timistravels

My job allows me to visit a lot of Alaska on a yearly basis. I wanted to capture the trips in one location!

from -33 Tuesday to 37 aboveThursday, that’s how we roll in Alaska

on February 8, 2012

From Tok I backtracked to Delta Junction. DJ is where the Delta River and the Tanana River meet as well as being the intersection of the Richardson Highway and the END of the Alaska Highway.  There are beautiful mountains that are off in the distance,  and I have included some photos of them, as it was a beautiful sunny day as I drove the 102 miles from Tok to DJ.  It also warmed up significantly and was almost warm, here was a 70 degree shift is weather in 2 days!

Some quick history on DJ as it is quite interesting.  During WW II as US helped Soviet Union against Germany, the AK Highway was built connecting roads with Canada.  The roads met in an areas known and later called Delta Junction!  Eventually the Glenn Highway was built connecting this area to Anchorage.  This was a great place to have shipments come through and the area grew.  In our world today, this is known as the Golden Triangle Drive, Anchorage to Tok to Fairbanks.

After WW II Fort Greely an army base was built and used to train soldiers for cold weather combat during the Cold War. (the -33 can help you understand why it was good for that reason!)

Ironically, during the 1990s and 2000s, immigrants from the former Soviet republics came to the area, significantly changing the makeup of the local population and to this day the district has a large population of students from Russia and other Soviet areas.  Actually there was just a restaurant opened that is called “Taste of Europe” that served amazing pelmeni’s, piroshki’s, and other great Russian dishes.

I get to work with this board yearly and have come to love the 2 hour drive from Fairbanks to here, it is beautiful and I dream of riding it on my motorcycle sometime!

I will be home until the 15th, watch for more from my Alaska travels after that!  Next trip, Gustavus, home of Glacier Bay National Park!


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: