We said goodbye to our guides at noon today, and the 10 hikers boarded the Alaska Railroad from Denali station to Anchorage. The line runs from Fairbanks to Seward, over 470 miles, and is the only year-round reliable transportation to the interior. It doesn’t travel fast, and there’s running commentary throughout about the history and wildlife and scenery and the amazing bridges crossing deep canyons and rivers. From Denali to Anchorage took 7 1/2 hours, but with a lovely dining car and big domed windows to look out the time went by fast.
At one point along the line the crew switched with one from a northbound train, and we learned from one of the staff that they have a habit of tossing notes to each other in a coffee cup as the trains pass on parallel tracks. Alaskan train mail.
There was a lot of conversation about a flight seeing plane which had crashed in Denali on Saturday. It was a plane from the same company that we used for our trip — K2 Aviation — and just 24 hours after our trip. Apparently all the passengers, who were visiting from Poland, were killed, and the search mission for the pilot was hampered by weather. Of course it could’ve been that we chose not to fly had it been Saturday, since the weather wasn’t very nice. But mostly we were all feeling blessed that the day we did fly was so magnificent.
When we got to Anchorage we were able to snag a shuttle to our hotel, which happened to be across the road from the hotel we had stayed at for our first days in Anchorage. It was late, and since we’d dined on the train, we said our goodbyes to our group and had an early night. While the group travel part of the trip is over, Kim and I have several more days to explore other parts of Alaska that we haven’t yet seen. So the adventure continues.
