Saturday July 9

Tatlanika Gift Shop and RV

8 AM  57° overcast

Firefighters and equipment have moved on. We've been told that the area is still hot.

This morning were again following the book and heading to several location on the Denali Highway that goes through the Alaskan Range from Cantwell to Paxton. Round trip is about 230 miles.

The Denali Highway is a two car width gravel road. Our first stop is 78 miles down the Toad at Clearwater Creek. What we're looking for is called Flowering or Snowflake Feldspar. This is base rock

 (basalt) with feldspar crystals that look like, you guessed it, flowers or snowflakes.

We agreed that once we found one we'd move on. Well we both found  perfect specimens but somehow we continued to feed the mosquitoes. Bob found red, blue, and green rocks (think slate).

We move on the Alpine Creek Lodge for gold panning.

This was a major disappointment!!! We did have pulled pork sandwiches and a diet coke for lunch $30. The gold panning was lead by a 10 yr old who admitted that they seed the pans with a few flakes of gold. The amount of pay in the pan was about 1/2 a cup and the gold "flakes" we're the size of a single table salt crystal. My pan had one micro dot and Bob's three.

I took no pictures as I didn't want anyone to say jimbobadventures suggested this place.

On the way out one of the teens working there said that he heard air leaking from on of the tires. We checked the truck air pressure sensor and didn't see a problem and headed back. Within a mile the truck alarm sounded so back to Alpine Creek Lodge...They offered to put a plug in the tire for free. They were very friendly.  Plugged tire we again started our return trip.

On the way, we came across a baby caribou in the road. He had been separated from the heard and is now know as wolve feed. We saw no sign of the heard and thus little guy wasn't going to let us near him. Sorry for the blurry photo. He was running and we were moving.