Today was primarily a travel day. The forecast called for rain (again), but when we started out the first 100 miles were not that bad. We were able to enjoy what we suspect is pretty close to the peak colors around Denali.
About 60 miles from the park we took a short detour down the Denali Highway to look at some mountains we saw in that direction. The Denali Highway is a “short cut” of 100 miles over what our navigation had picked out, the catch it was 23 miles of pavement and 100 miles of gravel. Ron was tempted and Ton was skeptical and said that if we lost another tire she would be very unhappy. About 6 miles in we ran into a pretty nasty stretch of washboard and Ron decided to retreat back to our old friend the Parks Highway.
After driving thru a pretty good rainstorm for 150 miles we popped out into blue skies and morale picked up. We turned onto the Glenn Highway just hoping to get some miles in towards Valdez. We had not done any research on the Glenn Highway as we only saw it as a way to get from Wasilla to Glenallen on our way to Valdez. Well the Glenn Highway was another version of spectacular. The colors had not changed this far south. But the Glenn has draw dropping views of glaciers, rivers, and mountains that caught us by surprise. It really got us back into a good mood and ready to take on some more road.