My Travels

Cruise and Tour of
Alaska

September 10 to September 21, 1998

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On September 10, 1998, I had the opportunity to once again travel with the Ashland Order of the Eastern Star on a 12 Day Cruise and Tour of Alaska.

We departed from Ashland early in the morning and went by bus to the airport in Harrisburg. There we boarded a plane that would eventually take us to Fairbanks, Alaska after changing planes enroute in Pittsburgh, Chicago and Seattle.

We flew from Seattle to Fairbanks where we had an overnight stay and spent our first night at Sophie's Station. After a good night's sleep and a hearty breakfast we started day two of our journey with a city tour of Fairbanks and a visit to a working gold mine, the El Dorado.

On the way to the El Dorado gold mine, we made a brief stop to see a portion of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. The 800-mile long pipeline is one of the largest pipeline systems in the world and was built in the 1970's following the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay in 1968. The pipeline stretches from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's North Slope, through some of the harshest terrain in the world to Valdez - the northern most icefree port in North America.

The pipeline was designed both to endure and protect the Alaskan environment including various species of wildlife that live along the pipeline route. Species include eagles and other raptors, migratory waterfowl, moose, caribou, grizzly bears, Dall sheep, fox, ptarmigan, wolf, polar bear, parka squirrel, coyotes, black bears, wolverines, marmots and musk oxen. The pipeline was designed and constructed with them in mind.

After leaving the pipeline, we reboarded the bus that took us to where we boarded a train near the Steese Highway and enjoyed a narrated journey across the tundra, through the hills and finally to the mine itself where we were greeted by a husband and wife mining team, who provided us with a good humored and insightful look at prospecting, panning and placer/sluice mining.. We saw how gold is recovered by using modern day techniques common in Interior Alaska.

Then we all received a "poke" of enriched concentrate and learned how to pan that dirt for our own gold. Experienced panning instructors demonstrated how to recover the gold and we all did indeed find some.

In the Cook Shack the staff weighed our gold and showed us how to fashion it into a memorable keepsake. Mine was worth $6.95 and I had it put into a necklace as a souvenir and a perfect reminder of a day well spent at the El Dorado gold mine. While there we also enjoyed complimentary coffee and cookies before leaving to continue the fun with a riverboat cruise aboard the sternwheeler Discovery.

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We boarded the Discovery and cruised along the Chena and Tanana rivers, taking in the beautiful scenery and native culture and local lifestyle along the way. We stopped enroute and toured a reproduction of an Athabascan Indian village where we saw a huge Athabascan garden and live caribou living in their pens. We saw the Alaska sled dogs that raced in the Iditarod and heard a lecture on how they were trained; we saw the smokehouses that were used to dry salmon and other meats for the long, hard winters. We also saw how clothing was made from the skins and pelts of wild animals and got to see the inside of the crude houses they lived in all those many years ago. It was a very fascinating day we spent here but before long we had to reboard the Discovery and begin our trip back to Fairbanks to get ready for day 3 of our journey.

Day 3 of our trip began when we left Fairbanks to go to the train station to embark on the railroad adventure of a lifetime. A 356 mile journey between Anchorage, Denali National Park and Fairbanks; through some of the most spectacular scenery in the world aboard the most luxurious train ever to roll in North America - the magnificent Midnight Sun Express where our travel group had the comfort and luxury of our own private railcar.

We had our breakfast aboard the train and later, we sat back and relaxed and enjoyed the view from the ultra-domed rail car while sipping on Kahlua, one of the many beverages available to us, as we headed toward our destination at Denali National Park.

Upon our arrival we settled into our rooms at the Denali Princess Lodge to get ready to go on a tour of the park. Denali National Park is half the size of the state of Rhode Island. We boarded a bus and our tour began, up into the mountains we went and along the way saw caribou and moose off to the side of the road..also Dall Sheep high up on the mountainside and flocks of Ptarmigan birds which stay in the park all year round. We had a box lunch while on the bus and also stopped along the way to enjoy a cup of hot chocolate served at a rest stop, where we got to keep our mug as a souvenir of our visit to the park.

Upon our arrival back to the lodge, we got ready to go to dinner at the Princess Lodge dining room. Although it took a while before we got a table, when we finally ordered and got our dinner, it was well worth the wait and few of us were able to finish what was on our plates. The dinner was delicious.

After dinner we went back to our room at the lodge and got a good night's sleep. In the morning we had breakfast at the lodge and spent some time in the gift shop after which our bus took us to where we again boarded the Midnight Sun Express to take us back to Anchorage. As the train headed back to Anchorage, it started to snow which added all the more to the beauty of the surrounding mountains and fabulous scenery.

Some Days Are Diamonds