The middle part of the Richardson Highway is a long stretch of lonesome. The Department of Transportation says that on an average day maybe 25 cars per hour rumble between where it reaches the Tok Cutoff at Mile 127 and Fort Greely at Mile 261, just south of where it connects with the Alaska Highway. Compare that with the thousand or more zipping along Turnagain Arm or through Denali Park.
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The 150 miles between Delta Junction and Glennallen has more relics rusting and crumbling into the tundra than standing buildings. It's easy to imagine that ghosts of sourdoughs, soldiers and Native hunters equal, if not surpass, the number the current inhabitants on slow days.
There are few services. You might get hungry. Here are your options.
A taste of history
Delta Junction, where the Richardson meets the Alaska Highway, has no shortage of food options, everything from a grocery deli counter to continental cuisine to a farmers market in the summer. We're not including the highway hub in this roundup. But you can start getting some of the flavor of the old Valdez-Fairbanks Trail by stopping at Big Delta State Historical Park, Mile 275, 10 miles north of town.
The park is built around Rika's Roadhouse, a hub for travelers 100 years ago. It has several surviving structures, including the main building, all filled with museum items. There's a historically-informed garden with vegetables laid out in the style of old-time homesteads and even a few chickens and sheep. Count on spending at least an hour.
You won't find crowds, or big boarding-house-style meals. The long-term operator of the restaurant and gift shop threw in the towel in 2013 due to lack of business. New concessionaires have reopened it with a menu that is limited but good.
A simple tomato-vegetable soup ($3 for the cup, $5 for the bowl) made from store-bought ingredients had a hearty flavor with a nice scent of basil. The beef and swiss cheese sandwich ($7) had three slices of meat on a bolo-type roll. Ham and turkey were also available and staff said they'd be glad to whip up a meatless sandwich on request; all the sandwiches are made on the site. Some desserts like brownies and lemon bars ($2) are also made at the restaurant. No alcoholic beverages.
It's pretty basic, but probably better than what a traveler in the 1920s might have sat down to; one of the historical signs suggests that owner Rika Wallen's cooking could leave something to be desired. The cafe advertises a breakfast buffet on weekends.
High style
It's easy to miss the steep turn up the hill to the Lodge at Black Rapids unless you spot the old one first, just past a Quonset hut at Mile 227. The plate-and-silverware logo on the highway sign is also a tip. "There is not another restaurant within 40 miles," says their website. It also advertises "a full-service restaurant serving three meals a day with home style meals for our guests and to the public."
Home style is the key term here. My traveling companion and I were not offered menus, but we hadn't made reservations, which is highly recommended if only to let them know you'll be coming. (Call 907-388-8391.) But it turned out they were making lunch for a family of four who, likewise, had stopped in on something of a whim. The aproned chef was happy to dish us up what he was making for them if we wanted to walk on the trails or explore the building for a half hour.
The lodge is one of the most beautiful buildings in Alaska, three slate-sided stories above a full concrete ground floor, giant timbers held in place with mortise and tenon construction -- some say peg and post -- without a nail. Comfortable bedrooms radiate from common areas built around a central smokestack wrapped in a winding staircase. Windows with stained glass highlights and decks drink in the vista of the Delta River and Black Rapids Glacier. The bottom floor is set up on a semi-private hostel model.
Lunch started with a salad made from lettuce, spinach and other greens grown organically out of Delta Junction, splashed with a fine vinaigrette, raisins and walnuts in the mix. It was followed by spaghetti with a meaty red sauce left over from a couple of days before -- the sauce, not the noodles, Available beverages include "anything you want." I had a sweet pinot noir.
The swank dining area has tablecloths and individual vases with peony arrangements that included local wildflowers and kale. The lunch was $18 per person, the wine $7.50.
Construction on the new lodge started in 2001 and is ongoing. A sauna and hot tub are in the works. And a heroic effort is underway to rescue the original Black Rapids Lodge, which operated roughly between 1903 and 1993. Fifteen years ago, the collapsing two-story structure looked headed for oblivion. The roof had fallen. The log walls slumped. The bulldozers were ready to fire up when the owners had a change of heart. At this point there's a new foundation, the roof is fixed and walls straightened. But there's still a lot to do.
The last survivors
The old Black Rapids establishment, also called Rapids Hunting Lodge, was one in the chain of roadhouses that supplied beds and food on the trail from Valdez. They were spaced about 20 miles apart, which could be a full day's travel by dogsled or horse. Most are gone.
The next identifiable old roadhouse locations are not in the food business. A picture on the sign at Water's Edge Cottages at Milepost 195, once Summit Lake Lodge, indicates coffee and donuts for guests at the cabins. The Paxson Roadhouse, Milepost 185, has been shuttered since 2013. You can still see the coffee cups on the cafe tables through the dirty windows. Word among the locals is that it will never open again. Highway signs promising gas, phone, bed and food are still up. Don't believe them.
Happily, Meier's Lake Roadhouse, Mile 170, is open. The menu includes items like the Truckers Breakfast, described as "four flats, one pair of headlights and a pair of running boards" -- that is, pancakes, two eggs and two strips of bacon ($13). The Big State Burger ($18) has a full pound of meat plus bacon and cheese. Even the regular burger has a heaping half-pound patty, handmade in the kitchen.
The french fries are also carved from real spuds right there. They came to me a little underdone and the staff would cheerfully have taken them back for another dip in the fryer, but I love real potatoes and was hungry. The Alaska Amber was served in the bottle.
The decor at the roadhouse is classic old Alaska. There's smoking in the bar section, which is wide open to the main dining area. The upholstered rim of the bar is fixed up with plenty of duct tape. There's an honest-to-God, old-fashioned "ka-ching!" crank-operated cash register, which still works, though the main till is a more modern grade of equipment. And there are antiques and curios throughout the place: old radios, a dial telephone, a strip of polar bear fur and whale bones that visitors are invited to touch, a barber's chair with a built-in ash tray and lots of old cans and boxes. A sign above the museum section specifies, "Nothing in the room is 4 sale."
Road construction traffic delays are a fact of life when driving around the state. By the time I got to the next stage stop on the old trail, the Alaskan Sourdough Roadhouse, Milepost 147, I was stuck in a line behind a pilot car going through gravel and didn't dare pull off. But it looked like the cafe was doing good business with truckers and boaters, who use this as a put-in for the Gulkana River. The old roadhouse burned in 1992 and the new building went up the next year. A couple of cabins from the 1800s are still in place.
Dinner, dessert, ghosts?
Where the Richardson joins the Tok Cutoff, Mile 127, I saw a closed espresso kiosk as I turned left. A 1.5 mile detour on the Glenn Highway (State Highway 1) brought me to the Historic Gakona Lodge and Trading Post, "the oldest operating roadhouse in Alaska." Near the aging -- and supposedly haunted -- lodge are several outbuildings. A former tack shed has been turned into the Trapper's Den Bar and a workshop for repairing carriages is now a restaurant, logically named The Carriage House.
The Carriage House is open only for dinner, 5:30-9 p.m. daily through the end of September, when it will close for the season. Like the Lodge at Black Rapids, this is a tablecloth eatery. The beer is served in a glass, shuttled over from the bar next door. Like the Meiers Lake establishment, it has lots of antiques on display. The salad bar components stay cool in a metal washtub packed with ice.
Appetizers include fried okra and boneless buffalo wings. I had a ribeye steak with baked potato ($31.95) which was all right, but not up to the "best steak in Alaska" standard at the Clear Sky Lodge near Anderson on the Parks Highway. My companion had fish and chips ($14.95). The fish breading was made with Alaskan ale, which gave it a slight, sour tang. Four pieces of cod were a bit over-breaded for my taste. The fries were not the hand-made type, but yummy. They make their own tartar sauce with mayonnaise, relish, mustard, vinegar and dill, so it's not sweet.
The best thing on the table was one of their house-made desserts, a cake with blueberries, raspberries and rhubarb ($8). It was mostly fruit with a made-from-scratch crust like a pie or torte and was a lip-licking delight.
Gakona's pipe-smoking ghost, subject of a 1995 We Alaskans article ("Gakona's 'guardian ghost,'" by Doug O'Harra, Oct. 26), did not show up. He's said to prefer the lodge, particularly Room 5.
From the turnoff it's 12 miles to the ever-busy Hub of Alaska service station and convenience store in Glennallen. Here the Richardson continues to Valdez and the Glenn forks off to Anchorage. Like Delta Junction, there are lots of places to dine here and more eateries as you proceed towards Palmer.
But not as many as there used to be. Some former food stops are abandoned. Some current ones are for sale. How much longer before they go the way of the Paxson Roadhouse is anyone's guess.