Brian,
My first time to Alaska was with my parents on a family vacation in 1978 or 1979, and my dad drove there in our RV. I have an uncle who lives in Ft. St. John, so we spent some time there on the way, but otherwise, it was almost a week up, a week there and a week down. At that age, it was terrible for me. I was just old enough to be the one to go out and change the flat tires with my dad. Like Bird mentioned, it was a test to what spare parts you brought and figuring out how to fix what broke. The U-Bolts on the rear axle just about did us in, but we found a guy with a welder who put put them back together, and allowed us to get to a place where we could get some new ones.
When driving up there, we had all sorts of moose issues with them being on the road. Even if you saw one off the side of the road, it was just as likely to run out in front of you as ignore you.
In Deneli, my Dad drove the RV into the park quite a ways. I've seen on TV that you can only take a tour bus into the park now. The best part was all the animals we saw on that road in the park. Caribou would cause road blocks, Dall Sheep were along the sides of the roads and there were Grizzly bears out eating in the open field with a massive bull moose behind them!!!! We couldn't see McKinnly due to the clouds, but that's pretty normal.
When I hunted my Dall Sheep in 1998, I was in the Alaska Range and close enough to have seen McKinnley if the clouds had cleared. They never did. It rained every day and my guide and I were soaked the entire time. The worse part was crossing the creeks. The water was so cold that it burned. It was something that I really dreaded, but you have to go where the sheep are, and when you see a full curl ram on the other side of the creek, you suffer through it.
Probably the worse thing there is the tundra. It looks beautiful from a distance, but walking on it is like walking on a giant sponge with holes in it that are deeper then you are tall. Since the tundra is full of water, you never know if it's two inches deep, or bottomless. About every twenty to thirty steps, one leg or the other would end up in one of those holes. Add to that, the sponge effect of the turndra is also very uneven, so you're already wore out by the twisting and sinking of just walking through the good areas. Then there is the mosquitos. They are tiny, but extremly aggressive and pretty much constant. If the wind is blowing, you have some relief, but otherwise, there is a cloud of no-see-ums around your face constantly. We had head nets, but that only kept out most of them. Several times I thought I was going to lose it, things were so bad that if the plane had shown up when I was stuck in a hole with a cloud of them around my face, I might very wll have left early.
The other trip was in 2001 for moose. It was a conoe hunt for two weeks in an area with allot of moose. Unfortunately, of the several hundred that I saw, very few were bulls, and none were big enough to want to deal with packing it out. Since weight is a big issue on the float planes, all the water you drink comes from the lakes and rivers. Of course, they are full of bugs and beavers. It was too wet out for a fire, so we just doubled up on iodine tablets in the drinking water. We never got sick, but what came out of us was something that looked more like mustard than anything else that I can describe. To say it was weird would be an understatement. The second day there, I tore up my waders on a beaver spike. When they chew off a willow tree, they leave behind those booby traps. My hunting buddy ruined his waders a few days later. Wet, cold and miserable is the only way to describe those two weeks.
I REALLY WANT TO GO BACK.
Eddie
After the first 50 miles of dirt and gravel, my wife wanted to turn back and I seriously considered it myself. And when we got to Alaska, my wife wanted me to try to sell the truck and trailer and us fly back.
