Visiting The Largest National Park In The USA (Kennicott)

Well we just blew a tire. I'm not sure when this happened but this one's balled completely right here. Well we just left the RV park that we've been staying at to relax the last couple of days since we crossed the border into Alaska and we're filling up gas right now. Diesel is uh diesel is cheaper here than gasoline. We've got some a little bit of a grocery haul we need to do where we head down south from here. We're going to go to a town called McCarthy. Nearby there is a glacier that we've hiked to but probably tomorrow or the next day. That should do it. So we're going to camp here for the night and then tomorrow go to McCarthy. I've heard that the roads are pretty rough so I wanted to get a good night's sleep and just deal with that tomorrow. I'll show you what it looks like for us like just a typical evening boondocking in the middle of nowhere. Starting with the leveling jacks. Got a nice little bluetooth app. I'll hit the auto button. The next thing we do is put the slide out. Obviously that gives us a ton more room. Now I got to get the Starlink out so we can have internet because we have nothing. S.O.S. I'm gonna put my flannel shirt on because I don't want to get eaten alive by mosquitoes. I made a little system here to make it a lot faster to put the Starlink up. So all I have to do is come up here, pop that in, stick it into this mount, tighten the mount, and that's it. So now the next thing is to uh... don't hit me! There's a mosquito already in here. So the next thing is to turn the inverter on which is this little button right here. Hey buddy. Inverter is on, Starlink is on, and that's pretty much it. That's kind of how we get set up for boondocking. So kind of a mishap here. These bumpy roads. One of our soap bottles fell in the shower and it must have hit the shower handle and the shower's been running for probably a long time and basically emptied our water tank. Madison just happened to see water running down all the way up front and our clothes hamper is up there so it was plugging the drain and so it was just completely full so we had to pull off and real quick and just use our freshly washed towels to mop all that up but these roads are just so so bumpy. I've been driving 20-25 miles an hour the whole way. Well we got most of it dried up I think. We'll definitely, once we get there we'll definitely open everything up and under the bed and everything and let everything dry and we got our little fan on some of the water spots so we'll hopefully get that dried up. Whew man this road is brutal. We got, we still have 45 miles to go. It literally had a sign that said that they don't recommend going down it. Everything good? Water pumps off. We have 45 miles of this left. We will probably get there in I don't know at this rate probably two hours going 20-25 miles an hour. Well we just blew a tire. Luckily it was one of the back ones. Today is just not our day. Man this is, I don't know what we hit. It just exploded. How old is this tire? Is this one of our new ones? No the front two are new. This is old. Okay it didn't damage anything. Yeah it's just this one here. That's why you have duallys. Just changed. I'm eating this video. Just take video. We gotta pay for these tires. Oh man. The good thing is we have leveling jacks. Let's get this thing off the ground. I feel like I'm cheating. All right we got it changed. Had a couple people stop and ask if we were all right. I don't know what happened. At least we got the new one on there. We're probably going to get all new tires for the rear while we're up here. Eight miles to go. We made it to the campground. Thankfully no other tires were popped. This place is a little pricey. It's basically boondocking. You're paying to stay on the land. So it was $35 a night. We've got two nights. Looks like they do have some outhouses but that's really it. Wow we get a view of the glacier I think. Oh man that was rough. That was rough going there for a bit. That's probably the worst travel day we've ever had. Probably of all the stuff that's gone wrong. So far this view it's totally worth it. This is incredible. I mean we see there's a glacier right there that we can see. These beautiful mountains. We got this lake in front of us which actually might be a river. And we have a secluded campsite. Everybody else is back there because they're too big to get here. So we decided to kind of go and push it a little further and come here. We got our own picnic table. This is it is stunning. Yeah I think that might be Root Glacier or Kinnikott Glacier. It is. Yeah because that right there is. That's McCarthy. No that's Kinnikott. Oh. Ollie's glad to be done too. We're excited to be here and we just we probably need a couple hours to just like. Yeah thank you for fixing our tire. Of course. Thankfully we have our nomad from Clear Source where we can pull water from creeks and fill our tank. Because we lost all our water on our way here obviously from the shower. It's basically empty. I mean there's just a little bit left. That would have sucked to go the next two days with no water. So that's good news. It is 9 30 at night right now and it is just so bright. And I mean you can still see the sun like in the in the clouds and on the mountain tops. Sun doesn't go down until 11 17. Sunrise is at 3 49 a.m. Yeah it doesn't really get dark here. So at night what I've been doing is luckily we have this. But I've been having to go and make sure all the curtains are shut completely. Which I normally do that anyway. And then I usually with our sunroof I usually just leave it open because it's nice to have some like moonlight at night. We have to make it dark in here so we can sleep. So I've been putting the shade over lately. Which I have to shut these doors to keep these windows blocked. There we go. In order to kind of simulate nighttime. That kind of helps but when you wake up at like 1 30 in the morning and you look at one of the windows and you see daylight coming through basically you're like whoa. We're gonna get in bed and watch a show and try to fall asleep. We're here at Wrangell St. Elias National Park. We're gonna hike to a glacier today. I think once we cross this bridge we got to wait for a shuttle that takes us about five miles to the little mining town here in McCarthy. And then from there it's a two mile hike to the glacier. So it's really not that We just walked through the town of Kennecott. It's an old mining town and it was really amazing to see all those old buildings. And we're gonna stop by on our way through. We just wanted to get on this trail. Root Glacier Trail is what we're going on. This takes us to the foot of the glacier. It's only two miles from here so not a bad hike. Yeah I didn't know that the Wrangell St. Elias National Park is actually the largest national park in North America which is pretty cool and the third largest in the world. It also has 60 percent of Alaska's glaciers. So a fun fact about this glacier our shuttle driver was telling us that there was a few kids that lived here and the glacier behind me here it used to be so tall that the kids that lived here they didn't know that there were mountains behind the glacier. They didn't know that these mountains right here existed because they couldn't even see them because the glacier used to be obstructing their view. So I thought that was pretty crazy. Of course that was 100 years ago or so. Looked at the maps we've got about a mile left to go until we're at the foot of the glacier until we're walking on it. We're getting really close to the glacier. We can see it pretty good now. I keep getting a cool breeze hitting me every once in a while. I think it's actually from the glacier. We are officially on the glacier now. We've got our crampons on which are like four-wheel drive for your shoes. This is our lunch spot on the glacier. Just a little rocky island here in the middle of the frozen wasteland here. But right next to this cool zigzag creek. That's what I'm naming it, zigzag creek. You also dedicated one of these glaciers to one of my dad. I dedicated this glacier to Madison so it's her glacier now. But we're gonna get some lunch and I brought some root beers so we're gonna crack open a cold root beer. Enjoy it. Sounds like a plan. Sounds like a plan. I'm gonna put our root beers into the creek to make them nice and cold. The beers, they're nice and chilled from the glacier melt. That's good. I'm glad I brought these. Sugar will be a good boost of energy for the way back. Yummy. Yep, I'm like a root beer with some salt and vinegar chips. It's cold. Refreshing. This is really, really cool. Where are we? Well, we've seen all that we've wanted to see so we're gonna head back to the RV. This was definitely worth the stop for sure. We've decided to treat ourselves to some ice cream after this hike is over with down at the little convenience store that they have. They've got coffee there too just to reward ourselves because, you know, we did so good today. In total, today probably have hiked about eight miles or we will by the end of it. What's crazy, we're camping at this lake right here and we can see the glacier from our bedroom window which is just so cool. We had such a fun time in McCarthy and Kennecott learning about the rich history of the mine and the town. There was so much more to do and see but unfortunately, we didn't have time for everything. If you want a true Alaskan experience, this is the place to explore. Thankfully, we didn't have any issues getting back down the road to our next town, Valdez. As always, thanks for watching and we will see you in the next video.