In Chitina, the road goes through this cleft and the pavement ends. From there, it's a 60 mile dead-end drive to McCarthy and Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, and it takes 2-3 hours. We passed perhaps 20 cars in that time. You can also fly there, but overall, not too many tourists bother going to McCarthy. There's one other road into the park, but I gather it's even less-used.
At the end of the road, we stopped at the Park Service information shed, and the next car stopped, too. There were two men in it, and one of them especially looked very familiar. The feeling was strong enough that, as they were leaving, despite the absurdity of the odds of knowing them, I had to ask where they were from. Lo and behold, they were from Hillsborough, and then it clicked that I knew the face from the Carrboro Farmer's Market: Ken Dawson of Maple Spring Gardens! It turned out that he and John (sorry, John, I forgot your last name) were flying into the backcountry an hour after us the next morning, and were also staying out for a week. After talking for a while, we found several other connections, mostly through Carolina Friends School. It was nice to see some folks from home in the middle of our trip, in the middle of nowhere.
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