Our Alaska Trip Part XXIV Before & After

This is the 24^th in a continuing series about our trip through Canada to Alaska

Pat Sajak often announces the category “Before & After” on “Wheel of Fortune,” a puzzle where two expressions overlap.  I decided “Deadliest Catch 22” would fit in that puzzle, with “Deadliest Catch” referring to the TV show about the hardships crabbing in Alaska and “Catch 22” describing a good-bad situation.

 Our trip through western Canada and into Alaska has been absolutely spectacular from the standpoint of scenery, wildlife and opportunities to learn about the rich cultures of this vast, somewhat forbidding land.  Since you’re reading these blogs, you probably have either been here or you want to take the trip.  We hope all you “want-tos” are able to get here – it’s an adventure of a lifetime.

The native tribes and clans of Alaska apparently had a very pleasant lifestyle for up to 6,000 years.  Then along came the Russians, who settled in the territory for fishing and trapping.  They enslaved natives and decimated the population with disease.  As bad as that was, their main impact was on coastal areas and less in the interior.

 Then came the goldrush and discovery of coal and other valuable minerals, which caused a cataclysmic change.  Whether all that was good or bad is in the eye of the beholder, but as Walter Cronkite used to say, “That’s the way it is.”

CATCH 22 – The Alaska we as tourists have seen over the past five weeks has been as that segment of the economy, now the state’s second biggest industry.  Our caravan is included in the 1,100,000 tourists who arrive here every year, and the number is said to be growing. [http://www.questconnect.org/ak_alaska.htm]

People like Christopher McCandless [whose story is told in the book and movie “Into the Wild”] and other survivalists may absolutely loathe this gift-shop, museum and charter boat economy, but in its defense, so many people from around the world would never get a chance to be among the splendor we have seen. 

Alaska would be a wilderness inhabited by the natives, but their lives would still be disrupted by the major industries, beginning the oil transportation and refining, and including fishing, forestry and fur-trapping,.  As the “questconnect” website states, “All sectors of Alaska’s economy are natural resource-based,” which does include tourism.

Tuesday Monique and I were in one of the few retail outlets without a gift shop or a moose head on the wall – McDonald’s in Homer – where we met a local, who has been in Alaska seven years since his wife took a job as a traveling nurse.  He wants to leave, he said, but she wants to stay.  He said he found Alaska no different from Florida, which thrives on its tourism economy by turning every natural area into a mecca for travelers.  Asked what he thought of tourism in Alaska, he acknowledged that it is a must for the survival of the towns, but he worries that there doesn’t seem to be any concern about the industry fading in years to come.  He doesn’t see any effort being made to look for additional avenues of revenue.

 As a recreational vehicle enthusiast, you may hope to see Alaska on the wild side, but without gas stations, RV parks, restaurants and chain grocery stores, and all the other businesses that support the tourist trade, you would never be able to come up into this territory, where you can be wrapped in the grandeur.  Just fifty years ago there were very few roads, practically no repair shops or medical facilities.  Without the steady line of RVs plying the highways each summer, it would probably revert to wilderness, unseen by all but a few laborers.

 Catch 22.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Another update on the Top of the World (Taylor) Highway from reader Dave Stoeffler:

“We are now in Dawson City.  The road was OK. We had to follow a pilot car for a few miles, but, people who came through today said there was no pilot car. There are only the normal repairs going on on both sides of the border. The Taylor Highway to Eagle is still closed, as far as I know.”

 

From the “Never-Bored RVers,” We’ll see you on down the road.