We prepare for our “Long Trip” from Anchorage to Montpelier, Montana. I checked the tires, the spares, and the changing equipment. I hope there are no flats or other automotive failures. I expect there to be bumpy roads, but hope that slow and careful driving will allow us to avoid problems. Others have given rave reviews of Chicken, Eagle, and Dawson City. We are up for the adventure of visiting them.

Clouds yesterday and rain today have dimmed our time here, but overall we have had great weather in Alaska. St. Paul was cold and damp, but that is St. Paul. The air and sea was calm in Nome, and the clearing skies gave us two days of viewing Mt. McKinley. So, we can forgive a bit of rain.

Tomorrow we drive the Glen Highway to Glennallen and then the Richardson Highway and Tok Cutoff to Tok. This passage will take us through a rugged road-widening project, past the Matanuska Glacier, and through the pass near Sheep Mountain. We have come most of this way twice already, both times in the other direction. There is a fierce climb, but the roads should be good overall.

After the departure of our “birding buddies” Ed and Nance, we are on our own again. This is sobering if view of the distance we have to go. After reaching “the States,” we still have to reach Vermont for a Labor Day rendezvous with our “hiking buddies.” There are a lot of miles to go.

Our loop through Denali, Fairbanks, Delta Junction, and Glennallen went grandly. After the marvelous scenery and wildlife of Denali Park, we enjoyed stopping at the small and modern city of Fairbanks. We saw lots of short-eared owls and northern hawk owls there, but also realized that we had seen most of the birds we would find in Alaska. The great gray owl, white-winged crossbills, and black-backed woodpeckes continued to elude us, but not much else was even possible.

We enjoyed the company of two fine young birders, one a high school student from Fairbanks and the other a college student from California who guided us to our convention of owls north of Fairbanks.

A professional guide snubbed our request for local information stating essentially that he was paid to guide and was not going to give away bird intelligence. Instead of a positive, “ I can show you that bird, hire me for a day,” he asserted that the birds were hard to find. We might have hired him and considered it, but then the next day accidentally encountered him with a small group of tourists in the field. There he would not even look at us. So, we politely ignored him, but did notice where he led his group. Later we visited the same spot to find our target bird, Smith’s longspur, in fine plumage. We decided we would neither hire him nor recommend him. Too bad.

Our tour of the Denali Highway was brief but fine. It has scenery as spectacular as that in the National Park, but here we could take our own car and stop as we wished to explore the land. Lapland longspurs flew up from the grass, spread their wings, and floated downward singing their cackling song. The air was cool and the lighting fluorescent. The peaks and glaciers of the Alaska Range towered over the green tundra fields and blue lakes.

Although mosquitoes became a nuisance in the campground and in the field, the touring continued to provide wonderful scenery mixed with pleasant human encounters. A fisherman gave us his second lake trout and we celebrated our good fortune. A campground host was miffed with us because we washed the car a bit. He thought we were making the site muddy. In fact we only cleared the windshield so our eyes could see. We promised not to do it again.

Our final visit to Anchorage was to leave Ed and Nancy at the airport. Before going to the terminal we stopped at the “cell phone parking lot” adjacent to the seaplane runway, That is a lake. Grebes, ducks, and sandpipers dabbled there and put on a good show, but this was interrupted repeatedly by the taking off and landing of seaplanes. In Alaska air travel is the way of life, and Anchorage is the center of of it all. As we watched the small crafts float into the sky on their way to the wilds, giant B-747 freighters roared behind us on their way to Asia cities, one every three minutes. Driving back to Palmer we found ourselves once again somewhat removed from the busy modern bustle.