Since days are long even in April, the three of us headed out to Whittier, a small outpost about an hour outside of Anchorage. Whittier is a port city in Alaska, bringing goods and materials into the state and carried by rail into Anchorage. However, it wasn’t always that way. Whittier is on the eastern side of the Kenai Peninsula. Anchorage is on the other side and blocked by a mountain range to boot.
Before the creation of the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel (locally known as the Whittier Tunnel), boats would have to travel around the entire Kenai Peninsula. Now that the tunnel is complete, boats can dock in Whittier, and their contents can travel by rail easily into Anchorage.
When lighting up for the tunnel, I had a bit of déjà vu from the San Francisco Bay Bridge. The Whittier tunnel lineup is similar to the Bay Bridge, with its eight different queues controlled by a traffic light. This tunnel is single lane with a strict 15-minute interval for traffic traveling in each direction. In any given hour, the tunnel cycles between:
- Cars traveling west towards Anchorage (:00)
- Trains traveling west towards Anchorage (:15)
- Cars going east to Whittier (:30)
- Trains traveling east towards Whittier (:45)
The single-lane tunnel is equipped to handle both cars and trains. If you miss your window, it’s another 45 minutes before your window opens again.
The town of Whittier felt familiar to me. It’s a small Alaskan seaside town that I felt like I’d seen in movies and on TV before. The actual harbor was snug and protected with large docs of boats nestled in next to the imposing mountains. My hosts impressed upon me the importance of Whittier in the overall Alaskan economy as it’s a major link between Alaska and ports to the south.
There’s a view similar to the photo below at Donner Lake in Truckee, where a small inlet fed by a stream looks out towards the larger body of water and a mountain range on the other side of the lake. Both Roger and I laughed when I mentioned the spot at Donner. We both knew it well and chuckled at the similarity of the view that the superiority of the Alaskan version was due to its unapologetic ruggedness.
We stopped at Portage Lake both on the way to Whittier and on its return. I quickly fell in love with one of the peaks on the right-hand side of the lake, with its snow-covered slopes peering out against the mountain range. We had more time to explore on the return as we weren’t concerned with the timing of the tunnel.
However, as the evening got later, the sun remained above the horizon, but the temperature started dropping quickly. I could soon feel that I was many parallels north of home. The same photo, while warm on the way in, promptly felt cold on the return.
I struggled to get this photo right, so I’m posting several iterations to get feedback from you, my reader. When doing the conversion to black-and-white, a lot of photographic noise appeared in the clouds behind the peak, taking away from the feeling of the photo. This is a mountain that will stay with my mind’s eye and one I may have the opportunity to photograph at some point in the future. In some ways, it was the one that got away.
In the conversation out to Whittier, we all talked about Turnagain Arm. Turnagain Arm is a waterway in the northwestern part of the Gulf of Alaska. It’s often associated with climate extremes and large tidal ranges – in the same category as the Bay of Fundy in Eastern Canada.
We spoke of Zachary Porter, a 20-year-old from Illinois who was visiting Alaska. He made the mistake of crossing the mud flat across Turnagain Arm at low tide. The glacial nature of Alaska deposits large amounts of silt into the coastal waterways. This mud behaves more like quicksand rather than the clay back east or the hardened cement dirt we have in Northern California throughout the summer. While crossing Turnagain Arm, Zachary was not able to free himself from the cold, thick, silty mud common in this area.
As the tide shifted, water rushed over the mud flats in a phenomenon known as a Bore Tide. Bore Tides occur when a large body of water rushes into a narrow channel at high rates of speed. Unfortunately, emergency personnel weren’t able to reach a Zachary before a wall of cold water took his life.
Zachary’s story sat with me for most of my time in Alaska. I thought I had seen places like Turnagain Arm before and have recreated in areas like it. But no, there were parts of this place that were decidedly different and dangerously so. I’d never experienced real quicksand in my life, nor a place with such violent tides. Zachary made an innocent mistake, but unfortunately, that mistake cost him his life.
It’s no secret that I’m a car guy. And I was stoked to travel around Alaska in Roger’s partner’s 2012 Toyota Tundra. This truck is a beast and is tricked out with custom rims and off-road tires – an upgrade that I’m excited about for the Rivian.
I see very few cars here. Lots of trucks and SUVs dominate the landscape. Low-profile cars are a sporty summertime pleasure but can’t handle the rough winters that define this area.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of space between towns in Alaska. Here in the southern part of the state mountains and coniferous forests carpet the landscape. This one is just a snapshot, but captures the sentiment travel in Alaska with its wide open spaces, often lonely at times, across the landscape.
#lifeIsGood and I’m thankful for truly awesome hosts.
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