It was fascinating to feel like a beach boy so far north.
Issue: 2018-06-06, PHOTO: Derek Ramsey via Wikimedia Commons
A panorama of the Homer Spit
Overview & Intro
There are so many good places in Alaska to go RV camping; it's a bit of a fool's errand to select just one to kick off our new six-part summer series on RV Hotspots in Alaska, Yukon, northern B.C. and N.W.T. That is the challenge at hand—a dirty job if there ever was one, but somebody gets to do it.
Your humble RV reviewer considers himself both a local and a tourist who has been to every part of all four destinations under study, which can be reached by road, with or without the grandchildren—a lifelong goal to see it all and write about most of it. In fact, there are only two spots left on the Yukon bucket list: one that requires an airplane (Mount Logan); and the other, a boat (Ben-My-Chree). Therefore, we usually know what we're writing about from personal experience, which is part of the reason why it is so difficult to shrink all this beauteous northern landscape into six tiny selections for the purpose of this survey.
Of course, the whole project is subjective and argumentative because it doesn't include the most spectacular sight in Alaska (Denali), the most beautiful road (Tok to Anchorage) or anything at all about the southeast, which, of course, requires a trip by ferry to get there; or the northwest to the Bering Sea, which has no roads at all. The ultimate irony of touring Alaska is that most of it is still inaccessible, at least by road. Although it has nothing to do with RV camping as an old man, I can also report that as a young one I visited the remote and volcanic Aleutian Islands ... but it was on a tour of a different sort, a fuel stop at Dutch Harbour en route to Vietnam in June, 1966, a Ring of Fire pitstop on the journey to hell and back.
While northern B.C. (Atlin) and N.W.T. (Arctic Ocean) were no-brainers, the Yukon was another head scratcher because it ignores Dawson City, certainly the top RV destination in all of the North; and her little sister, Keno City, which has the best pizza in the world now that Tony's is closed in Whitehorse. This is not destination science but just one travel writer's opinion based on places he would like to show to his grandchildren and share with them in words or deeds.
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Issue: 2018-06-06, PHOTO: Brian (bdearth) via Flickr
The Homer Spit has a nice beach that Doug Sack highly recommends
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Issue: 2018-06-06, PHOTO: Rear Admiral Harley D. Nygren, U.S. Government
The Kenai Peninsula is home to beautiful mountains and lakes
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Issue: 2018-06-06, PHOTO: Susan Drury on Flickr.com
The Dyea Flats have remnants of pilings from the old docks built during the Klondike Gold Rush
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Issue: 2018-06-06, PHOTO: courtesy of the Government of Yukon
Doug Sack found it difficult to choose from all the great spots around our northern landscape
The West Coast of Kenai
The Kenai Peninsula bills itself as "Alaska's Playground," which it certainly is judging by the crowds that descend upon it between May and September … but most of them are attracted by the water on three sides. Seward is the action spot of the peninsula (and the biggest attraction), but Homer, on the west side, is the farthest south you can drive and became my favourite place to RV camp in Alaska because of this surprise: it felt like California.
The tidal beaches between Kenai and Homer are so similar to Oregon and northern California, the only thing missing was massive redwood trees. If someone blindfolded you in a helicopter and dropped you there, you would never believe you were in Alaska (unless an oil tanker happened to slide by on the way from Valdez to Puget Sound).
It was fascinating to feel like a beach boy, so far north, and I stayed as long as I could. The road is up on a high bluff, with the occasional lighthouse, so you have to drop down small access roads to reach the beaches. One even required four-wheel drive to get back up, but all of them had nice campgrounds and no crowds … although this was in April, before the season began. I heard stories that the whole peninsula gets weird with RV traffic in mid-summer, but didn't see it with my own eyes.
Homer calls itself the "Halibut Capital of the World" and has a long manmade spit reaching over a mile out into Cook Inlet to a place called "Land's End."
If I had to live in Alaska, I'd be tempted to eat my halibut out on Homer's spit, and spend my summers at the beaches named Kasilof, Clam Gulch, Ninilchik and Anchor Point. In fact, had I visited Homer in 1971, instead of Dawson City, I may never have become a Canadian Yukoner at all.
My second choice in Alaska would be the free public campground on the tidal flats of Dyea, which is owned and operated by the city of Skagway. There is something spiritual about camping on the exact spot where the Klondike Gold Rush began. There are even some of the original pier pilings still standing where the ships of the stampeders docked at high tide.
I like to start my summer camping season with a late-April or early-May weekend at Dyea to rendezvous with the past. There's not a lot left to see at Dyea, but you can still feel the souls of those who perished on the Chilkoot and found nothing but lonely northern graves in their greedy quest for gold.
Speaking of which: Next time, in RV Hotspots #2, we'll visit Atlin, in northern B.C., and explain how the Canadian North's second-most-famous tourist destination (during the First World War and the Roaring 20s) almost became a forgotten ghost town by 1950. It's a tale worthy of the Great Gatsby era that spawned it.
It required a great deal of thought about a large number of camping and work trips between 1971 and 2018 to trim this wild turkey down to the following menu:
ALASKA
West coast of Kenai Peninsula and Dyea tidal flats
N.W.T.
The Arctic Ocean at Tuktoyaktuk via Dempster Highway
Northern B.C.
Atlin
YUKON
Kluane Park: Slim's River, Sheep Mountain and the Donjek
Top of the World: an oasis of scenery, serenity and solitude
Southern Lakes: including Yukon's newest campground (Conrad) on the Windy Arm of Tagish Lake