GLENN HIGHWAY

The Glenn Highway crosses east to west between the Parks Highway to the west and the Richardson highway to the east. From Glenallen going west, the first stretch is pretty flat with a lot of pine forests and swamps. It slowly gets hillier, less swampy, and prettier as you get further west. You can see the Chugach mountains to the south the whole way, but about half way across you start getting pretty close to them and the glaciers just to the south of the highway. The Talkeetna mountains are visible running north/south to the north of the highway.

In this picture, you can see the Chugach mountains behind the small lake where we camped for the night. It was one of the few almost cloudless days, and visibility was great. Zach made friends with the kid of one of the other campers at the rest stop. Turns out that there were three or four families heading into the interior off the Glenn highway for the weekend (out of Anchorage) and they stopped at this particular rest stop for the night. They had a couple of those "Class A" and "Class B" motorhomes I was babbling about earlier. Most of the people were very nice - they invited us to hang out with them for the evening and told us about living in Alaska. One of the guys rubbed me the wrong way, though - he was a native Alaskan and was apparently the president of his tribe. His tribe owned a large chunk of the state, and he was continually talking about how his daughters each owned one one-millionth of the U.S.A. Sounded like bragging to me, and I got ticked.

Anyway, Zach slept over in the motorhome of the parents of his new friend and gave us some privacy in ours. We got going in the morning and on the parents recommendation stopped at the Alaska County Fair in Palmer. I wasn't interested, so Zach and Deanie went in to poke around, while I stayed in the R.V. and read (finished "A Prayer for Owen Meany" by John Irving) and took a walk.

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