We left the Little Tosina River CG in pouring rain after a sunny start, but by the time we got to the west entrance of the Wrangell-St. Elias NP, the sun was out again. We stopped there to get online and make ferry reservations to Juneau, and found that while we could get to Juneau whenever we wanted, we couldn’t get out until Monday, Sept. 11. We booked Haines to Juneau on Friday, Sept. 8, with a ferry out to Skagway on Monday, Sept. 11. This left us five days to get to Haines, so we decided to go in the north Nabesna Road entrance to the NP at Slana and camp and hike for a couple of days. The camping is free pretty much wherever we wanted to park, and hiking trails run everywhere off of the main road because one of the primary uses for the park is subsistence hunting for Alaska natives, so the entire park is super accessible. We went to the 10-site campground, which only had two sites open when we pulled in around 6pm, since we decided we’d rather be off the road. We took a walk down the road with the dogs when we got there, and were really glad we’d made the decision to see more of the park than the visitor center we’d seen on the west side before going to Valdez. The colors were already starting to change, and when you can look one direction and see blue sky and sunshine reflecting on the glaciers, and look the other and see lowering dark skies making everything look stark, it’s sort of hard to decide where to look…so we just wanted to see as much as possible. We could normally have driven another ten or so miles down the Nabesna road, but with all the rain there was a 2-foot gully with fast running water that we weren’t going to attempt to cross, by foot or by truck.
We woke up Sunday morning to 25 degrees in the camper, with hard frost on the inside of the windows, and frost and iced puddles outside, although we didn’t take the thermometer out there. We had a little trouble getting the Buddy heater started after all summer in the closet, but it finally got going and with a little help from the electric heater and the gas stove, the inside temperature was up to 55 at 9am, which was tolerable, with the Buddy heater still running. We watched a number of tenters and van campers pack up, get in their warming vehicles, and drive off, but we stuck to our plan to head out for a hike, which ended up being two hikes, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. We had checked weather before we ran out of the cell zone and wherever it was coming from (supposedly Slana, which is only 28 miles north) said lows in the mid 30s, but either it was way off, or it’s just colder out by the glaciers.
The next day we had planned to hike the Caribou Creek Trail, but although it was warmer than the previous morning, it was also raining. We ditched the plan to hike in the bush, and drove out of the park to start our multi-day journey to Haines to get the ferry to Juneau.
