2005/07 Alaska and Back Again - Wrangell St Elias national park |
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Saturday July 30th
By next morning it was still wet with light rain and fog. We’d planned a day trip down the Richardson Hwy and along the McCarthy Road, into Wrangell St Elias national park, but the weather was just miserable. We stopped at the park’s visitor centre and saw pictures of how the view was supposed to look, but we could barely see the surrounding trees, let alone a mountain.
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McCarthy Road (Copper River) |
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The park is very large, about the size of Denmark, but it only has a couple of roads, built to access mines back in the past. We enjoyed the warmth inside the centre but carried on into the park and into the clouds, and then we could hardly see the road. No one wanted to cook soup in the rain, so we stopped for lunch at the Kenny Lake Diner, a tiny restaurant run by one man – cook, waiter, and cashier. This was Sandie’s birthday lunch.
We carried on to Chitina, through a narrow gap in mountains, which looked like it had been carved for a train track, across the Copper River, and onto the McCarthy road. The road was built for the Kennecott Mine, which was situated on a mountain top of almost pure copper. The ore was so good that it offset the costs of transporting it hundreds of miles across the mountains and thousands across the sea. The good ore ran out in the 1930s and the mine and separation plant were closed. The buildings are now just a tourist attraction.
The road was rough and muddy, but a lot better than most mine roads. The rain had eased off, but it was too late in the day to get to the end of the road and hike the five miles to the mine. We turned around at a great bridge over the Kuskulana River.
On the way back we stopped on a gravel bar in the Copper River to make tea. This is a popular spot for camping 
and we saw more people there than we’d seen all day. A lot of them were tending what looked like ferris wheels in the water. We thought they must be some kind of gold sluice, but they turned out to be “salmon cages”. The wheel turns in the current; the fish swim in, and are dumped into a central cage. This kind of fishing is only allowed if you are an Alaskan local. The rain started again, and it was heavy all the way back to our campsite, and all night.