How long is that trail?

We decided to first check out the Kennecott area of Wrangle St Elias.  The road in was 90 miles of which only the first 30 were paved.  The national park is new, created around 1980, and there are no official campgrounds so we just found a side road and made ourselves at home.  The road in followed the old railway constructed to service the mine.  Because of the high ore prices and copper demand from WWI they worked on the railway all winter with temps down to -58 F .  The trestle section, that we have a picture of, contains half a million board feet of timber and was constructed in 8 days with sub zero weather.  They had to blast out holes for the foundation pilings because the ground was too frozen to dig.  I’m pretty sure somewhere in the last 100 years we have become very soft.

The next day we parked near McCarthy and walked the 5 miles up to Kennecott (or Kennicott depending on who you ask).  Kennecott is a historic mining town that the park service is in the middle of stabilizing/restoring.  Back in the day mine workers worked for $4-$5 dollars a day, had to pay the mine $30 a month room and board, worked seven days a week, and only got two days a year off.  Think how much you would look forward to 4^th of July and Christmas!   And I thought that 18 days plus the 10 federal holidays was a bit low!  We then walked up to the Root Glacier, spending some time walking around on the ice.  The scale of the glacier was huge and well worth the walk, even with the 9 miles back to the car.  On the way back we swung through McCarthy and enjoyed a couple of beers with a bunch of locals, we decided that McCarthy is the Flagstaff of the north.

                

We picked up a bear can or as the park says BRFC (Bear Resistant Food Container) in Kennecott for a hike into the Nugget Creek area.  We had planned on hiking most of the way, camping, and then day hiking up the cabin and old mine at Nugget Creek but because of a missing creek we found ourselves at the end of a rather long day at the end of the trail.  In the morning the clouds had parted for the first time in a week and could see all the surrounding peaks and glaciers, including Mt Blackburn (16,390 ft).  We hiked up towards the mine and were commenting on how we hadn’t seen a bear in a while when I spotted a rather large grizzly on the trail less than 100 ft way.  Lucky for us the bear made a quick break for it in the opposite direction.  Alexis wasn’t supper happy that the bear was big enough to see eye-to-eye with her!   After that we were pretty awake and packed up our tent for hike out.  We spent the night at a RV park with a nice hot shower.  We’re now in Anchorage re-supplying and planning our next week.