Nine children ranging from 1 year old to 20 along with both parents made it to Anchorage, Alaska from Mobile, Alabama in a 65 Chevy van along with a homemade utility trailer. David Feldhaus started his comment on my Steamboat Mountain story with those words. His family made that trip in 1969.
The comment got my attention and David shared more. What follows is in David’s words. I’ve limited myself to some re-sequencing and some very minor editing. Regretfully David’s pictures from the trip burned with his home in California in the infamous Camp fire in 2018. He shared a photo of a Gruman canoe that went with them to Alaska. Bought in 1965 and melted in 2018.
Link to a story about the Camp fire in California
Link to a related story Rough Draft of a Highway
Every single day on that trip and the Road was a story in itself. At Kluane Lake we met a couple that had a pet marmot. Every milepost that we camped at usually had a wood stove inside a open type building that we appropriated during our night stays–tight for nine kids. And cords of wood were stacked next to the buildings that had to be split before using. On the return trip back at the same lake we used our canoe and using heavy test line on our poles unsnagged many lost lures from sunken trees offshore.
The Alaska Highway in Canada was mainly a gravel/dirt road so when dry, always dust. But if raining, sleeting or snowing then complete mud and very thick at times. So much so that when pulling over for a break we used shovels to scrape the built-up mud from the trailers front end. Seemed like hundreds of pounds at a time coming off.
The Highway was a twisty road that if you drove safely and with care you would enjoy. We met one couple who weren’t careful enough. We drove them to a milepost that had a tow truck to help get their car back after they flipped it upside down going too fast on the road.
For us Steamboat mountain and it’s day of crossing was the hairiest experience 0f the trip. The night before our attempt was made it had snowed and sleeted to make driving almost impossible. My oldest brother unfortunately got the van and trailer stuck in a ditch pulling out of the milepost campground. A group of convoy truck drivers graciously helped push the rigs out by hand and while doing that one trucker left his jacket in the van so as not to get it muddy. We talked my dad into driving over that mountain to catch up with the convoy and give the jacket back. We made it over barely, using first gear in the last hundred yards almost spinning out and getting stuck again but we made it over. At the bottom of the grade we found the truck convoy pulled over for inspections of their trucks. They were incredulous that we had made it just to return a jacket. They figured we had turned around
We saw glaciers and mountain ranges, deer, moose, grizzly bears, wolverines, and Rocky Mountain sheep. We saw abandoned equipment like dozers and trucks here and there. The trip took 3 and a half months of driving and camping.
Never made it to Fairbanks cause of really bad road conditions that put a rock through the vans back window. Instead we made it to Anchorage to get it fixed and then to Valdez to rent a boat to fish for salmon. Sorta weird seeing most of the town underwater due to the big quake in 1964.