is a green guide sign!

To this day (two years after I took these photos!) I have no idea what this sign means. But it is bright green, so it must be important.

A reflective lake in the town of Nenana.

The bridge to Nenana. From Fairbanks, along highway 3…

What’s the ancient Eskimo of saying that there is no way through? Nooutlet. Place the space where you feel necessary. An old alignment of Alaska 3, where a bridge has been knocked down. Nooutlet indeed.

An old alignment of state route 3. Dirt, of course… the roads weren’t fully paved until the 1980s, and in some cases the 1990s, and in some cases, not yet, even.

Flowers. In front of the Museum of History, at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. The Museum of History was a disappointment… the reason I went there was to find an Alaska US 97 shield, but it had been long removed. Note: you may have to massage that link to get it to work: copy and paste the URL into your browser and then hit GO, and the second time around it’ll miraculously work. Alas, the old embossed Alaska US 97 shield was gone by the time I got there, retired to the archives… may I have permission to see it? No, no I may not. Archives and research material is closed on Labor Day Weekend. Well, fudge! I arrived at precisely the wrong time. Oops.

More flowers in front of the museum.

Button copy! In Alaska! The only examples I found were here, around the Chena Hot Springs exit off of highway 2. Must be a contractor getting all crazy with the Cheez Whiz. We are on the way to the Daltonlands now, for sure… the Dalton Highway branches off highway 2 a few tens of miles off in the future, and heads near-due north, along a frightfully decrepit dirt road, four hundred miles to the town of Dead Horse. It is my ambition to, some day, get a vehicle of sufficient capability and drive the Dalton Highway. For now we’re just going to approach the foot of it, acknowledge that its beginnings exist, and then turn around and run away bravely.

The Dalton Highway, the symbol of all that is barren, forsaken, forbidden, and necessary to take steps before inevitably exploring. 430 miles to Dead Horse (what a name!) along the northern shore of Alaska. Alas, it is nearly all dirt and my rental contract forbids me to attempt it at this time. So let’s just go only a half-mile or so.

416 miles. An impressively long distance to be delineated by a single sign.

Livengood Maintenance Station. Probably not the absolute most remote maintenance station in the history of all highway departments (I’m quite sure that the one at Dead Horse, which surely must exist, is far less accessible), but definitely the most obscure I’ve seen with my own two eyes. Four miles up the Dalton, then two miles down a dirt road with no name, no face, no government, no style… an anonymous town, a population rivalling legendary Olnes in obscurity… just a guy with a satellite dish and a plow truck. Maintenance station yeah!

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Yeap, the main reason that the Dalton Highway was built was to service this gas pipeline, as it comes in from the reserves of Prudhoe Bay and other northern farparts. Here it is, streaking its way down to Valdez, where ships named Exxon screw up the process and run aground and fudge the environment. Damn pipeline!

We’re back on the main triangle, after going far to snag a few Dalton signs. Anchorage, 440? Yes, there are two officially recognized ways to get to Anchorage from Fairbanks… the shortest one is the occasionally closed highway 3 that we took this morning, built around 1962; the other is the newer, highway 2 to highway 4 to highway 1 route, that is more likely to be plowed and free of humongousbears of doom. Thus, the sign. It’s really 280 to Anchorage, but that road may be closed. Keep on going forward like it’s 1959.

Pretty flowers. Just outside of Fairbanks along highway 2.

Fun with cumulus clouds.

Seriously, fun with cumulus clouds… who says you can’t shoot nearly straight into the sun?

Expansive megacumulus.

Now this is a random rainbow. Where’s the rain? Directly overhead, and that’s it. Just a patch of it about to fall on my head… and the resulting rainbow against the generally unthreatening cumulus clouds.

These are some mighty clouds – for all I know, they developed into a thunderstorm… but I was blazing eastward, and passed them by.

Danger: High Pressure Pipeline Crossing. Remember that pipeline? Going from Dead Horse to Valdez? Well, it goes through this point; crossing under the road at Delta Junction somewhere around there. And yes, that sign has gotta date to the 50s.

One Hell of a rain cloud. Somewhere around Delta Junction. Just a few miles to the south of me – but nearly nowhere else! – it was raining up a flood!

The Alaska Highway ends here, at Delta Junction. It starts in Dawson Creek, British Columbia (home of some random TV show from the late 90s), and past here one can take either highway 4 to Anchorage, or highway 2 to Fairbanks, but neither of those routes are officially The Alaska Highway.

We’re only going a little past Tok Junction – not nearly as far as the Canada border. Yep, that leaves one very significant portion of Alaskan paved road unexplored: the Alaska Highway. Well, folks, that is why there’s a thing called next time.

Old sign? Not so much. Photoshop to the rescue. The image of the old, dusty road is real… and it is even an old alignment of the Alaska Highway… but the US-97 shield is not present these days. Around 1956 or so, they really did sign the Alaska Highway as US-97, and I’ve seen a photo of a bullet-ridden US-97 shield, in somebody’s collection, as evidence… but, alas, as far as I can tell, no more of those signs remain in the wild, so I had to make do with my own creation.

Faraway mountains. Visible from the northern road – if the weather cooperates and the distance isn’t too much – is Mount Blackburn, at over 16,000 feet tall. It’s the leftmost peak of these three.

Old bridge on the Alaska Highway. There are a good, solid sequence of them… the rivers must be crossed, the highway must be built, so here they are in the mid-1940s style, when the original Alaska Highway was built as a defense route – a joint US/Canada project, between 1942 and 1944 or so; nearly all dirt, a tank path from Spokane to Anchorage.

Alaska Highway going dead straight for a while.

Every hax0r’s dream sign!

I have no explanation for this one. It’s clearly some sort of a rainbow, but I’m not sure what. It didn’t appear in the right position with respect to the sun to be a traditional rainbow (and besides, red should be on the bottom). Certainly not a circumhorizontal arc, as those occur only around high noon and in this photo the sun was almost set. Not an iridescent cloud, as those would be on the same side of the sky as the sun. Your guess is as good as mine.

Sunset over the trees.

There’s always interesting clouds in Alaska, especially around sunset. Oh, did I mention that sunset lasts six hours??

The best part about having a sunset that’s essentially six hours long (well, beside the fact that you get twelve hours a day in enhanced lighting – and you wonder why I never slept!) is that you get to carefully observe it glint off each and every last object. Here, it is the power lines that glow orange for a minute or two.

Municipal puddle, for the win.

The Tok communications tower at dusk.

but it’s so pretty in the sunset, I can’t help but notice it!

A bridge, past Tok and past sunset.

Going to Chicken on route 5. That is a Yukon 9 trailblazer up there… when the 5 crosses the border, it turns into Yukon highway 9. Yukon is badass and color-codes its routes.

The road to Chicken. There aren’t many people on it, especially at this time of night. Did I mention that the sunset is six hours?? It is still twilight, at 10pm!

About eleven at night; the last of the sunset. Yes, that is a huge rain cloud overhead.

A thousand little sunsets.

Still on the way to Chicken.

Chicken is part of Alaska’s interior region… it is rather different from what people imagine when they think “Alaska”. Namely, the area is occupied neither by tall, snow-covered peaks, nor by polar bears. Still, though, it is the coldest part of Alaska, with temperatures dropping to -75 in the winter. Many patches feature only various and sundry grasses, none higher than four feet.

We have arrived! And yes, the road dirted out… you don’t tell the rental car company, and neither will I.

And we’ve even got ourselves an old white milepost. 66 miles back to Tetlin Junction, where we split off from the Alaska Highway.

Definitely the most remote post office I’ve ever been to.

Our first northern light. Not immensely impressive; you can barely see it coming out of the cloud at left, pointing towards 1 o’clock. The sky on the bottom side of that cloud is suspiciously green-tinged too, but it is still too light out for a real show.

The northern lights!

Two purple jets visible in this photo. The left edge, parallel to each other, with the left one much brighter than the right one. Oh, and there are green arcs. Plenty of green arcs. Amazing.

The aurora in green, and the last of the sunset in purple.

I’m just posting all the photos I took in one spectacular hour and twenty minutes … between about midnight and 1.20am; 25 degrees outside and the northern lights exploding overhead.

One long jet across the sky.

Sometimes they get incredibly bright. Note the red fringe at the bottom of the green. When they get really bright, they do that – the green is due to a hydrogen atom, provided by the solar wind, hitting the upper atmosphere and releasing some of its energy in the form of a green photon (light particle). The red? If the hydrogen is sufficiently energetic, it releases two photons: the green, and then the red, which is why the red tends to appear below the green. The purple, by the way, is due to an oxygen atom releasing some of its energy – and if you get some really energetic oxygen, you get yellow mixed with the purple. You don’t see that here; yellow is very, very rare. Purple is uncommon enough!

One last one, with the last purple fringes of sunset, still visible at 1am – or is that sunrise by then?? Gotta love the northern latitudes!

And that does it for day two. Next up: day three! Day one was the wild creatures; day two, the atmospheric effects. Day three will be all about the mountains.

Here are days zero and one – I landed in Anchorage around 10pm so a few photos bleed back into the previous day, but in general they are of Day One and all the glories it contains.

Now 35% more bears.

Grim dawn weather in the southern-coast port town of Seward. The first day was pretty patchy, never getting any clearer than a moderate “partly cloudy”.

A lake, under morning fog.

Fog, fog, fog. Dunno how the white balance came out to the proverbial rose-colored-glasses shade, but I sure as Hell kept it! Intersection of highways 1 and 9.

Mount Iliamna, across the Cook Inlet from highway 1 and civilization. This is actually our second view of it – once down the spur route to Homer, and once back up. The way back up yielded much, much clearer skies.

Moose! How did I get so close to a real, live moose?? Easy – he’s sitting in a wildlife preserve. There’s a fence, somewhere between observer and moose, but I conveniently shot through the openings.

BEAR!

Mt. McKinley… 20,320 feet tall; the highest peak in North America – proudly making Mount Shasta look like an anthill since 200,000,000 B.C. About 160 miles away in this photo. Alas, this is the first, last, and only glimpse we’ll get of the peak. Non-cooperative weather intrudes as we get closer to it… from 30 miles away, all we’ll see (in the Day Two batch of photos!) is a quarter of the way up the side, barely half an edge in the ever-present fog. So take what you get: distant, nearly illusionary, glowing purple-red in the last rays of the setting sun.

I’m in your Alaska, photographing your highway signs.

Our first look at the scenery. Yep, I arrived just after midnight, and took this photo at something resembling 1.15 in the morning, on the highway heading south out of Anchorage toward Seward on highway 1. My task for the three days was to travel as many miles of paved highway in the state as I could… (there’s only like 2200 miles total! Most of the state is accessible only via ship, airplane, snowmobile, or moose!) I think I ended up rather successful, missing only highway 6 to Circle Hot Springs.

Looking back north; the light from beyond the cliff is the town of Anchorage. I wish I could claim that was a meteor to the left… it’s an airplane.

Occasional moose presence.

Foggy weather at this time of night.

When in doubt, name the road after an ever-present natural condition.

MOTHER OF GOD, IT’S A BEARMOOSE.

well, that settles that. Next week: is the Pope really Catholic??

Clearest skies we’ve had all morning.

Clearing fog in the morning.

Another from the 1/9 junction, this one zoomed out a bit.

Soon enough, we’re back in the fog.

There’s only two real types of creatures in Alaska.

Moose come in a variety of sizes, to better serve the customer’s needs.

Apparently, this is not just a Texas problem.

I am pleased to announce that I now have done over 100 miles per hour in all fifty states.

Mount Iliamna, across the seas and the fog. There’s a sign pointing it out at this little pulloff. Oh hey, what’s the coolest thing about Alaskan roads? Turnouts every few hundred feet. And you can park in ‘em. Overnight. Nobody cares. Hell, there are cars that seem to have last been moved sometime during the Nixon administration!

And Mount Redoubt. The two of them are about 50 miles away from this vantage point, and each is just a tad over ten thousand feet high. Oh and they’re both active volcanoes, because Alaska is danger like that.

And one in infrared.

The little fishing village of Ninilchik, with Mount Redoubt in the background. Yep, the origin of the name is Russian. Ancient Ur-Soviets, older than communism itself, were the first Europeans to have come to Alaska, in the 1660s. Shrugging off the cold – hey, it’s warmer than Oymyakon, Siberia – they established a brisk trade in fish and furs before selling out to Seward and the Follies in 1867. 7.2 million dollars didn’t buy naming rights, though – we’re stuck with Ninilchik, mercifully, not Fishing Village Brought to You by Capital One.

Sweet, an old white sign! Alaska, not only is it colossal and filled with large creatures… but there’s even old signs to be found! Best. State. Ever.

Mount Iliamna. The fog to the south (left in our photo) cleared out, revealing several other peaks in the mist. I’m not quite sure what to make of the dividing line about halfway up the mountain – darker below, lighter above. Some trick of atmospheric optics; it was exactly like that in real life. Trust me!

Holy crap, a Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability cloud. The distinctive sequence of vortices is caused by two layers of fluid (in this case, air) moving past, and interacting with, each other. The link I just provided has good explanations and a better example than mine here; my knowledge of fluid dynamics isn’t nearly complete enough that I can do more than point to the reference. This sort of spiral cloud is very, very short-lived. I grabbed this photo out the windshield; by the time I could’ve pulled over, it had dissipated. Searching for “wave cloud” or “Kelvin-Helmholtz cloud” on google yields some magnificent examples, far more impressive than this one. But hey, I saw this one in person, so I’ll take mine.

Nine-degree halo around the sun. By the way, for all of us enjoying the atmospheric phenomena… the second day in Alaska is gonna blow our rocks off. Stay tuned.

A land beyond the fog. We’ve reached the coastal town of Homer: end of the line for highway 1. The road into Homer descends about 2000 feet in the last six miles – this is a viewpoint from atop the hill, and yes, that is a sea of fog as the lowest layer, maybe 50-100 feet above the more traditional water-based sea. Furthermore, that is indeed another Kelvin-Helmholtz cloud at the bottom, vague and distorted.

Another one – same basic idea, but viewed at a slightly different angle, where the ocean breaks through the lowest layer of fog.

One more of the same theme.

A more traditional view, to give an appreciation of the distance to the zoomed-in three.

Why look at that, an old truss bridge. Surprisingly, Alaska is filled with them. This is on an old alignment of highway 1. Since we’re driving the spur to Homer, we may as well take the current road down and as many old alignments as we can find back.

And we’re actually back at the 1-9 junction. Totally different lighting and clouds from the morning. This time around, the fog is gone and we’ve got big, fluffy billowing cumuli.

Recognize this valley? Yep, same one that was rose-pink in the dawn… now, in mid-afternoon, clearing out.

And it gets seriously cloudy again.

But we get through it quickly. Looking back in the other direction; yes, that is rain to our south.

Plenty of clouds, and distant mountains too.

Cumulus clouds, everybody!

The tunnel to Whittier. This is a one lane tunnel that is shared between cars and the railroad… they open it for fifteen minutes in each direction, except when the train comes, in which case no car may use it. It was solely a rail tunnel until 2000, when the paving was added for cars. Whittier is, like so many other Alaska towns, a seaport – they had no real need for a vehicular land connection to Highway 1 and Anchorage and all; they’ve always done most of their business with Valdez and Cordova, by sea across Prince William Sound. But, here is a connection anyway, and thus I get to go to Whittier. Hooray.

Alas, there really isn’t much in Whittier, unless you want to take a monster cruise ship to Juneau or something… this is about the most photogenic that I could find, by strategically pointing the camera in the opposite direction to the harbor and the tourist shops and whatever else plagues the lower 48 and has found its way here. D’oh!

Back through the tunnel we go, then.

Glaciers! On the third day of Alaska, we’ll totally get our fill of the glaciers of Prince William Sound – for now, here is just a brief glimpse.

Our first rainbow! Somewhere in the distance it must be raining, even though nearby it is merely a heavy shade of partly cloudy.

A pair of musk oxen. Same wildlife preserve as the other creatures detailed above.

A large elk.

Another bear! This one is even conveniently passed out from drinking too much Jack Daniels, or whatever it is that bears drink to pass the time and endure the existential crisis of lacking opposable thumbs.

A handful of bison.

Bison calf – and a magpie going in head-first after a tasty meal.

Distant glaciers. Somewhere along highway 1, between the wildlife preserve and Anchorage.

More glaciers, two or three peaks over from the previous photo.

Truth in advertising.

Highway 1 heading north into shrouded mountains, with a paralleling bicycle trail.

Before Wasilla became nationally famous, because you can see Russia from there!

Fairbanks, surprisingly not all that far. And yes, it is lighter than it was in the previous photo. That was due to overcast skies… also, it must be noted that at such northern latitudes, the sunset takes forever. What is a half-hour occurrence in a lower-48 place is well over two hours in Alaska.

Sunset, somewhere along the road between Anchorage and Fairbanks.

There’s nobody on the roads in Alaska. Especially when the sun sets, and most decisively on the highways that take three hundred miles to get to the next major city.

Night, for real… about ten o’clock is when it gets dark, and this is into September. During the summer, it’s light all around the clock.

Gooddness, that’s it… for day one. Coming soon … days two and/or three!