“Whittier: The Weather is Always Shittier”

This is a local saying and boy does it hold true, except for Tuesday. We learned the Army put a base in Whittier during WWII because the constant bad weather made it difficult for Japanese bombers to find. We gambled on the weather and booked a sea kayaking trip for Tuesday, when the rain was supposed to stop. We spent Monday hunkered down in the Casita, avoiding the downpour and wondering if our gamble was a mistake and whether we should have just left. Since we had no cell service and no electricity and all electronics were out of battery power, we entertained ourselves with poker and a short drive through the outlying area of Whittier. It was a long day.

The rain is driving us nuts and the Casita is always wet. The bathroom smells of bad towel because the towels won’t dry. The door area is a revolving pool of wet from whatever shoes or coats we wear outside. You can’t dry anything, even with heat. You grab clean clothes from the closet, and the clothes are slightly damp. We are done with the rain but the timing is good because it’s the end of the season here in Alaska.

As an aside, the history of Whittier is pretty interesting. In addition to the town’s WWII origins, during the Cold War, the military built a huge building (Alaska’s largest at the time, if I remember correctly) to house 1,000 military personnel. It cost $6 million and was in use for just six years. It was created to be self-sustaining and also had a bowling alley, movie theater, firing range, etc. We learned it’s full of asbestos and no one wants to deal with it, so it’s abandoned and fenced off. The military built another building for soldier housing, and that is where most of the permanent Whittier residents live now.

On Tuesday morning, we woke to no rain. It was the foggiest it’s been since we were in Whittier but it wasn’t raining. We went kayaking. We were the only customers so it was just Mike and I in a tandem kayak and our guide, Bruce. Bruce is new to Alaska this season and originally from Tennessee. He was very southern in an outdoorsy, comfortable sort of way. Bruce seemed happy to have people who had paddled before and said he wanted to go outside the normal route.

We started with a visit to a natural salmon spawning run. We were a little apprehensive considering the last spawning place we saw with all the dead fish, but most of these were alive. Not pretty, but alive. Bruce is a fish guy and explained the change in salmon seasons, which explained the dead fish. He has experience in the fishing industry and will work on a fishing boat soon to catch “silvers”. It’s an interesting and tough lifestyle. He also showed us a black-tailed gull rookery with the hundreds of birds. But, our favorite part of the day was just paddling in the bay.

When we started, the fog across the bay was thick. We kept a close eye on it to see if it cleared enough to allow us to paddle the two miles across the bay. When the fog lifted, we finally say Whittier in its glory. It’s surrounded by beautiful mountains with huge glaciers and waterfalls. Here we were in a kayak on a blue Alaskan bay surrounded by amazing scenery and the sun was shining. It was just awesome. We crossed the bay and explored a beach with another salmon spawning run. Because Bruce took us on a longer trip, we ended up paddling nearly 10 miles, which is a lot longer than what we usually paddle. We were tired but had a lot of fun.

It was supposed to rain again that night or the next morning. We decided to run while the weather was good and hustled out of Whittier that afternoon. We stopped at a state campground at the southern end of Turnagain Arm, south of Anchorage.

Rain it did and heavily. We left early yesterday morning but did not know where we were going except north out of the peninsula. We stopped at a Starbucks to check the weather forecast. We needed the wifi because all of our electronics ran out of battery except for Mike’s iPad. The weather report was not promising and said rain the rest of this week. We debated just leaving Alaska and skipping the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park that we wanted to see. As we got close to Glennallen, AK, the weather cleared some, which changed our perspective. Even though it is the largest US national park, it is not easy to get to. We went to the park visitors’ center and learned we could get into the park from Chitina and didn’t have to go all the way to McCarthy. That was good news because the McCarthy Road has a reputation for being a very bad dirt road. Hmmm…though we did want to see McCarthy. Chitina was over 60 miles away and had a campground, so off we went.

We saw the park’s large, snow-covered mountains from the road. As we got closer to them and Chitina, the weather worsened though it wasn’t raining yet. Chitina is an old town and the private campground was virtually abandoned and a little sketchy-looking. We entered the park and drove onto the McCarthy Rd to what we thought was the primitive campground there. We saw was a littered, dried river bed with a couple old, old RVs that looked like they had been there for a while – like maybe years. After a long day of driving and knowing more rain was coming, it was not where we wanted to be. We ended up driving back to Glennallen and stayed in a RV park so we could charge our electronics. On the way back, we saw more of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and yaks.

It’s getting really quiet on the road. Campgrounds and tourist places are empty and closing soon. That combined with the cooler temperature and the rain makes us think we should head south.