Visiting the Matanuska Glacier and getting turned out of Fort Richardson
In the morning I had to decide how to fix our lift system. I thought perhaps air was leaking past the piston seals faster than it could get out the top where the ram slides through the cylinder and positive pressure building up above the piston wasn't allowing the u-cups to seal. So I drove to a napa and bought some really expensive drill bits and drilled some holes in the top of the 2 worst air cylinders which would prevent any pressure buildup and allow me to get grease into the cylinders if that wasn't the problem. We let the trailer down and left 'the hub of Alaska' just after 11am, the road from there to Anchorage was quite nice. There was a mountain named gunsight mountain because it has a gunsight at the top.
We stopped at Matanuska Glacier which is the largest glacier in the USA accessible by car. it was quite the road to get there and it is on private property so you have to pay quite a bit to get in. We spent most of the afternoon here walking on the glacier; it was really neat.
We ate lunch in the dusty parking lot when we got back and then I emptied our water tank most of the way. I was worried about making it back up the hill to the highway. It is a very steep, narrow and bumpy gravel road with switchbacks and I was worried about spinning out going up the hill. There isn't much room for getting by large oncoming vehicles either and luckily we only met a small car. I took the hill fast and here is the short video of that:
The road from the glacier to the freeway from Anchorage was really scenic, here are a couple 1min videos of it:
We had been planning to stop in Palmer but had no time so we went straight to Anchorage. Google maps told us there was a cheap campground on the outskirts of Anchorage called JBER family campsite so we stopped in there. It turned out that was one of the military bases- Fort Richardson and we obviously cant camp there. This is the video of our festiva in a military base in a foreign country!
We then went to the next closest campground without looking at the reviews first. The non serviced are right beside an onramp to the busiest freeway in alaska, close enough that anyone could throw a rock and hit the cars from our site. The traffic was loud enough that Julie and I would have to basically yell to have a conversation if we were more than 10ft away from each other. The military jets from the air force base seemed to fly all day and you have to wait until they pass before you can talk again. Its also on the poor side of town and is a homeless people hangout. The bathrooms were the dirtiest I had ever seen even though they get cleaned very well once a day. Our air cylinders that I thought I had fixed wouldn't lift again so we got some guys to help us lift it. They gave us a hand lifting it and left, but they were back 10 minutes later to ask why it was so light and what it was made out of. A really drunk guy living out of a yellow service truck across from us kept us up pretty late, he just wouldn't leave our site. I finally went over to look at the woodstove he used to heat his home and his sewing station, then after he tried to sell me a bunch of stuff including guitar lessons i finally made it back to our site without him. He could play guitar fairly well considering how drunk he was. It was after midnight before we were in bed and we did manage to fall asleep eventually. I think that was a much worse rest than all the times we camped right beside the train.
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