Wayside Camping

Day 45  Friday July 29, 2016       Parks Highway, mile 186, East Fork Chulitna River Wayside, site 8
222 miles           9.6 mpg

Woke up to rain.  It rained all day without letup.  Our plan was to go to Denali for a few days at Riley Creek campground and do some hiking at Savage River.  We were worried about it being a weekend and we had no reservations.  The forecast for Denali was rain for the next four days.  We hoped that would keep the weekend people home.

Stopped at Fred Meyer on Fairbanks.  Then southbound on the Parks Highway.  We stopped in the little village of Nenana on the way south to stop at the Roughwood Café.  We liked it so much going up to Fairbanks, we stopped by again passing through going south.  Had the same thing as I did last time, Jose Stacked.

Well, when we got to Denali National Park campground registration center, there was a sign outside that said all sites at all campgrounds are full.  We sort of expected that could happen.

This is then Denali sign when approaching from the north.

We stopped at the Wilderness Center to get some souvenirs.  Marsha got a T-shirt, I got a beer glass.  And so ended our Denali visit for this trip.

Time for plan B.

About 25 miles south is the village of Cantwell, where we stayed at the RV parking lot.  Also in Cantwell is the west end of the 135 mile unpaved Denali Highway to Paxson on the Richardson Highway.  We thought we could go a few miles and find a boon docking spot and sit out the rest of the rainy day working on catching up on our posts.  There is a 4G signal at Cantwell.

That didn’t pan out.  We didn’t want to go too far or we would lose our signal and we saw no where we wanted to park overnight before that happened.  We thought of going to the Cantwell RV park and work there, but no point spending $35 just to park.  So we decided to head on south and look for a nice turnoff or rest area to spend the rest of the day and stay overnight.  Lots of people do this. 

Here’s our driving weather.

The Steese Highway after we left this morning.

We saw the Alaska Railroad train along the highway and Marsha got this shot.

At mile marker 186 we saw a rest area that looked fairly nice and went to pull in.  Just after pulling in, saw a sign pointing straight ahead “Camping”.  We followed the road and it lead to a campground.  Numbered sites, picnic tables, fire rings, water pump, and vault toilets.  All behind the rest area.  We decided to stay here, at site 8.  There were some bicyclists tent camping in the tent area, and eventually a truck camper and class A showed up, too.  Marsha looked it up in our RV Alaska Camping bible and it is a state campground and is free!  So we stayed there. 

It was raining and we stayed in and Marsha made spaghetti.  We just worked on our blogs and sorted all our photos.  We have lots, too.  Not much to do on such a dreary day.