July 1st on the Glenn Highway from Anchorage to Glennallen

Our Niemeir-Express left Elmendorf AFB today about noon, heading out on Hwy 1, the Glenn Highway to Glennallen. The drive was one of the most beautiful to date! The road was in great shape except for a few bumpy spots and we were delayed one time for about 15 min. by the highway dept. working on the road. There were not as many people on this road as the others we have travelled, but the folks who did not come this way missed a treat for sure. The trip today was only 189 miles and we have now camped in a parking lot of the Caribou Motel in Glennallen. The view out our front RV window is Mt. Drum, covered in snow and very majestic looking. There are two more mountains out our window, one on the left is Mt. Sanford, 16,237 ft., and the one on the right is Mt. Wrangell, 14, 163 ft. All three mountains are in the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, largest in America covering over 13 million acres. Denali park, seen earlier this week covered only 6 million acres. We will turn south in the morning, going down to Prince William Sound to the port of Valdez. The trans-Alaska pipeline is just one mile down the road from us now and we will be following it all the way to Valdez. This is the 800-mile pipeline that carries the oil from Prudhoe to Valdez where it is then put on ships and taken to the refineries in the lower 48, usually Texas and Louisiana. We will come back up this way later this week to see what we can see of the National Park but it is very wild, and has only one or two short roads into the park for visitors. Naturally it is full of wildlife and undesturbed land. Watch here for pictures from our next adventure.