SOLD
“Neither rain nor snow nor threat of sleep deprivation shall keep us from our appointed rowdiness.”
Mary and I coined that as our trip’s slogan. Mary had a cold and I was feeling an irksome scratchiness to the throat. We can afford for one of us to be ill, but if both of us are down, who’s going to drive?
These long days were taking a toll. We were up at 6:00 AM, and in bed late at night. Even with this, we had made little forward progress, at least on the map. Alaska is huge. Still, we were moving, albeit slowly.
We followed the Richardson Highway south and east from Fairbanks. This road tracks the Tanana River through the richest gold strike area ever found in Alaska.
Gold was first found here by Russian settlers in the 1850s. Sporadic attempts to prospect and mine were made throughout the 19th century but it was not until the Klondike gold rush of 1896 in neighboring Canada that the madness was on.
At Big Delta, the Tanana River spreads into myriad fingers of water and gravel bars stretching into the far distance. This area must have seemed irresistible to placer miners trying for the next big strike. In 1902, gold was discovered here. It would end up being the most lucrative strike in Alaska history.
A spur trail was built from Gulkana on the Valdez-Eagle route to the new mining areas around Fairbanks. Rika’s Roadhouse, north of Delta Junction, is one of the few tangible remnants of the Valdez-Fairbanks Trail.
Enterprising men panned for gold, and other enterprising men and women provided support. Rika’s was built in 1910 by John Hajdukovich, who sold it to his manager, Rika Wallen, in 1923. She paid “$10.00 and other considerations.” We might conclude that John owed his manager money, or worse. Wallen ran the roadhouse into the late 1940s and lived there until her death in 1969.
It’s easy to see how miserable conditions were for those old prospectors. It was still summer according to the calendar, but temperatures were dropping into the 30s overnight. As calm as the Tanana looks from a distance, walking to its edge you realize that line of shadow on the closest bar in the river is actually a high, overhanging bluff. The river is large and boils along like milky chocolate. Those men deserved every penny they wrested from that inhospitable earth.
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In 2016, my daughter Mary and I set off across Alaska and Canada on a Great White North Adventure, which you can read about starting here. We arrived in Anchorage at the beginning of September and got home in mid-October. In between, we visited every province but PEI (been there, done that), and Yukon Territory. In retrospect, it might have made more sense to do this during the summer, since Alaska and Canada threw a mess of strange weather at us.
