| Campground | Eagles Rest RV Park, 139 E Pioneer Dr, Valdez, AK 99686. |
| Total Distance | 4437 Miles. |
| Drive today | |
| Highlights | Drive St Elias NP to Kuskulana Bridge Bike from Kuskulana Bridge Early 3rd in July day in Chitina Worthington Glacier State Recreational Site Hike Thompson Pass Loop Trail |
Another spectacular day. Alaska is beating all expectations! We started the morning by heading to drive the first portion of the St Ellias dirt road to McArthy (next time – we will go all the way, and spend there the night). Literally – 60 seconds after we started driving – we had our first stop: a big Moose female was having fun in the O’brian pond. Another 60 seconds passed – and we saw a couple of beautiful swans with six fledgling – and the mama swan doing awesome job fishing and feeding the babies.
The road to st. Elias passes through narrow rick pass first, and than over the Chitina sliver river – offering fantastic views. The first part of the road up to the impressive Kuskulana bridge (over a very steep canyon) is easy to ride. At the Kuskulana bridge, we took our bikes for a nice route over the next 5KM of the road (that was more dirt).
Upon returning to Chitina – we found that the locals pulled independence day by one day to July 3rd – to celebrate with more visitors on Sunday. Before the very cute and provincial parade, one of the locals, an educator from Fairbanks that operates the Caffe in Chitina in the summer, took us to a behind the scenes walking tour of this remote village. Apparently – the local has always treated this place as a ghost town, and as such multiple structures have ghost images painted on them.
The road to Valdez is another amazing scenic highway (4, Richardson HWY) . It was two hours of scenic delight. We stopped at the Worthington Glacier that had recided so much – that it is no longer open to do a ‘walk on the glacier’ or walk to the glacier. We did take the first part of the road to get closer – and had witnessed a massive rock slide from the top of the glacier to the bottom.
Thompson Pass is serouonded by huge glaciers and snow peaks. We did not know about the loop trail there – (only 2km). When we saw many people stopping – we joined the crowd and enjoyed a fantastic mini-hike. This area has much more to offer (like Blueberry lake and other trails) – but we ran out of time. We drove over the Keystone cannyon with its many falls, saw another black bear, as we got tired and happy (but apprenetly with a borken refregirator) to lovely Valdeze