Wednesday 17 July
Woke up this morning and realised that we would have to revise our itinerary and go the long way round to Dawson City (Canada), travelling back to Talkeetna before heading to Dawson as although the girls had their passports, the rest were safely back at the hangar 
We decided it would be a good opportunity to go through Hatchers Pass which we were going to do later, so that is now where we are heading tonight.
On the way, we stopped off at the visitor centre in Sutton to find some toilets, and ended up spending some time looking around the site of an old ‘coal washing’ plant, that after construction requiring sizeable capital investment, was decommissioned 6 months after starting, when the army changed from coal fired to oil fired.
It was awesome to look around at the machinery and buildings but the most memorable part has to be the 3 kids playing on a playground – with some memorable quotes, one being from Danika – “I can reach the monkey bars now”.
Many of the properties, probably due to the harsh winter, do not have manicured lawns and gardens, so Danika was pleasantly surprised to see these paddocks and said “Look at all the mowed lawns, it’s the first mowed lawns I’ve seen here”, only to realise there were wrapped round hay bales and it was only mowed due to the hay, not to manicure.
Stopped to refuel and stock up at Palmer and tried for the second time to find their information centre, without success so continued to read the milepost and headed to Hatchers Pass. The scenery was gorgeous and we stopped at rivers.
Independence Mine was shut so we headed up to the summit for a walk before dinner. The drive to the summit was fairly hair-raising, and not something Chris enjoyed. It is a very steep unsealed road, that was quite narrow in places. Once we made the summit road (3886ft) we walked up to the summit and the views were amazing, looking both ways.
On our way up we scoped some possible overnight camping spots. There were a number of Parks controlled camping pullouts, where there were long drops, and overnight fees of $15. Found a really picturesque one beside a river, but it was a little too picturesque for a number of members of our party, as just after we entered, a guy hiking was getting changed, and when we saw him he was fully naked, thankfully facing in the other direction. At that point we decided to move on to the next campground closer to the summit and set up for the night.
Other great quotes from the day;
For dinner we had sausages and salad – “Blue cheese dressing doesn’t taste like blue cheese. Blue cheese tastes like feet. And I know what feet tastes like” – Josh
Earlier Mum had said “That’s a nice sign” and was continually mocked for that. Tayla then pointed out another ‘nice sign’ and when we started to mock her she said – “I was trying to be genuine” – mmmm if you were genuine would you have to try???
